There are some things about karma that are largely unknown or misunderstood. One of those things is that karma is usually understood as a macroscopic phenomenon, influencing soul-entities based on activity-events. Essentially, you do something and you get corresponding consequences.
That’s not really what happens, because karma is a kalapa-level force.
I will again need to resort to the analogy with gravity and say that gravity appears to be a stellar-body-level force, but is in fact a particle-level force, because it is related to mass, and as long as a particle has mass it bends space and thus “attracts” other particles. We usually think of “Sun” and “Earth” as entities, but they actually exist on a rather high level of abstraction. Earth, for instance, gains mass with meteorite impacts, and loses mass with deep-space-probe launches. Before the Theia impact, Earth was a completely different entity. It only really exists as “Earth” in our minds. What really exists are numerous atoms that combine their mass and therefore gravitational influence into one virtual entity.
So, while it makes sense to calculate gravitational influence of the Sun-Earth system using Sun and Earth as entities, and although you will get very accurate results, that’s not really how gravity actually works. It doesn’t take place on the level of stars and planets, it takes place on the level of the smallest massive particles, and if a huge number of such particles join their space-bending properties together, we get what we know as gravity, from an engineering standpoint.
Yes, Sun influences the Earth, and Earth influences the Sun gravitationally, but the effect is proportional to mass. Also, the effects of the increase of an entity’s mass are not linear. You don’t just get a bigger rock, you first get the ability to maintain atmosphere, then you get the ability to have Hydrogen in the atmosphere, and then you get so much pressure that you get fusion of protons and nuclei. Eventually, if you get sufficient mass, you get a neutron star as all the atomic nuclei are forced together into one entity and protons beta-decay into neutrons, and with even more mass, Neutronium collapses into singularity. So, although the increase of gravitational influence with mass is linear, there are other effects that are non-linear.
The same applies to souls. As they grow by including more kalapas of “spiritual substance”, they have more karmic influence, and greater resistance to karmic effects. They are always sensitive to karmic reactions, but this influence is in proportion to their size, and in proportion to the size of the karmic entities that influence them. Essentially, quod licet Iovi non licet bovi. This is hugely important because people usually form theories of karma that reflect some kind of egalitarianism, and this sentiment is misplaced. This makes poor treatment of humans particularly dangerous, because, unlike other terrestrial biological entities that have constraints placed on the maximum soul-size that is able to incarnate through them due to their biology, humans have a much greater variability, and can incarnate entities that range between sub-animal on one extreme and God-level on the other. Essentially, you get a village idiot on one side of the spectrum, and Jesus on the other side of the spectrum, and the problem is that they both look more-less the same if you probe them with physical senses. If you probe them with spiritual senses, a village idiot’s spiritual body (or, should I say, karmic body) looks like a speck of astral substance of dull and impure colors, and Jesus or a similar being looks like you somehow managed to cram a Sun-level star inside a human body, with corresponding order of magnitude of “spiritual gravity”. He bends “spiritual space” in a way similar to that in which Sun bends physical space, and produces huge, vast effects on the karmic bodies of lesser spiritual entities. An appearance of such a vastly huge spiritual being on Earth has effects similar to the transition of another star through the Solar system on a path perpendicular to the ecliptic.
And therein lies the problem. Incarnation in this place creates some rules that mitigate those effects, but those rules don’t apply universally. For instance, interactions with other humans always karmically affect you, but this effect is not directly proportional to the size of the soul that is incarnated in the body you are dealing with. This is due to some kind of an egalitarian, plane-specific law that was introduced by Sanat Kumara and embedded in the basic design of this place. It seems that a part of it is that you can’t be held responsible for something you are unaware of, and therefore it was absent from your motive. Essentially, that means that one can sentence Jesus to death and have him killed, and not suffer particularly grave karmic consequences. However, if he actually knew who Jesus was, and used the opportunity to kill him, with the actual intent to do harm and not, I don’t know, to grant him the opportunity to show how great he is by conquering death, the difference in “karmic gravity” between the entities, and the direction of karmic vectors would be such that it would cause spiritual destruction of the lesser entity, and, most likely, absorption of the resulting fragments into the soul-structure of the larger entity. This is actually described in Bhagavata-purana, when various demons attack Krishna. He not only destroys them, he absorbs their soul-structure into his own.
