I recently talked a lot about karma, with karmic structures from past lives having been discussed quite extensively in private conversations and on the forum, so I think I have to explain some of it here.

When karma from past lives is discussed, people almost always imagine some kind of a sin that needs to be paid off; basically, you killed someone, you had to be reborn here to learn a lesson by being killed in similar circumstances, and then you can move on. Let me start by stating that I never encountered this, anywhere. I’m not saying it’s not possible, or that it can’t exist; it’s just not common enough for me to have any experience with it. For the most part, karma is not about repaying past debts, it’s about inheriting the momentum of your past choices and actions.

Imagine a forest, with people and animals navigating through it every day. Eventually, as they walk on the ground and break off branches that are in the way, they make a certain path easier to walk. As time goes on, everybody just automatically gravitates towards that path because it’s faster and easier; you don’t have to clear all the brush yourself, because it’s already been done. Not only do you end up walking the same path every time, but so does everybody else, simply because it’s easier. The shortest, easiest path through the forest thus tends to get carved into the landscape by everybody traversing it, and after a while nobody even considers alternatives. Sometimes it’s for good reasons – the beaten paths go around marshes, cliffs and other hard terrain. However, sometimes it’s just because someone went that way first and cleared the brush enough to make it easier for others. I recently did exactly that, by going through a forest path with a chainsaw; the path I cleared became the new default path for others. The paths I didn’t clear because I didn’t need them or didn’t feel like doing the extra work fell into neglect and became so hard to traverse that people stopped walking there. The thing is, the path I cleared isn’t necessarily the optimal path for everyone; it was just the path I found easiest to clear with the chainsaw that day. The others just went along with it.

So, that’s your karmic heritage: it’s the momentum of all the things you did before; if it was playing music, learning music will be incredibly easy for you. If it was speaking Latin, this language will be very easy and intuitive for you to learn. If it was a certain type of religious practice, you will tend to find it the most reasonable and intuitive and just fall into the beaten path. The arguments that reinforce your momentum of beliefs will be heard and understood instantly. The arguments that contradict it will just pass through your ears without even being registered, like the background noise that you automatically ignore because it doesn’t matter, or is intuitively wrong. So, in every following iteration you will instinctively gravitate towards doing the same thing you always did, because it feels good and natural, it’s the “voice of your heart” that tells you you’re in the right place. The alternatives will feel wrong and you will tend to ignore them at best, and usually even have strong negative feelings about them.

As you can see, none of this is inherently good or bad. It’s just what you did before carving a path in the woods, that will become easier for you to just follow intuitively later on. The good and bad parts are up to you, and they don’t necessarily negate each other. You can be an asshole to others, and you can at the same time be very studious and diligent. As a result, you will find it very easy to treat others very poorly, and you will also find it very easy to learn new skills through application of diligence and hard work. Again, whether your karmic heritage is a burden or a boon, is entirely up to you. However, the more you did something, the greater the momentum of inertia behind it; once you carved Grand Canyon into the rock, you will find it incredibly easy to just flow at the bottom, and incredibly hard and unintuitive to climb the cliffs and try to find another way. If you did evil things, you will find it incredibly hard to stop doing evil things and do something kind, good and constructive, which will make your doom likely and your success incredibly improbable. If you did good things, you will find it incredibly hard to be diverted from them, which will make your success likely and your failure improbable. Sometimes it’s about things that are neither good nor bad – if you had multiple male incarnations, you’ll just gravitate towards future male incarnations. If you had multiple female incarnations, being female will feel right. You’ll just fall into a pattern, as you carve yourself from karmic substance in your evolution. Everything that feels more like you is accepted, and what feels as not you is discarded, the way Michelangelo carved Moses from a rock. What felt like Moses stayed, what didn’t feel like Moses got chipped off.

