All that is nice and lovely, you will say, but how can it possibly leave any room for economy, politics and war, which is all you seem to be writing about lately?

I would start by making a reference to the Bhagavad-gita, where Arjuna asks the same question – “If all that is true, why do you ask me to commit this horrible act, o Krishna?”. I would say that the contradiction and the apparent incongruity is, again, due to semantics, where “compassion”, “love”, “unity” and other words mean one thing to a yogi, and quite another to common humans.

To humans, dharma would mean some kind of “harmony” where there would be no violence or strife, and everybody would be happy. To a yogi, dharma is a state of living God, and if God takes a form of affirming something that is good, or a form of destroying something that is evil and stands in the way of virtue, it is all the same. People somehow make an assumption that God wants all souls to “be saved”, or “achieve Nirvana“. That formulation is not aligned with dharma. Dharma would mandate that brahman overcomes illusion, that virtue is chosen and manifested, that truth and greatness are lived and shown. To accelerate this process will mean to accelerate choice – to either be of God, or not to be at all. This, then, translates into politics – there are systems of organizing worldly life that promote dharma more or less, which means that one must favour the political systems that favour the correct principles. It’s the same with economy; the system that rewards goodness, utility, advancement of knowledge and promotion of dharma must be established and favoured, and economy that increasingly rewards dharmic behaviour, and punishes adharmic behaviour, is a manifestation of dharma. Basically, if someone creates wisdom, beauty, goodness and so on, he should be rewarded with money, so that he would have more energy to do more of that in the world, and, conversely, if someone does nothing good and useful, and uses whatever he has to make lives of others miserable and to oppose dharma wherever it is manifested, he should be punished and money be taken away from him, so that he would lack energy to do things in the world, and would eventually starve and wither. Obviously, it goes against the expectation that the manifestation of dharma would be some kind of communism, where everybody would be treated the same and have the same, just because brahman is One in all. That’s not how things work. Brahman is not just “One”. Brahman is also sat-cit-ananda, reality-consciousness-bliss. To live dharma is to promote sat-cit-ananda, and if something is hindrance to sat-cit-ananda, meaning it is of illusion, ignorance and suffering, it is to be removed from existence, and not treated equally as a manifestation of God, just because God is one. The expectation of equality is a fallacy. What needs to be applied equally is the criterion of manifestation of brahman; the results, however, will differ greatly, and the same Krishna will be friend to the good and virtuous ones, and death and destruction to the evil ones. God doesn’t create some kind of sheep heaven where lions and cows eat yoghurt together. As Arjuna rightly said to Krishna, “it is right and proper that all saints and rishis bow before you in reverence, and all the demons and evil-doers to run away from you in terror”.

To provide another perspective, let’s refer to the Augustinian concept of righteous war, which sounds like a contradiction, if you are untrained in thinking with any kind of layered complexity. You see, St. Augustine would say that God formulated certain laws, and one of them is “do not kill”. However, what happens when you as a God-loving nation are faced with an enemy that will kill you, given a chance? You need to try to dissuade them and show them the error of their ways; basically use diplomacy. If that fails, you need to scare and intimidate them, to show them the fatal consequences of war against you; this is deterrence. If that fails, you need to weigh the amount of good and evil that will happen along both options – to either wage war, or not. If a situation where you don’t wage war results in more good than evil, then you should surrender; this is the case if war is to be waged over some irrelevant dispute, and the enemy is not inherently evil and does not intend to enslave, murder and impose a godless order upon you, but instead wants access to some natural resource. The principle is that war should never be waged over such things, and they should instead be solved by diplomacy and commerce. If the enemy is inherently evil, however, and wants to prevent you from living in accordence with the will of God, if he wants to enslave you or murder people, then this should be opposed, and war is to be waged as effectively as possible in order for such a threat to be removed. At the very moment the threat is removed, however, violence should cease, and all efforts are to be invested in repairing the damage caused by the war. St. Augustine mentions the bad examples from Roman history, where the victors continued to murder people out of spite and vengeance after the war was over, instead of proclaiming peace. Obviously, even if you think that killing and violence are evil, and are forbidden by God, you are to stand in the way of people who intend to murder and commit violence and oppose the will of God, and if violence is necessary in order to defend peace, you better learn how to be good at violence.