I also mentioned the analogy with gravity and how it can transform physical matter (fusion of protons and nuclei, neutron star, singularity), and how similar non-linear effects take place with karmic entities. One such effect is transformation of the astral/mental substance of sufficient purity and density into vajra, a higher-order spiritual substance, and there are other, even higher-order substances that make up the spiritual bodies and attributes of Gods. Fundamental structure of souls is not a linear function of their size; there are certain crucial points in spiritual evolution that mandate qualitative leaps.
Such qualitative leaps are in fact initiation into deeper level of participation in God’s nature and character, and also in power and authority. Also, those qualitative transformations make souls immune to certain forms of influence, decay or destruction that lesser spiritual beings can be sensitive to. For instance, an astral being is sensitive to astral influence, but a vajra-being is not. It can wear an outer astral envelope that is sensitive to astral influences, but it can shed it altogether without any harm to its spiritual core. If an astral being’s astral body is damaged, it’s damaged. The effect is real and influences the being’s identity and character. If an astral entity can wear a physical body, and survive physical body’s destruction unharmed, but can’t survive astral body’s destruction, a vajra-being is in a position that’s an order of magnitude better – it can survive physical body’s destruction unharmed, and it can survive the astral body’s destruction unharmed. Whether vajra-core can be harmed is another matter altogether, but you get the general idea. My position is that a sufficient amount of sinful choices and deeds can kill anyone, even the Gods, but the higher quality of spiritual structures makes such choices unlikely, if not altogether impossible. The only way the vajra-level beings can be harmed, in my experience, is when they use their “spiritual jewels” as a pledge that buys the lower-level beings some kind of an undeserved opportunity. If those lower-level beings abuse the gift, the “pawned” jewels can remain locked-out of the higher-level being’s control. The implication is that a higher being can have non-isotropic structure, where some parts are of a higher order than others, and where some parts are more internal than others, and that actually seems to be the case; some beings “wear” vajra-type spiritual jewels as either weapons, shields, robes or other attributes that are more-less inherent to their nature. Loss of control over one’s jewel is always a grave tragedy, where one is bound to a fate he has no control over, bound to a plane of existence that is beneath his natural state. Deceiving other beings into pledging their spiritual resources to his cause seems to be the main element of Sanat Kumara’s “mutually assured destruction” doctrine, where he protects the soul-trap he designed by capturing multiple spiritual jewels and therefore the spiritual integrity of many higher beings, where karmic invulnerability of the trapped structures precludes any attempt to destroy the trap, unless the jewels are disentangled from the structure first, of course.
What this all means is that there is a vast range and diversity in nature and makeup of the spiritual beings. There is no singular end-point of evolution; it doesn’t produce rubber-stamped entities. You basically create yourself by your choices and actions, and the end-result can be anything from your dissolution, merging into another entity, breakup into multiple entities, or higher initiation in various directions – essentially, not only do we have great diversity on the lower levels of existence, such as the Amazon jungle, but we also have great diversity among the Gods.
