Garbage smoothy

I’ll write a few things down as I think of them.

I’ve been thinking, from time to time, about my mistakes in the early 2000s, when I wrote commentary on the scriptures and thought that the best thing I could possibly do is to push the absolute limits of my spiritual perception and understanding, in order to be able to write things down – the exact yoga techniques to be used, the exact levels of purity required for certain things, and so on. This was such an incredibly naive and autistic view of things, I cringe every time I think of it. That would have been absolutely useless, and it reflected only my own desire to do the absolute maximum while I’m incarnated – touch the utmost limits, write it all down in form of manuals for the future generations of yogis, convey my knowledge to students who will establish a living tradition, so that I would check every possible box and God would let me out on good behaviour. 🙂 Occasionally, reality would snap me out of it; for instance, I used to say some of it out loud in front of one of the students, how I would like to have a yacht in order to be able to go to some completely desolate rock at sea, where I would be as far away from humans as possible in order to be able to do things that require long, uninterrupted streams of consciousness; it’s hard for me to even describe how those things work because of the limitations of language. Basically, imagine striking and keeping a single “note” of energy/emotion/consciousness, very narrow in “frequency”, the way a laser or LED light of a single wavelength is in the spectrum of light, observing what exactly it does in the energy system, how to cause it, how to remove impurities, how to maintain it, how to turn it into something else, and how to extinguish it. The guy I talked to (actually talked to myself with him around, apparently) concluded that this is certain evidence that I’m spiritually fallen because why would anyone want a yacht if not for hookers and cocaine. It sounds funny as hell now, in a sense where you can imagine a mathematician talking about fields and trees to a farmer, who keeps trying to understand what fields this guy is ploughing and what kind of trees he’s growing, but I didn’t find it funny then – I didn’t find it anything, in fact. My reaction was a blank lack of understanding, a total disconnect between what I thought their problems were and how I can help them overcome them, and what their problems actually were and how they understand the world around them. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad, mind you. I think it’s actually good that people are confronted with someone who exists in a way so different from them, it pulls them out of what they think is reality and what they think is “normal”, because you can’t really guide one gradually from one to another by explaining it “in their language”. You can’t explain yoga to a whore using her “language” of pimps, drug dealers and “clients”. You need to snap them out of their world and show them that “their world” is basically a form of madness and garbage unworthy of attention. The problem is, if it doesn’t work, the whore will think pranayama and vipassana are some forms of kinky sex from Kama Sutra, and conclude you want to fuck her for free, and I would guess that this, oversimplified as it might be, is in fact close enough to the root cause of the issues arising when a very real guru is trying to teach what is usually described as “normal people”. A “normal person”, from a position of a yogi, is caught in a whirlpool of insane delusion and attachment, completely ignorant of all reality, with consciousness that looks like content of a garbage can mixed in a blender. From a position of a “normal person”, a yogi’s motivations are completely incomprehensible, and they keep trying to translate his words into their language of hooker-drug dealer-pimp-cocaine-blowjob-get paid-buy drugs. The difference between a really fucked up human and a human that is so good they are a potential student candidate is, basically, in how long the garbage was left in the sun before it was put in a blender. That, I think, would be hardest for people to understand – that I didn’t really think that my students were anything special; I thought I could basically take anyone who wants to listen, show them the direction and the technique, and if they practiced it enough, things would start happening that would basically lead them towards enlightenment, one step at a time, where after a few steps your position is quite different from anything conceivable at the starting point. Also, I didn’t care if what they thought and felt is “true”; I only cared about the energy frequency and intensity, and whether it’s pointed vertically or not. You see, people in general have very weird notions of what’s true, that basically assume their general picture of reality is valid, and if something deviates from it, it’s false. A yogi, however, knows that only God is real, everything else is comparable to some video game, that is to say it is a persistent, convincing illusion, humans are energetically trapped by investing energy within the illusion, and trying to feed off of diminished reflections of their own energetic investments, and it’s all insanity, it is all false. It doesn’t really matter whether you believe that the sky is blue or yellow; a yogi perceives your beliefs as either useful, if they can cause you to disentangle yourself from the illusion, or harmful, if they promote further entanglement. In a very real way, a yogi knows that God is true, everything else is falsehood and nonsense, and whether you believe in fairies or electrons, it’s all the same to him. If you believe in fairies, he’ll try to talk to you in terms of fairies, if you believe in physics he’ll improvise something in terms of quarks and protons, but what’s actually important to know is that a yogi doesn’t really believe in any of that nonsense, he’s just trying to speak to the patients of a lunatic asylum in some way that would influence their energy system in a positive way, and turn the garbage smoothy in their minds into a coherent-ecstatic energy flow.