Buddhist view of war is very Augustinian, because Buddhism doesn’t see ahimsa the way Jainism does, as a central virtue. To Buddhism, what matters is to promote dharma and metta, reduce suffering and accelerate liberation from samsara. Violence is seen as a knife – it is usually an instrument of evil, if it is used for killing and maiming people, but if it is used by a surgeon and as an instrument of healing, it is good. Ahimsa in Buddhism is an important principle, but if ahimsa means opposing and destroying adharma by violent means, so be it. What is common to Christians and Buddhists is that they would find it universally objectionable to mistreat prisoners of war or terrorize a conquered population: they would try to promote goodness and preach the right way, and if they are faced with someone who doesn’t want to change and learn, and is a danger to others when released, they would likely just kill him, rather than torture him by prolonged imprisonment. Making the utmost virtue out of life itself is a materialist thing, and is foreign to all religions that believe in a transcendental reality.

What separates Buddhism and Christianity is their position on suffering. To Buddhists, suffering is outright evil and should be prevented and opposed if at all possible. To Christians, things are more complex. Yes, suffering is not pleasant, but suffering is also good against arrogance, because they noticed that people tend to turn to God and abandon their arrogant and godless way when they are sick and in pain, and they actually introduced forms of self-torture as prevention/cure against arrogance and godlessness, and this is actually a form of spiritual practice in some monastic orders. Also, suffering of Christ had redeeming qualities. The Christians will therefore not see a great evil if torture is used as an instrument of teaching arrogant and evil people that they are not gods. My opinion is that this is fraught with too many dangers to be used effectively against evil, because both from the position of Vedanta, where actions that are not of sat-cit-ananda are to be avoided, and from the position of Buddhism, where suffering is evil and metta is recommended, any kind of torture and humiliation of others is to be seen as evil, and always avoided. Unteachable evil people that are a danger to others might need to be killed, but if you approach this by turning yourself into a monster similar or worse than those you are fighting, you are not manifesting dharma, you are finding excuse for indulging your sadism.

I was thinking, related to the line of thinking from the previous article, about several issues I’m having with the ideas I expressed there.

The first is in regard to the concept of spiritual growth by expanding the domain of self into the domain of non-self; basically, including things that are “other”. I didn’t explain what I meant by that, and I think I should, because most people will not find it intuitive.

I think the easiest way to explain this is if I say it’s the opposite to “cancel culture”. In the “cancel culture” of the contemporary Marxists, you basically never argue with the “enemy”. You just recognise that the “enemy” fits into the pre-defined groups that need to be destroyed, or at least “excluded from polite company” until their physical destruction becomes practical – you call them something-ist, and then you try to prevent them from talking or existing. The irony is that those cancel people justify their behaviour with the argument of compassion, but I will return to that later. For now, what matters is that cancel culture deals with non-self, with “other”, by separating it decisively from “self”, and designating it for destruction. This is exactly how one should behave if they want not to grow spiritually, because such an approach builds impenetrable walls around “self”, where “self” is good, and “non-self” is the evil Nazi enemy of all that is good and proper, with whom there can be no compromise or understanding.