And most important of all, universality of karmic law does by no means imply any kind of egalitarianism or democracy. If you put the collective soul-mass of all humans on one side of the scale, together with their joined willpower-vector, and one of the Gods with his soul-mass and willpower-vector on the other side of the scale, the scale tips on the God’s side so hard that the collective of human souls doesn’t even make a blip. This means that humans can’t “vote” themselves out of trouble if they find themselves on the wrong side of the will of the Gods, and there isn’t much strength in numbers, because those numbers don’t really mean anything; in a single entity, that much astral substance in a single astral body wouldn’t really hold together unless it were transformed into a coherent form, and then it would produce initiation into vajra. With multiple individual beings, however, such transformation doesn’t take place and their collective spiritual gravity isn’t the sum of their individual spiritual gravities, just as a billion brains of rats doesn’t make their brain-mass miraculously join together and make a huge super-human brain. They are just a billion instances of a rat, with collective intelligence of rat. A billion IQ 80 people don’t join into one IQ 150 person; they are just a collective idiot that is not worth much compared to an individual genius. All the collective efforts of mankind are worthless from the position of spiritual evolution, and if you somehow attempt to join humans into one entity, you get Facebook, which is a collective idiot joined on the lowest common denominator. It doesn’t in any point even reach the value of the spiritually most powerful individual in that group. If that was Sanat Kumara’s intent, it is worthless. Mankind can increase physical power exponentially over an individual human power. It can increase knowledge of the physical world exponentially. However, its efforts are all spiritually worthless and harmful, and the net result is spiritual degradation. I’ve been digging through everything Sanat Kumara created here and I’m yet to find a single good thing. Everything I found was just one abomination and tragedy after another, and evidence of unspeakable evils. Every single attempt to suppress the individual for the sake of some “greater good” invariably results in evil.
I forgot to ask you. How does this whole story fit with multiverse theory. If there are countless physical universes and lot of them contain versions of ourselves does that mean that there are also multiple astral worlds which are inhibited by souls (each physical universe nested inside one of the astral universe)?
Why would there be a multiverse? It’s simply a trick invented by scientists to get out of a very unpleasant recent discovery of fine-tuned basic constants, where it was either admit the Universe was deliberately created or simply state that there’s an infinite number of universes.
The other point where the multiverse theory was proposed is the many-worlds interpretation of the quantum function collapse. This is an idiotic theory according to which probability doesn’t collapse into 0 or 1 at the point of detection, but the universes fork into those with respective 0 and 1 solutions.
So the nature of the physical universe as a simulation or hologram, doesn’t allow for the multiverse theory to be true?
“Doesn’t allow” is an exaggeration. What “doesn’t allow” for the multiverse theory is the complete and utter lack of evidence for it, and the fact that it is merely a way for physicists to weasel out of a check-mate situation the evidence had put them in. As far as I’m concerned, the mahat-tattva concept works perfectly well with multiple universe-instances, it’s just that there isn’t any reason for me to believe there are any.
So there is one physical universe (btw what is going on here, it is pretty enough). What about astral and causal, are there many astral and causal universes?
Funny thing is that lot of scientists are now getting phd’s based on a lie.
Of course they are getting their PhDs based on a lie. Consider their alternative – admit that a sentient being created the Universe, because that’s what the evidence seems to state? That’s why all those atheists are screaming like crazy recently, acting as if science is their weapon against the believers. What is their alternative, to admit that science apparently proved that the Universe was necessarily created because the alternative is to start seriously making shit up?
I feel that lack of alternatives is putting them in the corner, making them more aggressive than before.
Yup, that’s exactly it. They equated science with atheism because they see science as a sacrament of their religion of atheism, and if science stops supporting atheism their world collapses.
And as for how many astral and causal universes there might be, I have no way of knowing.
So according to this, Atman/Soul is not a cellular entity but a connection of kalapa’s which experience various states of realities such as physical, astral, causal and after death it is subjected to break up (in the case of undeveloped soul)?
Well, vedanta itself clearly states that atman is transcendental to karma and that it’s merely a witness, one and undivided. Everything you are as a being, is karma. Karma is what you decided to be by selecting from atman.
So Atman is passive element in the process of incarnation, doesn’t reincarnate itself but its connected to a karmic “aggregate” and that aggregate is basically what we call a “person”?
Is that connection between two what are they calling Lila or is that something else?
I have a problem with Vedanta. This problem is rather simple: it explains only one thing well, and everything else poorly. It also explains only one thing in my experience well, and contradicts my experience and perceptions in all other matters.
