I’m reposting one of those private discussions that end up being too widely useful to be left private. 🙂

Robin wrote:
If free will is defined as freedom to do whatever we will/want and the options are so limited that we basically are not free to do anything then by that definition free will doesn’t really exist for anyone that is incarnated. One could argue that anyone with a physical body does not have free will which applies to incarnated enlightened souls too.

I’ve actually seen several definitions, or at least several ways of wiggling out of the paradox. One is that the desires are actually a problem, because if you have no desires, you are never in a situation to test your degree of freedom and find it lacking. I find this to be a dishonest solution. True, you can argue that in a God-state, you are in a state of total fulfillment, and if you define a desire-motivation exclusively as desire to move toward greater fulfillment, then this would be absent if total fulfillment is achieved. However, I find this model lacking. The first argument against it is that God is creative, which means that fulfillment can be motivated towards manifestation, or at least there is a phenomenon that can be explained in this manner, which would mean that emptiness of spirit is not the only possible motivation behind desire. Second, to lack desire is not necessarily a symptom of high achievement. I used to meditate under a tree on the graveyard and I got quite familiar with the way a tree exists and experiences, and desire plays no part in it. Nevertheless, I would suspect that a tree is not universally admired as having achieved the goal of existence. 🙂

So, I would say that true freedom is to have only the desires that are of God, meaning that they are of the kind that originates from God-consciousness and are of God-quality, meaning you are not bound by any lower force or a state that would condition your consciousness in ways that normally produce desires. Furthermore, this freedom from lower conditioning needs to be combined with the ability to manifest literally anything, so that your consciousness is not bound or limited by the inability to effect a desired outcome. Basically, what I’m talking about is complete purity of consciousness that is God-level of fulfillment and power, and is combined with unconditional omnipotence.

Robin wrote:
Perhaps a better way of framing the question is not weather or not we have free will but weather we have any control over anything at all and weather our apparent choices, preferences, likes/dislikes are all conditioned and therefore predictable. What I’m seeing is that choice is an illusion too and that there are just patterns of thoughts, emotions, sensations of certain qualities which are attracted to certain phenomena which resonate with their nature. However, this attraction isn’t really a choice any more that an electron doesn’t really choose to orbit around a proton but does so purely due to physical forces.

Well, this describes conditioned will and the correct conclusion is that this is not free will by any definition of freedom other than that by which a falling rock is free.

Robin wrote:
Similarly, one could say that a soul does not really choose God or the world, but when exposed to God light, the kalapas of ones spiritual body feel ‘attraction’ but I don’t think choice has anything to do with it, it’s the actual particles that are attracted. In contrast, a soul of poor quality may feel ‘repulsion’ to God which is again attributed to its own quality and nothing to do with choice either.

Yes, because one’s nature conditions his choices, which is probably why Ramakrishna said that one is free to choose the form in which to worship Krishna, because the implication is that you’re free only when worshipping Krishna in this or that form is the only thing you want to do, meaning that if other things are options to you, you are conditioned and not free. However, if you are truly free, you could do anything in theory, buy you don’t want to do anything outside a very narrow band of good options. Generally, I think freedom outside of God is greatly overvalued.

Robin wrote:
However, if we analyse this, I don’t have control over what sensations are experienced in this body, don’t have control over the emotions experienced at any moment, my mind pretty much does its own thing and pulls me in various directions and appears to have its own momentum, the interactions of all these sensations, feelings and thoughts with external objects is experienced as attraction and repulsion forces manifested as likes and dislikes all of which result in apparent choices which may not actually be choices and consciousness/awareness/spirit is simply the passive witness to the whole thing. If the spirit is deluded and identifies with the drama unfolding and thinks that it is the one making choices it is bound and if it understands the true nature of what’s going then perhaps it would be freed?

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:
There are obvious problems with this theory such as if one cant influence or have control over anything then what’s the point of the entire creation?

If by “entire creation” you mean this shithole of a world, then I must state that there indeed is a point, but I cannot be forced to see it as a constructive one. However, the pit of doom is hardly the place to judge all creation by.