I get flashbacks of this when I hear the Russians explaining their position, and then I hear the Americans and their vassals interpret that, translating Yoga Sutra into pimp-hooker language. It’s actually funny in a weird sort of a way.

Putin: “Stop trying to make a dirty bomb, it’s going to escalate into a nuclear war.”
Brandon: “If Putin doesn’t want nuclear war, why is he talking about it so much?”

FML 🙂

Land of a Thousand Fables

In one of the extension packs of the Witcher 3 game, the “Blood and wine”, the authors managed to make an excellent and accurate illustration of an actual “astral” process; they called it the “magical entropy”. Spoilers ahead, because I’ll have to provide a description.

Basically, a court mage created an illusory fairy-tale reality where the two princesses could play with the fairy-tale characters when they were children. However, the girls grew up, everybody forgot about the place for decades but it continued existing, and decomposing, to the point where the characters became crazy, malevolent and dangerous. The three little piggies became the three huge aggressive pigs, the big bad wolf killed the red riding hood and the hunter and threw them into the well, and now drinks with the pirates, the pixies are attacking everyone indiscriminately, the girl with the matches is a drug dealer, the Longlocks hanged herself by her own hair because the Prince Charming never came to her rescue because he broke his neck falling down the broken stairs of her tower, and so on.

This behavior of “magical structures” is in fact real and well known in the literature; Alexandra David-Neel, for instance, described behavioral degradation of a tulpa she created, where it became more and more nasty and malevolent with time. This happens as the energy invested in the entity by its creator is depleted, and it loses ability to access higher spiritual states, because this requires more energy. Basically, it loses the highest things it could originally access first, and then progressively degrades to the point of being able to access only the lowest demonic states, after which it completely loses coherence. You can call it astral entropy, tulpa degradation, or structural decomposition; doesn’t really matter, because none of the terms describe the phenomenon completely, and completely new terminology should be devised. What matters is that astral structures have a very distinct and recognizeable pattern of degradation, and they are by design net energy negative, meaning they would require a constant influx of energy in order to maintain a stable state, and if they are not externally powered, they degrade along the arrow of time. The way you need to design astral structures if you don’t want them to degrade is to provide them with either a power reserve, in form of a spiritual “crystal”, which is basically very condense and coherent form of localized spiritual energy, which then acts as some sort of a “soul” that drives the astral structure you designed, or you need to provide it with a link to God, that will keep it permanently powered, but this won’t work if the structure is in any way incompatible with God’s will and nature, but there are ways around this (for instance, when God delegates a duty to grant or deny access to another spiritual being, and this being makes a mistake due to negligence or outright stupidity). There is a third way, that is the darkest black magic by definition, and it consists of tricking souls into forming some sort of a symbiotic relationship with the entity, where they are tricked into powering it, and deluded into believing that they will somehow benefit from the process.

Why is any of this relevant? Well, it is in fact most relevant, because that’s where we are. This world is the “Land of a Thousand Fables”, and it’s powered in several ways: by our own energy captured through deception, by stolen spiritual crystals, and partially, probably, by the will of God, because Satan obtained permission to run his experiment unopposed, for a time. The reason magical entropy, as described in the game, crossed my mind, is because it is an excellent explanation of the phenomenon we are faced with. The structure we are locked within is going to hell because it lost power, which means it is progressively losing access to higher spiritual states, and acting exactly like you would expect from a tulpa that is depleted of energy.

The very specific aspect of this process, that is taking place as we speak, is America losing its “mystique” and attractiveness, like a wicked witch that magically presented herself as a beautiful and good lady, and the magical makeup is starting to show holes, revealing evil and rot underneath.