The thing that Vedanta does well is samadhi. Apparently, samadhi is how Vedanta came to be, because the yogis, shramanas and sannyasins who experienced samadhi wrote the Upanishads, and then came Bhagavad-gita, Shankaracharya’s commentaries and so on. It all sounds great, but it doesn’t work. Vedanta doesn’t handle absolutely anything other than samadhi well, and its recommendations are in fact the opposite of useful. The worst thing is that samadhi actually inhibits spiritual growth and freezes people at that point.
So, what does Vedanta fail at? First of all, it doesn’t understand evolution at all and has a completely wrong understanding of how spiritual bodies work. Vedanta thinks that you started as pure and free and got impure and attached later. This implies that the less “karma” a being has, the closer it is to perfection. Observation says the opposite: the primitive forms of life have the most simple karmic bodies, the Gods have the most sophisticated ones. Furthermore, the gunas don’t exist. Oh, they exist as “moods”, as an explanation on a high level of abstraction, but they don’t exist as a fundamental layer of nature. They are simply a fabrication, invented in order for Vedanta to have an alternative to Buddhism and its theory of elements and kalapas. The elements actually exist. I have experience with them, I worked with them directly. You can perceive them quite clearly, and their attachment to chakras. The gunas, however, are clearly made up.
An additional problem with atman is that the term evolved. It originally meant “breath”, and only later was used to mean “soul”, and finally as a synonym for brahman, as the fundamental absolute reality. This makes it quite difficult to make definite statements about it because it is used in different ways in different scriptures.
There are attempts at making distinctions, as in jivaatman vs. paramaatman, but I’m not buying those because that’s clearly an attempt to put a square peg in a round hole.
The fundamental problem of Vedanta is that it can’t make up its mind about its recommendation and can’t fit parts of its narrative together. For instance, one recommendation is to abandon yoga and karma because only jnana can cause moksha, because only jnana is opposite to avidya and can cure it. On the other hand, you have recommendations of yoga as the process of dealing with attachments and impurities, and you have tantra as a method of dealing with ignorance and attachment, and you have puja as a method of attaining purity, all in different schools of Vedanta. Basically, they can’t make up their mind because apparently different things produced samadhi or darshan for different people and so you have a fragmentation of methodology. What that means is that they don’t really know what works and how to approach things.
They can’t even make up their mind about the goal. In advaita schools the goal is first-person recognition of self as brahman, the I Am state. In dvaita schools, it is taught that this is inferior and that one is to attempt having a personal relationship with God, which is the ultimate goal in life. You can attempt to reduce one school to the position of an inferior understanding of the other, but I have a better interpretation. It’s that Vedanta should keep explaining samadhi and Buddhism should explain everything else, because Buddhism explains well everything except samadhi, and Vedanta sucks at explaining everything other than samadhi.
So my problem is, basically, that vajrayana Buddhism explains most of my experiences so accurately as if they were there with me, other than samadhi that is. Vedanta, on the other hand explains samadhi as if they were there with me, and everything else they try to explain is a complete failure, complete mismatch between their interpretations and predictions and my experience. So, basically, I’m not taking Vedanta very seriously since 1997, in a sense that I say “yeah, samadhi, good, but now listen what I’ll tell you about yoga, transformation of the energy bodies by elements and initiation into vajra”.
As for your question, atman is merely self-perception, asmita, lived through the prism of the karmic aggregate, which is the soul. “Person”, or jiva, is basically the light of atman shining through the karmic body, through its particles, the kalapas, which are essentially the spiritual quanta of energy. So without atman/brahman there would be no self-awareness and therefore you’d get a total zombie. Karmic body, however, is everything that is essentially individual; the memory of all incarnations, complex relationships with God, Universe, other beings, it’s why your friends are your friends and why your enemies are your enemies, it’s whether you prefer good or evil, knowledge or ignorance, whether you prefer to give or to take, whether you prefer Mozart or Vivaldi, Oldfield or Queen. Essentially, it defines your relationship with everything else, based on your actual decisions and actions. It’s the way you relate to God, and it’s your actual individuality. If that is destroyed, you don’t become liberated, you become a single-cell organism.