Robin wrote:
Regarding the topic of paying off karma, in the jewel you mentioned that it is karman that is reincarnated not atman. In that sense, atman is always the unchanging witness, is never incarnated, never subjected to karma. But who is “you” in the sentence “you need to pay off karma”?

For Vedanta, this is an unsolvable mystery, which is why I don’t see it as very useful in practice and have slowly abandoned it through the years. I prefer the Buddhist perspective according to which karma and the soul are the same thing, and instead of “working off karma” I would use the expression of “shaping oneself”, “purifying one’s consciousness”, or something similar. This is why Buddhism doesn’t really know what to do with the concept of atman, because it is by necessity a term that denotes a localized, karma-determined perspective of Brahman, and the very idea of attachment of atman (as defined by Vedanta) to karma is philosophically unsound. However, I do have an explanation that reconciles several apparent paradoxes. You see, if you understand brahman as the “hardware”, and everything else as “software”, then karma can behave fully according to the Buddhist expectations, and yet aggregations of karma can be seen as aspects of computer which localize the “selfness” nature of brahman. Basically, it’s a thing you can point your finger at and say, “here, the computer is doing something” showing an application window, and you can see many windows as independent and distinct, but what are they if not computer?

And yet, I am not fully satisfied with this explanation because aggregation of karma is more akin to the phenomenon described in Stanislaw Lem’s novel “Invincible”, or an imagined world where inherently computational superconductive crystals aggregate into larger structures and thus create more powerful computers. Basically, aggregation of karma intuitively feels more like grains of sand arranging themselves into a microprocessor than windows manifesting the computer, and yet both analogies are valid descriptions of the underlying phenomenon.

I heard a saying once, attributed to Paramahamsa Ramakrishna: “Everybody has free will to choose the form in which they want to worship Krishna”, as an explanation of free will. I reduced this to the core statement, that free will exists only for God and the saints, because everybody else has so many conditions imposed upon them, it would be ridiculous to even speak of any kind of freedom of will. However, it is intuitive to people that they have this or that kind of freedom, and my parsing of Ramakrishna’s dictum is usually rejected on the intuitive level. Also, the concept of desire is very quickly introduced in any discussion about free will, so we’ll need to deal with that, as well.

I have a nasty joke from the former Yugoslavia as an illustration of the relationship between freedom and desire. The adapted version would go somewhat like this:

A guy was cornered by the street gang, and they asked him, do you want us to do it with or without lube? The guy thinks and answers, “with lube”. The gang leader shouts out: “Hey Lube, come over here, this faggot wants it bad”.

That’s the position we’re in, while in this world, and I remember this every time I hear some Hindu preacher start about how the desires need to be controlled because they somehow stand between ourselves and God. The guy cornered by a gang of sodomites actually has a hierarchy of desires; he wishes never to have found himself in that situation in the first place. Barring that, he wants to be out of there unharmed and instantly. Barring that, he would prefer to fight his way out of the situation, but there are too many of them and he assesses his chances and concludes that his options are to be either killed or beaten up first and then raped, and to be raped with varying degrees of bodily harm, and then appears to choose the option with the least harm.

That is what I call a conditioned desire, and all the desires we ever had in this world are likely of this kind, and when someone takes the last iteration of the process and claims that this thing is an actual desire, I think of that joke instantly, because one’s desire for a new car or a house or a new phone is exactly as free as that guy’s “desire” to be fucked with lube, and the Hindu or Buddhist preacher talking against desires is basically humiliating the victim of violence by claiming that “he wants it bad”.

Let me illustrate this with my own hierarchy of desires.

I want to be in God forever with no limitations of any kind, to either my consciousness, form of existence, memory, knowledge, power or freedom. I can’t have that, because reasons. OK, if I have to be here in this lunatic asylum / prison, can I have at least some of my stuff back so that I don’t have to feel like a bonsai kitten in every way possible? Nope, because reasons. [several iterations later] OK, I see where this is going, I’ll go buy a lawn mower to trim the grass on someone else’s lawn that I’m renting because I don’t have anything better to do anyway and I need a workout.