Compassion, as I conceive it, means to understand that it could be you in that “non-self” entity position, and when you are skilled enough in yoga, you can extend your area of “self” to engulf either a person and an object, and think and feel from their position, and if their understanding is flawed, you bring it to correct understanding by introducing proper arguments that improve thinking, and you apply yoga to the disturbances of your mind – because it is now your mind, since you expanded the definition of Self to engulf it – and process the karmic impurities that are now your own. This, of course, is dangerous, because if your own spiritual core isn’t very firmly established in dharma (and by that I mean initiation into vajra and a prior experience of samadhi) you can quite literally “lose yourself”, and I don’t mean that in a good way, but in a psychosis and spiritual destruction way. In yogi terms, such process of expansion of self to engulf “other”, is very close to the definition of samyama, where for instance samyama on a tree means to exist as a tree, in a sense where you don’t think about a tree as a human would, but you “feel compassion” with a tree to the point where you exist and feel what that tree exists and feels. I used to practice this quite extensively, by sitting on a bench under a tree from late afternoon to deep night, and doing samyama on a tree, being the tree, learning to first calm my own mind completely, and then expand my perception, identity and range of “self” to engulf “other”. I was basically in the process of initiation into vajra at this point so I had both the ability and maturity, and I wouldn’t recommend this to beginners, because they either won’t be able to do it, or, even worse, they will be able to do it, but it will overwhelm them to the point of serious imbalance. Basically, one should achieve perfection of self first, then expand perfection outwards. Not having achieved perfection, work on that until you do, and abandon other silly ideas. I’m defining “perfection” as the ability to enter the state of samadhi at will, and feel its aspects in any direction of consciousness. Examples of this are, for instance, the ability to “bless” food; I would do it by entering samadhi and expanding consciousness/awareness/perception outwards, to food, where I would feel it within self and as a structure within the mind of God, so to speak. If I felt any karmic impurities or disturbances, I would do kriya to release them until all was at peace and depth. I would then proceed to eat food.

This is the process I call “compassion”, and here we arrive to my second issue; that of semantics. It is obvious to me that the words people commonly use, and the same words when used in literature of Yoga and Buddhism, have vastly different assumptions and meanings, which is fertile ground for all kinds of misunderstandings. When people commonly use the word “compassion”, they mean emotion, and it’s hardly a subtle one at that. When I use this word, I mean entering samadhi, and directly feeling the “other”, as self but with different body/mind/circumstances, and while compassion as it is commonly understood implies agreement and unity of emotion and thought, yogi compassion doesn’t exist at all at this level. There is no emotional exchange, and there are no own thoughts, because those are interference and disturbance that stands in the way of direct perception by means of samyama. When a yogi “feels compassion” with someone, it means “to exist as”, or “do samyama on that someone”. It doesn’t include thinking and feeling emotions; sure, thoughts and emotions do arise as secondary aspects of identification, but they exist in the same way in which two fluids would exchange heat and kinetic energy when mixed; it’s physics, not an emotional exercise. It means to become “other” karmically, and to solve those problems from that “other” position, while at the same time retaining the perspective of dharma, and “enlightening” the joint karma by application of yogic effort. Compassion, essentially, starts from the position of dharma, “spoils it” by engulfing karma of “non-self” and making it the karma of self, and then applying the force of dharma to, metaphorically, “compress” the chaotic, turbulent karmic substance, feeling suffering, and doing kriya to release, which would be the thermodynamic equivalent of releasing the excess heat. Eventually, a state of peace is achieved, where the greater-self entity is in the state of dharma, devoid of disturbance, and in the high-energy state (which is comparable to the state of physical matter where the atoms are close together, a solid or something even denser). So, when you see mentions of “compassion” and “suffering” in Buddhist literature, have in mind that those words don’t have the same meaning one would associate with them in common speech. It’s the same with the word “love”, which is used by everyone and could mean anything, which is why I find it contaminated and useless. As an anecdote, I once heard small children saying how love is the most important thing, and I was initially shocked, because I know how children are inherently incredibly selfish and completely unable to feel empathy, so what would they possibly know of love? I then understood that they don’t mean love as something they feel or do; it’s how they feel when others feel and do something towards them, when they feel safe, included, accepted and cared for. This, in turn, creates the idea that one loves you if they do everything you like, and exactly your way, which is an incredibly selfish way of perceiving others. How is it at all possible that people say that God is love, when it is obvious that God is as far from this spiritual state as one can imagine? I thought about this, and the conclusion I came to isn’t simple, because the statement that God is love is really an over-simplification of statements that were made by the actual saints who actually experienced God. The saints didn’t experience what a child would assume by love – the feeling they have when their parents care for them. Sure, there is one aspect of it – being completely understood and known, being accepted and part of, but there is more to it; as St. Theresa of Avilla described the feeling when an angel pierced her heart with his spear, and she felt pain so terrible she couldn’t bear it for even a moment, and so delicious she wanted it to last forever. This feeling of terrible power, that is wonderful beyond dreams, and at the same time both accepting and judgmental, because it carries implications – you need to act of that in order to be of that, so to speak. In order not to reject God, you need to affirm your belonging to God by acting the way God would act, both in the world and beyond. So, you can say it’s “love”, but honestly, a word that can mean anything to anyone is hardly of any use at all, and the danger of misunderstanding is greater than the possible utility of conveying a meaning.