If a person did not cultivate and transformed his karmic aggregate into a “hard” substance, does that karmic body break up and its particles are drawn to similar particles of other beings who are awaiting reincarnation?
No, it doesn’t work like that. You can’t just assimilate spiritual substance of other beings, that would be incredibly harmful to most, because it would radically change their spiritual makeup and their destiny. Only the beings of a very higher order can survive assimilation of such poisonous spiritual structures without damage to themselves.
As for the existence of beings lower than vajra, it is… precarious. They don’t *just* decay and disintegrate, but they are sensitive to all kinds of damage, from illusions to sin. Such souls behave like you would expect souls to behave. Not quite volatile enough to fall apart all by themselves, but also not structured enough to know much about the nature of reality and about their relationship with it.
When I talked about “substances being drawn towards others”, I wrote that because I saw that you have mentioned in the article “breakup into multiple entities”.
Can these fragments of soul be incarnated into various life forms at the same time? I read lot stories about past lives and came few times across people who talked about multiple lives while being regressed, and by cross referencing conclusion came that these lives were at the same time (opposed to usual linear past).
What you’re actually asking is whether souls can merge and reincarnate together, while retaining memory of their separate experiences. Yes, I think so. I don’t know how likely or frequent it is, but it’s possible.
I don’t think its frequent as I read about it just couple of times.
Btw, in the whole process of reincarnation, what does soul “do” between the cycles? Does it shed away its bodies (physical, astral, causal) one at the time and then it stays in some other plane of existence (I heard term “Sach Kand”) and than its again drawn to the physical plane and starts again with producing bodies?
First of all, if a soul that’s essentially an astral being, sheds its astral body, it dies the ultimate death.
You can shed bodies that don’t contain your identity, or, as I sometimes put it, bodies that don’t contain definitions of your personality. In yoga, more accurately in the inner space technique, you find out that you can’t clean things up if you’re present in them. You must first pull out, or outgrow something, and only then can you do anything with that structure. It’s basically a game of “detach from everything, dissolve everything, and then create what you need in order to function in this incarnation, in a controlled manner and with full awareness”.
So, basically, the only persons who can actually shed bodies the way you put it are “avatars”, or, more accurately, incarnations of Gods. There is a certain number of humans who can shed the astral body and have their entire personality contained in vajra, but I wouldn’t exactly count them as humans, because for humans, even having a distinct, clear and elaborate mental body (there are significant qualitative differences within the astral plane and I use Leadbeater’s term for the high astral) is quite rare. Most humans have souls that are so incredibly poorly defined and evolved that in normal conditions they would barely qualify for a mammalian incarnation. It’s mostly some haphazard astral-mental mesh, producing very crude emotions. Some, however, are very clear, sophisticated, homogeneous, in fact close to vajra-initiation. I’ve actually seen some with anisotropic structure, part jewel part mental. Basically, the vast majority of human souls I wouldn’t actually qualify as souls; it’s astral trash that would assemble around a blank body if it functioned for a few decades, basically. 90% of humans, or more, don’t have anything I would qualify as soul in the proper sense because it’s so poorly structured and the energy is so low that it’s something that would actually decompose if physical continuity didn’t hold it together.
And there’s that remaining percentage of proper souls, where there’s real diversity, and I can’t really say there’s this or that type, because there’s too much individual diversity, obviously produced by vastly different choices and life-paths, serious and deep thoughts and considerations about things, spiritual experiences of various kinds etc. So basically you have those, and they are a minority, and you have dirty astral smoke incarnated in vast majority of humans, and they are all supposed to be equals here. It’s insane.