At this point the Hindu preacher pisses himself with happiness because he found the reason for all my problems: it’s the desire for a lawn mower that was preventing me from being with God all this time, and if I only gave it up and not act on it everything would be great, to which I roll my eyes and think “please kill me now”.

Basically, you’ll know what your desires actually are only as you start approaching the actual freedom. I would classify desires as intrinsic and extrinsic, where the intrinsic ones are the ones you would have in your pure, unlimited state, and for all I know, you might still want lube at that point, but I somehow don’t think so. The extrinsic ones come from the circumstances, and can be described as a desire for hell not to be as hot, or a desire for some toy so you don’t go crazy thinking about all the things you can’t do. Basically, the desire for sun block with protective factor of ten million ends as soon as you’re removed from hell.

Here’s another exchange, this time from the blog comment section, that is so good it would be a shame not to make it an article:

Katarina wrote:

What about forgiveness? I find that a little bit confusing in a practical way. I am able to forgive almost everyone, and find that quite liberating. But there is one person which has done me great harm and I am not sure about forgiveness. I feel that I still have links to that person, and a lot of bad emotions, particularly anger. I can´t leave that in the past.
But also remember you said forgiveness can be fatal thing.

Forgiveness is a very difficult topic to talk about, because of Christianity. They made it basically a given that not only are we under pressure to forgive – because there’s an implicit threat that if we don’t, we’ll be treated mercilessly – but also that God isn’t really God unless He forgives. In all of that, the concept of justice is not only sidelined, but is practically made a “bad word”.
I would introduce some common sense into the whole thing, and first of all define the basic concepts we’re dealing with, so that we can think clearly about them.
First of all, God’s nature is good, and this nature is the basis of all righteousness and, for lack of a better word, ethics. You can’t have God in your consciousness and be evil; evil by definition severs connection with God. Things that are good are such because they contain some aspect of harmony and alignment with God, which is the fundamental spiritual opulence and wealth behind all wellbeing, happiness, truth, reality, knowledge etc.
Evil is, by definition, any orientation of consciousness away from God, and, consequently, actions that are performed in such a state of spiritual darkness. Also, there is a special category of evil that goes even beyond mere acts in a state of spiritual darkness, where darkness is embraced, where one feels it fully as one’s own, and acts in specific hatred and opposition to the light of God. This is what I would call “sin”, and this is where I seriously differ from the Christians, who use this word too lightly, in my opinion. To them, even masturbation is a sin. To me, it’s not necessarily a sin even to be in a state of spiritual darkness, because one can say that darkness has “will” of its own, and defines what you can experience, what you can feel, and how you can act, to a very large extent which basically excuses a blind man for not seeing and admiring the light. For the most part, being in darkness is the property of this world, and we can’t really help it. However, to embrace and justify darkness, to say there is nothing more, to attack the light and those who embrace it – this choice to embrace evil and be its instrument, this is truly sin against God. To be an instrument of ignorance and suffering, to be that thing that is terrible about this world, to be hell to others, that is sin.
So, what about forgiveness? It’s my opinion that when we define things properly, the question doesn’t truly arise. You see, if one is in spiritual darkness and acts blindly and deprived of the light of God, he is more in the order of a hapless victim of the world, and more in the order of someone we should feel sorry for, than someone that ought to be condemned and punished for his actions. Such souls are weak, because the strong ones bring their own light into the world, and they fight against darkness even despite overwhelming ignorance and darkness, but the weak ones are suppressed and extinguished by the world, and their existence is seldom more than meaningless victimization and suffering. Should we hate them? No. Should we feel particular sympathy for them? Also, I would say, no; I would reserve sympathy for those who remember the light of God and who fight darkness of the world with all their might, but who make mistakes, stumble and fall under a great load. For those who just blend into the background noise of a world of darkness I feel nothing. I wouldn’t condemn them, but I wouldn’t lift a finger to save them, either.
What about those who joined the enemy, who chose to become his soldiers and minions, who embrace the darkness and become its apostles and prophets? What about those, true sinners in a philosophical meaning of the word, where sin is an act of opposition to God? Literal opposition – those are the beings who would try to seduce others away from faith, who would torment the saints, who would try to hide the truth from others? To forgive them, I think, is to embrace darkness yourself. I think they should be rejected and condemned, but ultimate judgment and vengeance should be surrendered to God, and not pursued personally. To quote the Bible: “Vengeance is Mine; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; for their day of disaster is near, and their doom is coming quickly.”
I understand the concept of forgiveness in the sense of surrendering ultimate judgment to God, because while we are here we don’t know all the facts, and can thus judge wrongly. We are also not as just as the Lord, and this might mean that we would either punish too harshly, or too leniently, out of fear of error. It is much better to cede judgment to the one whose ultimate job it is, because the perfect light of God is the ultimate judge of all darkness, and no stain can survive in His presence. The Earth can turn on its own without need for us to get out and push; if that is so, how much more can God, who is the ultimate Good, take care of justice? Our job, however, is to stay true to God, and to remain in His holy presence, so that we could do good. This means making choices – what to embrace, and what to condemn and reject; and, often, choosing not to reject certain things or beings is to reject God himself. If you’re in love with God, truly and strongly, contempt and hatred for all that is His opposite will be in your nature, and you won’t even have to think about it. Forgiveness, I fear, is one of those things we are forced to think about too much, because they are spiritually unpalatable, and yet they try to convince us that it is essential for our spiritual wellbeing. However, once we clarify things by thinking about them in clear and unequivocal terms, it becomes much less of a dilemma.