Prey species

I would say that humans in general, and people in the West in particular, have a very strange way of understanding evil. For instance, decades ago I played with the Star Wars lore when explaining certain spiritual concepts, and stated that Darth Vader was the “avatar” in that context, the one who did whatever had to be done in order to defeat evil, and that he wasn’t actually evil – he’s an extremely brave person that handles dangers personally instead of sending his minions to die while hiding in his far away fortress, for instance. If I recall correctly, I made that analysis somewhere around 1997-1998, which means it predates the prequels. Lo and behold, now the official Star Wars canon supports my interpretation; Anakin Skywalker aka Darth Vader is indeed “the chosen one”. To me, this interpretation was completely obvious when watching the original trilogy, but I honestly never found anyone else with the same interpretation, because, apparently, the fact that someone wears black, speaks in deep ominous voice, is profoundly threatening, and kills and tortures people whenever he deems appropriate, is simply too much of an obstacle for them to be able to see that person as, fundamentally, something God brought into existence to re-balance things. Apparently, the things God creates to re-balance things need to be “good”, and “good” beings are basically the fluffy bunnies of the world, never the eagles. It is here that I got the first inklings of the idea that humans don’t really have any concepts of right and wrong, or an understanding of the actual God. It’s all genetics, a projection of fears and desires of a prey species that imagines God as someone who will save them from the predators. The fact that something that is obviously and inherently a prey species grew to become the world’s top predator through use of tools doesn’t seem to change the way they internally perceive themselves. Christianity, obviously, is largely at fault here, because I can’t really see this mentality in the Roman Empire, for instance, but the fact that such an ethical system was so widely adopted makes me believe there’s something genetic there, especially when I perceive how the humans tend to emotionally identify with and root for the prey animal when watching an eagle or a lion hunt. Perhaps it is because in a normal human society, most humans are deprived of any power, and only the small number of rulers acts as a predatory subspecies.

I found a more recent example of this in the Witcher games (spoilers and in-game lore ahead). There’s a character there, Gaunter O’Dimm, who is generally accepted to be the devil of some sorts, “evil incarnate”. At the first glance, that checks out – he apparently tricks people with wordplay and “fine print” when fulfilling their wishes, which turn out to doom them. He is also known to kill people who annoy him and curse others. However, at a deeper inspection, this interpretation falls apart, because he seems to be very picky about his targets, and very obviously fails to exploit an opportunity to trick and ensnare Geralt, flat-out refusing to grant a wish that would have deadly unforeseen consequences, and his trade with Geralt is inherently fair; he saved his life in exchange for help, and he helped Geralt succeed and literally adhered to the terms of the deal. Also, the advice he gives to good people is actually very good; at a wedding party he teaches an old woman about time as an essential ingredient of a cookie, gives Geralt good and accurate advice when he needs to find Yennefer, or when he seems to come to an impasse with Shani, or when he asks how to save Ciri. There’s no trickery involved; the advice is very straightforward and helpful. When I tried to categorise the character, I had to categorise him as “lawful good”, which came as a surprise to me. Another surprise came when I tried to identify similar characters in the game, and I came up with the Lady of the Lake. They both seem to have their own rules which they both impose on the world and personally obey; they promote what they see as good and punish what they see as evil. However, since the Lady of the Lake looks cute and sexy, apparently nobody else saw that she’s the same category of entities as Gaunter O’Dimm, the “devil” of the in-game world. However, let’s see the facts. Olgierd von Everec was a nobleman who surrounded himself by a gang of cutthroats and thugs, and studied black magic. He tried to marry a good and beautiful woman, but since he “ran out of money” (which doesn’t look like an accident for someone who roamed the world with his thugs rather than tend to his estate) her parents chose to give her to another, an Ofieri prince. He then proceeded to curse the Prince, and sell his soul to the “devil” in exchange for wealth and eternal life; he then proceeded to destroy everything he touched, including his wife, and proceeded to feel sorry for himself all the while destroying everything he touched. We see his gang setting fire to some people’s estate which they took by force and terrorized the owners, and we see him planning to destroy more people who didn’t “show hospitality” to his gang. Basically, he’s scum of the earth in every conceivable way, and if not for Gaunter O’Dimm, Geralt would actually die as a consequence of doing a contract for Olgierd; he was captured and would have been executed.