And yes, there are Gods in human form, beings made of such high substance I don’t even have names for most of that stuff, and they wear vajra-structures as attributes and ornaments; essentially, Sanat Kumar took one of these and created this entire reality-type with it. I don’t know where and how he got it, but that’s the order of magnitude; you have beings incarnated here as humans who have personal resources, not soul-core, but external attributes, that are more powerful than the jewel that was used to create this world.
These Vajra structures you speak of, are they things that are represented as weapons or sticks or bells on various statues, like Krishna’s flute for example?
My confusion of whole process of reincarnation stems from years of reading a lot theosophical literature. They talk about various bodies gathered around a “cell” soul, which I now know is rubbish. I stopped reading them when I saw that they regard SK as a “misunderstood good guy” and such things. I think he actually used theosophical movement to implement his ideas on this realm. Remember how they speak fondly of him?
I am understanding correctly that after the death of physical body, soul experiences various planes of reality (according to its complexion) and after some time it gets thirsty for another round in our coarse world, because of SK implemented structures that function as a honeypot trap?
Re: vajra structures and attributes; yes and no. Probably the best example is kaustubha jewel of Vishnu, or thunderbolt of Indra, trident of Shiva or sudarshana ckakra of Krishna. Sometimes the things on paintings and statues are a metaphor for some aspect, but the jewels and special structures are real.
Those things are usually incredibly powerful; like, Universe creating/destroying powerful. The inner core of the Gods, however, is way beyond even that.
As for Theosophy, yes, they seem to be Sanat Kumar’s PR service. They do, however, know more than most about those things and it makes sense to be aware of what they are saying because sometimes they reveal things that are not really common knowledge. They do, for instance, know a thing or two about the jewels. Their understanding of the soul is better than average and certainly better than Vedanta’s, but below that of the best Buddhist schools.
Yes, according to its nature the soul, after death, sheds the lower energy layers and ascends to its maximum stable state. I am not sure if there’s a universal reason for reincarnation here, and I don’t think incarnation here is a good idea in any case, but might be necessary in case of some kind of a karmic attachment.
The process of disincarnation is actually opposite to that described in Bardo Thodol, and works very much as described by Theosophy or NDE experiences. You shed matter first, prana second, and then you find yourself in the astral world. What happens next depends on what your soul looks like and how much bad package you have with you; some first experience some kind of a nightmarish existence where they resolve things, and gradually disentangle themselves from that and ascend. Some, however, might be simply destroyed.
I find it interesting that lot of humans have attachments to this place, leading to incarnation here countless times. If we are to believe regression transcripts, lot of people lived through antics to modern times.
I will one day too go to regression to see what the all fuzz is about.
I’m not really convinced that *all* of the regression stories are true. I know of cases where people invented incredibly mad and false stories just because they were asked certain questions and their imagination simply created elaborate bullshit.
Yes, that crossed my mind.
I don’t know would that method be completely reliable in my case. I love to research history and especially historical weapons, warfare, etc. and I am 90% sure that I would say in regression that I was a samurai, Norman knight or something like that.
Well, it’s expected for men to research weapons and to be interested in war, unless they’re gay. 🙂 On a serious note, I care more about the resultant than the components, meaning that I care more about what I have in this life, and I’d be concerned about a former life only if I had some serious issue that needed to be explained. What I care about remembering is non-physical existence before incarnating here, because I believe that’s where my true identity is. It’s like being in prison. If you had to choose between remembering what it was like in other prisons before this one, or remembering what it felt like to be free, well, I don’t really care to remember other prisons.
You have interesting take on the subject. But tell me, what do you think is the main reason we keep coming back and back.
Just some karmic connection or the nature of this place is specifically made to be like honey (or shit, depending on whether you are bee or fly)?
I’m not actually sure what happens on an individual level.
Do you know how many times you incarnated here?
That actually requires a complicated answer. What seems to be closest to the truth is that consciousness of my type never incarnated here, but this incarnation vehicle was assembled from many karmic remnants.