I recently talked about scripts and attractors, and I’m currently dealing with one that is probably the most obscure, weird and scary things I ever saw. You see, attainment of liberation/enlightenment during life is one. Specifically, the “during life” part.

Let’s first deal with the definition of the goal, according to Vedanta and Buddhism. Vedanta is not a singular teaching; advaita according to Shankaracarya defines liberation as a state of direct and perfect realization of oneness of atman and brahman, which burns up all seeds of future karma and all connections with the illusory world (maya). This is moksha, or mukti. If this is attained during life, it’s referred to as jivanmukti.

Dualistic teachings, like those of Ramanuja, Madhva and Caitanya, have much more in common with Islam and Christianity than they do with advaita Vedanta, which is probably because India was under Muslim occupation when they were developed, and the Muslims tended to violently eradicate philosophies that contradicted Islam. This is how we ended up with the versions of Hinduism that basically believe in a monotheistic deity and see liberation as ending up in heaven with this deity after death. In dualistic Vaishnavism, reincarnation is not seen as necessarily bad, because even deities seem to incarnate in this world occasionally, when it fits their purposes, but involuntary reincarnation caused by karmic necessity or attachment is. In general, being “conditioned” by anything is seen as bad, because it is the opposite of freedom. Basically, being born here because you wanted to follow God who was born here to do something is an act of unconditional free will, and as such it is fine; being born here because you were forced to by your past karma means your fate is conditioned and not free, and this is not fine. Essentially, the dualists see the goal as developing such spiritual refinement that you are no longer attracted by anything other than God, and resolving all kinds of past karmic obligations and not creating new ones, in order to prevent loss of freedom, or conditioning of will.

Buddhists are more complicated. Because nirvana is defined in ways that are completely inconsistent with normal human existence, they usually don’t think such a goal is attainable during life, but some mahayana schools, such as Zen, believe it is possible to achieve “insight” or “enlightenment” that changes the way one perceives things, and allows one to acquire something between detachment and change of perspective, where things are perceived very acutely and in the present moment, but the self-centered aspect of existence is lost. Between attempts to attain emptiness and attempts of clicking-into a change of perspective, it is quite obvious that Buddhists in general have no idea what nirvana is or how to attain it. This is understandable, because nirvana is defined as something you can’t really understand if you didn’t attain it, but I would say that Buddhist existence is most clearly defined as a confusion of paths and goals. Between trivial accomplishments and confusions, there is a very impressive path of Vajrayana, which I can describe only as “we don’t know what nirvana is, but there are Dakinis, there are higher levels of consciousness they lead us towards, there are blissful and scary spiritual things, and if we achieve those things it might not matter whether we understand nirvana or not, because our personal reality might be a mixture of reality and illusion, and nirvana might very well be the state where the mixture consists of 0% illusion and 100% reality, whatever that is”. This is a very honest approach that seems to have perfect alignment with my personal experience – basically, start somewhere, follow higher reality and avoid illusions and nonsense, and always take God over a good theology.

When we normalize this set by trimming away obvious non-accomplishments and trivialities, we end up with, basically, three viable definitions of enlightenment.

The first is that brahman is the only true reality, and what we are perceiving is a paradox of dual/relative existence which takes place when maya is superimposed upon brahman. When we permanently depart from this illusion of duality, we are free.

The second is that there is God, there are all sorts of spiritual entities of various degrees of purity and complexity, that inhabit all kinds of planes of existence according to their levels of sophistication, purity and attachment, and the goal is to attain greatest sophistication, purity and detachment which will allow us to dwell in the highest of the realms, together with God and his saints.