The second known victim was the spotted wight of the Trastamara estate in Toussaint, who used to be a beautiful arrogant noble woman whom Gaunter O’Dimm tested by pretending to be a beggar and asking for alms, and she responded that she would rather give the remains of her feast to the dogs than feed him, at which he cursed her to basically become an ugly creature that can’t eat.

See a pattern there? Guess who is also known to curse people for very similar reasons? Lady of the Lake. Remember the Golyat, the giant Geralt and his guides kill when first entering Toussaint? To cite Witcher lore: “According to legend, Golyat had once been a knight who violated his vows, for which he was punished by the Lady of the Lake.”

So, when Gaunter O’Dimm punishes the arrogant noblewoman for violating the ancient rite of hospitality by turning her into a monster, he’s the devil, and when the Lady of the Lake punishes a knight for “violating his vows” (we can assume he did something particularly cruel and ugly) by turning him into a monster, she’s what? The protector-saint of the five chivalric virtues? In my analysis, both are “lawful good”. They have rules under which they act, they help the good characters and punish the evil ones, under their rules. For instance, Gaunter O’Dimm kills the pestilent useless drunkard who annoys him by preventing Geralt from reaching his table to talk to him, and he “shows particular interest” in a mage who made him the object of his study, and it’s hard to tell whether he cursed him to die when leaving a circle drawn in a room, or simply foresees this as a future event, considering his mastery of time.

It’s interesting that both Gaunter O’Dimm and Lady of the Lake see Geralt the same way; they understand that he’s someone who is wise, compassionate, brave, honest and extremely competent, and is essentially someone who keeps reducing people’s suffering and removing evils from the world, but this reality is not something that is either widely known or obvious to people; you need to be able look beneath the appearance and into the reality of things. Also, they are both some sort of a predator that selectively attacks cruel, arrogant and evil people, thus motivating others to adhere to moral principles, because they show by vivid example the dangers of being a callous bastard – you can cross paths with someone who will really end your career.

As a comparison, look at how the Crones of Crookbag Bog do things, and I categorise them as “lawful evil”, because they follow certain rules, but the end-result is that Velen, which is “under their protection”, is a hell on Earth. For instance, when a crone says a “prophecy” to Geralt, it’s a lie that consists of enough elements of truth to make it really dangerous, which is an attribute I would associate with Satan. They also have the ability to appear beautiful in order to seduce and deceive; the humans in Velen pray and sacrifice to them as if they were protective deities.

All in all, I would say that humans as a species are very much obsessed with good and evil, but they also have a terrible track record at being able to define those two in terms that have any bearing on the actual reality. When I heard someone state that all legally sane people can tell the difference between right and wrong, I started laughing. People couldn’t tell the difference in case of Jesus, which one would expect to be as obvious as it gets. One would expect equal propensity for mistaking saints for devils, devils for saints, and all kinds of dubious characters for either/both. Or, as I would put it, if one isn’t firmly founded in the darshan of God, everything he knows about reality amounts to shit.

About reality of karma and Gods

( 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. 🙂

The paradoxes of relative existence

The continuation of the discussion:

Danijel wrote:
This is the paradox: if you’re conditioned, are you truly responsible for your actions? Vipassana helps in that regard, that much is certain.
I would say that in such a state of conditioned routine, you are not really yourself. Only when the shackles of human illusion are broken and you are in the state of darshan of God, do you truly start to remember yourself.

Robin wrote:
I guess that Karman is conditioned and the consequences of actions in the sphere of karma always have to play out, but technically Karman it is also matter and devoid of intrinsic self. Using your analogy of aggregation of karma as grains of sand arranging themselves into a microprocessor, if the Karman is the microprocessor and brahman defined as selfness is the electricity, without the electricity the microprocessor is inert, but when the electricity is turned on, the selfness of Brahman is manifested through the constraints of the microprocessor.