I’m having similar issues when using the words people think they understand, but they truly don’t, for instance the word God. When I say the word “God”, I touch samadhi. When people think the word “God”, who knows what rubbish they think; the only thing I’m certain of is that it contains very little in terms of a transcendental component; it’s mostly misconceptions accompanied by frustrations and resentment. To me, God is the deep transcendental reality from which I raise up thoughts and words, and this manifestation of thoughts, words, deeds from God is dharma, as I understand it. Dharma is the state in which thought, action and deed arises from brahman, without disturbance.

So, basically, if a common person thinks they understand what a saint, avatar or an enlightened person is saying, just because they use words that have a commonly understood meaning, they are most likely wrong.

Yes, that’s my line of thinking as well. Remove the body and suddenly both a flower a saint and a god are “self realized”, but then there’s the obvious difference between them. The only thing Vedanta has to offer is “a flower will need to be *more* self-realized”, but it’s a completely hollow argument that shows the inherent weakness of the philosophy, because it has only the atma-brahma-jnana card to play as the explanation for all the problems and quantitative differences, and once that is removed, it has nothing. That’s actually something I noticed in 1994 when I was in samadhi; that there is an obvious difference between a saint and God, and it was obvious that the answer wasn’t that the God was in samadhi more, or that he removed some remainder of duality and what not. It’s something else, and it was a mystery to me. The second mystery were the descriptions of God in Bhagavata-purana, that looked like descriptions of name and form, which Vedanta would dismiss outright as mere limitations upon brahman, but they obviously weren’t limitations, but somehow God-aspects; relative and Absolute both, in a strange way that created relative divine presence phenomena, similar to how Buddhism would explain Dakinis, something that exists in a superposition state between nirvana and samsara. I incrementally introduced non-vedantic elements to explain reality, because Vedanta simply lacked cognitive instruments for processing the actual empirical evidence that I gathered, and it’s not that I just replaced Vedanta with Buddhism, because I find most interpretations of Buddhism lacking and unsatisfactory; however, the part of Buddhism that deals with high-energy spiritual states, such as the elements, vajra, dakinis, bodhisattva-states etc., corresponds very closely to my experiences and I found it very useful for modelling, in combination with the aspect of Hinduism that describes the Gods. Combining the descriptions of Vishnu and Shiva, for instance, with the understanding of how vajras and dakinis work, and then understanding that Self-realization is the underlying current somewhere in all that, not some generic emptiness Buddhism keeps harping about, well, it creates a much better framework.

That’s all true, but the real question is, if “more self-realization” isn’t the path forward, explaining the difference between a rock and sudarshana-cakra, or a flower and the mind of Shiva, what is? Compassion, in the sense of “becoming more”, expanding what you are into the realm that is presently beyond you? That seems to be the closest, because, obviously, things like suffering and yoga might be side-effects and tools, not the working principle; for instance, when through compassion you expand to include non-self things, they are usually what Patanjali would call “disturbed”, they create terrible whirlpools of citta that emotionally translate as “suffering”, and then yoga comes into play, as means of working through the suffering and “thermodynamically” calming the spiritual substance, the way a compressor in a refrigerator “calms” the gas by extracting the excess heat. This seems to be the basic Buddhist explanation for the phenomenon of spiritual growth, and I can’t presently think of problems it doesn’t solve.