There’s also a mention of karmic lessons. Those are about aspects of your karmic makeup that give you wrong ideas about things because of the inertia of your experience, and you are so stubborn that you refuse to learn that you’re wrong about it, and it’s something that’s important and can’t be just ignored or used for a constructive purpose. It can be many things, and they usually come in clusters. For instance, you have a person who gravitates towards a Pharisee mode of existence – oh, thank God who made me so holy, Jewish, male and pure, unlike those other lesser people. The karmic lesson is of course to be born as all those things you think you’re above – an Arab female, for instance – in order to see that you’re still you, no more or less pure than before; some things are just different, and that doesn’t make them better or worse. Making a whole worldview around stupid prejudice is always a bad idea, and bad ideas need to be crushed through educational experience in order to clear space for better ones. Sadhus in India are a particularly bad case of stupid prejudice that needs to be crushed by particularly unpleasant measures, because those people tend to think in patterns to such a degree that their entire existence becomes entirely formulaic. Shankaracarya literally starts Vivekachudamani by stating that optimal birth is that of a male brahmana learned in vedas, and that such a birth should be used for attaining liberation. The next obvious step for such an enlightened sage is, of course, to be born as a female somewhere in Bosnia, to a family of village idiots, and still have all the necessary requirements for liberation. The karmic lessons of this kind are something that looks more like a blessing from God than a normal way of things. A normal way of things would make you more of the same. However, if you get to be on good terms with God, your path will start looking more rocky in the well established places, and more appealing in places you haven’t explored before. When your life consists of a series of karmic lessons, it means your past became such a problem, that no further progress is possible until you literally dismantle all the momentum of wrong nonsense you convinced yourself to be the only true path that leads to a bright future. That is obviously hard to do, the way it would be hard to teach a river to flow uphill, but sometimes your past experience stands in the way of correct understanding and development to such a degree, that radical changes need to be introduced in order to shake you up – or, rather, pulverise you into cement and then rebuild you from the resulting concrete in a better shape.

So, when I talk about learning karmic lessons, that’s what I mean. It’s a different thing from spending karma – a routine if unpleasant practice that transforms low-energy kalapas into structural elements of your soul, that need to be energetically elevated in order to be integrated, and the process is basically suffering without forming a reaction. A karmic lesson is something else – it’s being broken where you thought you were good and solid; it’s finding out that your glorious and pure past is basically stupidity, nonsense and obstacles to enlightenment, which can mean many things, from silly ones like understanding you don’t need to be a male Hindu from brahmana or ksatriya varna and a good jati to be qualified for spiritual practice, to understanding that monotheism isn’t necessarily a good, healthy and useful way of conceptualising transcendence, or that spiritual advancement and purity can take forms completely different from your expectations. Sometimes, it can mean that being an advanced dark mage who sees “common people” as hardly more than cattle is not an evolved form of spiritual existence and is rather a sinful and fallen state.

Sometimes, it means learning that this world isn’t created by a good and loving God who rewards the good ones with fortune and fame, and punishes the bad ones with poverty, ignominy and hardship. It will definitely mean learning that being in comfort of a beaten path doesn’t mean you’re on the right path, or even The Right Path, as some love to call it. It just means you’re doing what you did so many times before, and what others did alongside you.

As you can guess from all of that, spiritual evolution is a complex thing, where good things can take many shapes, and bad things even more so, and appearances can be deceptive. Things that feel right aren’t necessarily “a sign from God” that you’re doing the right thing; more likely, it just means you’re following gravity downhill, walking the path of least resistance, and whether it’s actually a good one is a completely unrelated matter. Sometimes the feeling of rightness actually does mean you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing and you found your true calling. Sometimes, it just means your karmic momentum is making decisions for you. Sometimes, the feeling of freedom and levity means you fell from the 100^th floor and are currently falling towards your death.

In any case, there’s no substitute for actually using your brain for its intended purpose and actively thinking about what’s happening to you and around you, instead of just following instinct and inertia. This means that similar symptoms can mean multiple different things, often with different moral significance, and nobody can rescue you from having to make hard decisions on your own, and facing their consequence, whether in the case you failed, or in the case you made the right call that opened up a whole new horizon that will require thorough re-learning of things you took for granted.

I occasionally had weird experiences when strangers who found out that I “practice yoga” ask me if I can do this or that thing – can I slow down my heart rate, stop breathing, and so on.

Never have I been asked a question to which the answer would be “yes”. Whatever they could think of that they associate with achievements possible by yoga, I couldn’t do any of it; or, even if I could, it worked in a completely different way from what they’d imagined.

I never volunteer what I actually can do, however, because if I did, they would think it outright impossible. The things I can do are not even on the spectrum of what they would think of, not even the most ordinary things, such as being able to adopt and process foreign karmic mass and integrate it into my soul-structure, suffering greatly through the process, but retaining the ability to write in a sophisticated, calm and detached manner about very intricate things, while enduring emotional pain on the level that would make an ordinary person go instantly crazy, scream and kill themselves just to make it stop. To me, it’s a Tuesday. Also, this is a rather extreme case of a very fundamental set of skills acquired by yoga, and required in advanced practice: detachment, emotional control, mind control, perception and focus control, concentration and ability to direct energy, emotion and action separately and precisely. Also, faith, because faith is absolutely necessary when you lose control and direct insight of what’s actually going on, and that’s absolutely going to happen during this process; the first thing you lose is spiritual sight, and then you gradually lose your own normal spiritual state, as you are overwhelmed by foreign, extremely loud trauma. If you don’t have faith, you’ll panic. If you panic, it does not have a good ending.