The third is that we live a complex mixture of reality and illusion, which includes our spiritual bodies, which can evolve in sophistication, complexity and purity; if we really try to make progress, we will be offered help by Dakinis, which are in essence angelic beings that manifest nirvana to us, in our limited condition, and if we follow their guidance our perception will consist of more reality and less illusion, which also means that our spiritual bodies will look less like a chaotic mess, and more like a jewel of vajra. Nirvana might just be a fancy name for a state of our spiritual body where it is hard, coherent and pure vajra, and solving actual problems and attaining actual goals is preferable to having a clean theory that explains everything, especially since our bodies just might be incapable of formulating a theory that is both accurate and useful, since a higher reality is by definition something that cannot be either contained or described in terms of a lower reality.

The great advantage of the third definition is that it is pragmatic, useful for attaining actual spiritual results, and useless for intellectual posturing. This can never be overstated, because it is my experience that advaita Vedanta produces incredible intellectual contentment by providing “final answers”, and the result is that its followers are basically stupid people with a very high opinion of themselves and their “Self-realization”. They obviously don’t look like they achieved anything near an actual ultimate reality, and it’s more like they fell into some kind of a trap for egotistical pricks. The second definition, that of dualistic Vedanta (which includes Christianity and Islam) has one important advantage over advaita, which is that it inherently doesn’t allow one to be content with his level of achievement during this life, if he has any brains in him, because it is obvious that the final judgment of his achievement will be made by God after this life, when his fate will be determined. This, by definition, should discourage fucking around and having any pride in one’s salvation or its certainty, but of course there are stupid people who manage to miss even that obvious fact.

But let’s return to the matter at hand, which is the global attractor I’m presently having the misfortune of dealing with. It deals with spirituality here. Even the people who believe that salvation is only determined after this life are not immune to its influence, because it deals with a very broad spectrum of “achievements”, spiritual ones included, and it is very easy to convince one that he needs to accomplish or attain something here as a pre-condition of salvation. This “here” part is the trap, and if it ensnares you, you will basically attempt to pull the entire world with you to God, because you will not want to let go. Bushmen of Kalahari catch monkeys that way, by offering them something they want, but in a very tight space, so that if they close their hand around the object of desire, they can’t pull out their hand and escape, so the choice is between having the object of desire and escaping. The monkeys invariably wish to have both – to escape with the thing they want – and they invariably end up as lunch.

People want to have the kingdom of heaven, but they want it here. They want enlightenment, here. They want supernatural powers, here. The here part creates a mantric contradiction which binds you to this world, and not only that, but it invests the energy of your efforts into feeding the importance, necessity and reality of this world, thus making it stronger, and you weaker. The funniest thing is, the same attractor that makes people want a Rolex or a Ferrari also deals with this. As strange and crazy as it seems, wanting a Rolex in this world and wanting to achieve liberation during life are equivalent attachments.

Also, if you want to achieve things here, you need to have its owner’s permission. What part of your very real soul are you willing to give Satan, the Prince of this world, in trade for an “achievement” in this illusory place? I figured that part out long ago, when I read something in Yogananda’s autobiography, about a saint who used atoms of his previously cremated physical body to manifest a temporary physical body in order to encourage disciples after his death. Why specifically the atoms of his body? Why not any atoms at random, when he has the power over arranging atoms into physical structures, anyway? Why not just condensed light? Why did Jesus have to resurrect his physical body, not just manifest another structure by condensing light into matter? Because they don’t have permission from Satan, but they do have permission over their physical body that they obtained under the original incarnation contract, and they hacked this arrangement. See the problem? Want something here, you have to come to Satan for it, and of course he’s going to give it to you, out of the kindness of his heart, without asking for anything in return. Right.

You need to let go. You are already on the other side, so there’s no reason to fear it. This place doesn’t actually exist, except as an illusion-generator. It does, however, block your vision and memory, feed you reflections of real things projected onto illusory things, and promote attachments. You don’t have to go to the spirit-world; your spirit never left it, because the best hidden secret of this place is that matter can’t actually contain spirit; your soul is not actually in the physical world, it’s still “up there”, only under an influence of a very strong and persistent illusion, and the part of why we seem to be stuck here is because we are deluded into thinking that we need it for spiritual purposes. We don’t. Let go.