There are some constraints I need to point out. First, when we’re talking about karma, on the levels of kalapas and the karmic aggregates, the concept of electricity animating the otherwise inert microprocessor doesn’t apply. The karmic particles possess their own “light”, or “electricity” in this analogy; this alone makes them a weird kind of entity because in this world, nothing behaves this way, but in the astral world that would be considered perfectly normal because everything behaves this way there. This means you have a microprocessor consisting of tiny constituents – not so much transistors as logic circuits – that also produce electricity by being natural conduits for the light of God. This is because the very structure of the world (the real one) is upside-down from all expectations for this one, and this is also why I will need to be pointing out those differences regularly, because they are quite easy to forget here. For instance, another analogy for a kalapa is if you take a piece of black nylon, and put it against a light. Nothing goes through. Now take a needle and poke a hole through nylon, repeat the process and you have a tiny dot of light. Make several dots of light in close proximity to each other and now you have a good deal of transparency for light. Now imagine those “holes” being n-dimensional entities (where n is a Hausdorff dimension) that move around and associate on their own, basically a hole being an actual entity and not absence, and the light it radiates gives it inherent spiritual properties, albeit on a microscopic level. It wants to be with more and greater light, on many dimensions of existence, and there you get the fundamental driving mechanism of karma.

Robin wrote:
But then something weird seems to happen, where the unconstrained awareness of Brahman seems to forget itself and identifies with the limitations of the microprocessor and thinks it is separate from other microprocessors under the illusion that it is somehow a sperate entity responsible for its actions and making choices where in fact its simply manifesting programming of the microprocessor.

I don’t think that’s the point where we get the paradox. We get it at the level of kalapas, because that’s where I see the weird stuff going on. Each of them seems to behave independently, and yet when they aggregate they behave similarly to the way neurons behave in a brain, yet with more flexibility, and not necessarily any spatial constraints, meaning the parts of your “spirit-brain” can be located all over the place and still be as immediately interconnected as neurons in your brain; you can literally be spliced across worlds and still function as a singular spiritual entity. Also, are they entities, or are they merely n-dimensional coordinates that “access” infinity, and the “entity” part is merely a function of “n” being a right type of a number, meaning the dimensions include space of some kind? People say the quantum theory is difficult, but it only seems to be difficult if you use obscure descriptive models, and the paradoxes involved are tiny. Here, the paradoxes involved are orders of magnitude greater, because we’re dealing with “pixels of spirituality” of sorts, that come from unmanifested God and can manifest God, or they can manifest everything on a transition vector towards manifested God, including all the wrong paths, pitfalls and illusions.

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. As you are more successful in reaching different aspects of God, your karmic body re-organizes, and your feeling of “self” remains “you”, and yet you perceive more and higher things as “you”, because regardless of how much your consciousness contracts or expands, “self” exists on the tiny kalapa-level, and the more kalapas you add to the soul-structure, they add dimensionality to the same core of identity, like those pinholes adding light to the same perceived entity. Sure, you can say it’s all an illusion or a paradox or whatever, but once we remove this world, which is “illusion proper”, I’m not really sure the word applies. Paradox, yes. But is the Relative illusion? I don’t think the word applies. 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:
The question is, is this desire for freedom and self realisation also part of the conditioning which awareness is also witnessing or is this desire actually originating from awareness itself as it tries to break the shackles of illusion and remember itself? The later would suggest that consciousness does have some influence in the relative world and is not solely a slave to the commands of the microprocessor. What do you think about it?

I think it’s a problem that is constrained to this world; I don’t see it anywhere else. Here, you have a very static and deterministic universe that still manages to interface with souls, and they are spliced between several modes of existence and reality-types, which creates both illusions and paradoxes. For instance, it’s a paradox that I can barely influence my physical body at all, in a sense that it degrades with age in ways that are completely beyond my control, and yet I can access realities way beyond all of that and use the body to write that down, and this is obviously an influence in the world, it’s obviously not something that naturally follows from the mechanics of the physical body. What follows from the mechanics of the body is that you develop caries spontaneously if you don’t brush your teeth with daily regularity; what follows from the mechanics of your body is that you get angry when someone annoys you. However, when you turn within and extend your consciousness, that’s when you access parts of you that are spliced off between worlds and here things start to be a paradox of this or that sort.