It’s actually interesting how people expect circus tricks to be possible and attainable, but their reaction to anything real and actually useful is “no fucking way”. Unfortunately, that severely limits my ability to have a constructive conversation with people, because most of my experiences and abilities lie in the spectrum of “no fucking way”. They would expect me to be able to fart and whistle at the same time, or not close my eyes while sneezing, but I’m afraid I always have to disappoint them.

One of the interesting things people expect me to be able to do as a yogi is not care, and that one is almost universal. They expect me to not be touched by things, to be indifferent to anything that’s going on around me. I know how they got there – they are negatively affected by so many things, that they perceive being able to not care about any of it as huge relief. Of course, that’s not how it actually works. You actually get to care more, only about different things. You care about how a cat feels. You care about whether some person managed to achieve important milestones in their life when you hear that they have terminal cancer. You don’t care about living or dying, but you care about purpose, about important things being concluded, lessons being learned, temptations being resisted and higher things being accepted. You don’t care about neighbours getting a new car or local gossip. You care about global politics in a sense that it reflects spiritual choices and realities that will eventually trickle down to things like children being taught nonsense in schools, truth being persecuted and evil being mandated. You care about opinions of others, but that no longer works the way it did; now it’s a complex thing where opinions matter in a sense where it’s good that they are aligned with reality and lead to transcendence, and it’s important that they are not of the kind that is illusory, deceptive, ignorant and degrading. Essentially, you look at those things the way an angel would see them: things are good if they praise God and lead to God, and they are bad if they lead away from God. So you definitely always care, just in a different way. There’s a complex landscape of energies, spiritual states, destinies and trajectories that matter, and then there are the things people ordinarily care about, that you don’t even register except as noise.

In essence, serious yogic practice leaves normal human experience very soon after its onset, and soon after that your experience starts to differ so much from the normal human stuff, that communication becomes difficult at first, and impossible after several further steps. The development is not in the direction humans would expect, or even in the dimensions they register. I never talked about experiences that followed my first darshan, not even with my brother, because the experiences were either too far removed from the common ground that makes communication possible, too private, too subtle to put in any kind of terms, or I didn’t feel like it because his existence just lost any overlap with mine by that time. Not throwing pearls before swine is a thing. If I talk about any of it, the reason is usually to encourage others on the spiritual path, to show how those things work, what exists and what is possible; basically, to map the previously uncharted space, mostly because people would normally never think of any of it otherwise.

I frequently mention spending karma, and I know people have all kinds of ideas about it – from my idiot enemies who think I’m just making it up to rationalise my depression, to others who think all kinds of stuff, from question marks to “it can’t be all that bad since it’s not significantly altering his behaviour and he can write sophisticated stuff under it”.

No, it’s not depression, it’s much worse.

Patañjali defined Yoga as “citta vrtti nirodha“, cessation of the whirlpools/fluctuations in spirit-stuff. It’s a very easy thing to model thermodynamically; high energy molecules are having lots of kinetic energy, and if you imagine them in a container, they are bouncing around each other and the container in form of a gas. As they cool down, they form a liquid, simply because each molecule no longer requires as much space for its bouncing around, so they get closer to each other. As they cool further, they form a solid. This process of cooling down a substance from hot gas to a solid, when applied to mind-stuff, citta, is Yoga.

Translated to spiritual equivalents, all kinds of spiritual disturbance imparts spiritual particles, kalapas, with kinetic energy of sorts, which makes them bounce around and repel other similar particles, creating the opposite of cohesion within one’s spiritual body. At best, it creates weak spots that would fracture under pressure and thus need to be removed before any further growth. At worst, if there’s enough “hot stuff” in your spiritual body, it “explodes”, fragmenting fatally and ending your existence as a singular spiritual entity.

Conventional yogic practice is performed by a person whose spiritual body contains all kinds of issues; low-energy inclusions, fragmentations, and so on. In spiritual language, those are the wrong ideas about things, limiting beliefs, consequences of sinful actions, consequences of other people convincing you of things that aren’t true but you kept believing in them to your own detriment, latent desires, and karmic structures you inherited from your past lives or what not. Essentially, the worst problems are the beliefs that are completely intuitive to you, but are completely false; however, due to your conditioning you don’t want to understand that they are problems, and rather see them as solutions. For instance, someone conditioned in a certain spiritual tradition will see a priest as more holy than a carpenter; that would be simply intuitive, something he doesn’t even test. Of course a priest is more spiritual. However, then you encounter a carpenter by the name of Jesus who says he’s the son of God, and you encounter priests who accuse him of blasphemy, and if you go by your intuition, you end up being one of the guys who spat at Jesus and ridiculed him as he carried his cross to Golgotha. Basically, your implicit, intuitive belief that seemed self-evident got you in a world of trouble. That’s what the problems with karmic makeup look like. If you look at them energetically you see a low-energy inclusion in an otherwise uniform spiritual crystal, but that inclusion is a wrong belief that refuses to go away because it’s something you don’t see as a problem, you see it as one of the foundational components of your correct spiritual understanding. See how that can be a problem? If it’s an obvious problem, it usually has an obvious solution. For instance, you’re lazy, you see it as a problem and you get your shit together. But what if your laziness camouflages itself as detachment from matter, and any attempt to deal with it gets judged and discarded as material attachment? Then you have a problem, and it’s not one that can be easily attacked either, because any attempt to deal with it will face opposition from the deeply internalised wrongly assembled spiritual structures that see the problem as part of any acceptable solution. That’s how you end up with people who resist dealing with their core issues until something fundamental enough happens that shatters their entire core of confidence in their wrong beliefs, and they don’t just remove inclusions in the crystal; usually, the crystal shatters as the inclusion is removed, and is rebuilt from the ground up. In any case, obvious problems that are perceived as problems are easy to deal with. But if a problem camouflages itself as part of the solution process, the person might defend it to the point where the whole structure needs to be shattered.

So, what about karmic transfers, where foreign karmic mass is absorbed by your karmic body in order to make it grow? Well, if Yoga is calming your spiritual mass down, this is anti-Yoga. It’s like having a bowl of cold water with ice slowly forming on top, and mixing it with an amount of boiling water. What happens is that your entire spiritual mass becomes a turbulent mess of strong emotions, strong trouble-causing ideas, and strong emotional pain that wants to hide itself away because it’s too much to bear. To spend karma means to face each of those turbulent thought-emotions, and extract its energy from your system in form of suffering. Basically, to absorb such a wild mess of karma means to experience a karmic regression, to return your system into a past state where it was less cool, less calm, with all kinds of insane turbulences in citta, and if you have enough detachment, discipline and experience, you will gradually go through this mess and process it, eventually returning to your previous state of cool water with ice forming on the surface, only with greater amount of water.

The reason why inexperienced people should never do this is obvious – if you don’t have enough detachment, skill and holiness to begin with, you might lose yourself altogether in the process, and forget that Yoga is a thing. You’ll get angry at this and that, find more reasons to be angry, feed the karmic mess with your own energy and end up growing the problem instead of solving it. If that happens, the boiling mess becomes a bigger boiling mess.

The reason why I say it’s worse than depression is obvious – sure, this is spiritual darkness, because that’s what disturbance of soul-stuff feels like, but spiritual darkness is not just some depressing apathy; it’s anger, hatred, self-righteousness while being completely wrong and inventing all sorts of defensive worldviews for the wrongness, it’s making a religion out of your stupid ideas, and so on. People imagine sin as some kind of a stain on the soul, but it’s much worse than that. Sin is an active thing that defends itself. Sin creates rationalisations why it’s not sin, why it’s other people’s fault, why it’s God’s fault, why you’re a victim persecuted for your righteousness by a cruel unjust God. Sin bitches, moans and whines, it turns you into its servant, into its beast of burden, and that’s what Jesus meant when he said that he who sins is a slave to sin. It’s literally true, and sin would ride you into the ground, until there’s nothing left of you, rather than stop defending itself and admitting that it’s a sin, that it’s a bad thing, that you did wrong, that you thought wrong, and that you need to reverse course and rethink your life from a new perspective. When a sin is easily recognizable as sin, it’s a very easy problem to solve, and your core issues are never like that, which is why it is easy to spend decades and lifetimes dealing with such non-issues, while the actual problems pose as some kind of a glorious past that needs to become your glorious future.

So, Yoga is almost always misunderstood as a technical process of, basically, transforming nondescript energetic disturbance into deep spiritual calm. It’s not how this works, because in order to solve something you can’t keep polishing the surface. Sometimes you need to break the whole thing, because the root cause of your spiritual problems is too fundamental, and you need to suffer the pain of this breakage, and re-grow yourself from dust.

The only difference between a beginner and an expert is that an expert has lots of experience, technical knowledge and detachment that helps them endure the most traumatic parts of this process without going insane or evil. One would expect an expert to be facing only minor imperfections on the surface of their soul structure, but that’s not how those things work. If the imperfections are superficial, they are not an issue and you undergo immediate higher initiation. The reason why you don’t undergo initiation despite being apparently ready are the inclusions of low-energy stuff deep within the structure, meaning that you have fundamental misunderstandings that would require completely reworking your entire soul-structure, worldview and understanding, before you are ready to go forward.