I think the concept of forgiveness is additionally blurred by those who have an actual experience of God, and perceive it as “acceptance” and “forgiveness”, and I would say that those come from misunderstanding of what happens when darkness of the world is removed from you and you find yourself in the presence of God. All the limitations fall off, because they are of the world. All the ignorance, judgments, misapprehensions, wrong beliefs – they are of the world, of the body, and just fall off in the holy presence. One interpretation is that God is acceptance and forgiveness, but I say that a better one is that God is such harsh judgment of all darkness, that none of it can survive in His presence, and so it all falls away, provided that you are spiritually detached from it all, and can allow it. If you can’t separate yourself from darkness, you will feel all the pain darkness feels in the presence of the scorching light that suffers no competition. So, God is very forgiving of sin and evil if you don’t hold on to them, and if you let go of all the darkness as soon as you are given the option. However, those who would hold on to evil and darkness, they would discover why Shiva is seen as the Destroyer, of all evil and darkness.
Of course, to hold onto sin of others in the presence of God, that would make no more sense than to hold on to one’s own, so that’s another way to understand forgiveness; you can state your complaints about the way you were treated by others, when you are in the presence of God, but then you will receive healing through knowledge that there indeed is the Light that makes all darkness and evil insignificant, and knowledge of how much God is the opposite of all that is wrong; it becomes obvious that God is the ultimate judgment upon all evil, and you can immediately surrender all fears that somehow all the terrible things that took place in this world will be somehow swept under the carpet, forgotten and forgiven. If that fear is the reason why one is reluctant to forgive, then the presence of God, and insight into His true nature, are sufficient to rid one of that misapprehension instantly.

I might be missing the intended scope of the idea, though.
It now crossed my mind that the worst sinners that I know of live in a perpetual state of complaint and whining, directed at all kinds of imaginary slights by others, and justify all their evil by their imaginary victimhood.
The “take the beam out of your own eye first, and then we can talk about the speck in your brother’s eye” might be intended for them, and it would be perfectly appropriate. A perpetual self-justification loop that uses others’ real or imaginary slights or faults is a very real phenomenon, and it is the exact opposite of vipassana, which is detachment from one’s patterns and willingness to let go.
I have seen into the mind of sinners, and all seem to be “rehearsing” the defense of their evil lives, and they expect to play their act before a compassionate God, who will forgive them, and punish harshly all who transgressed against them. This seems to be the rule, rather than an exception, so it could be said that true spirituality starts once you voluntarily stop that, let go of all self-justification, of seeking punishment for those who made you aware of something bad that you were doing, and so on. If we see the instruction to forgive others and turn attention to your own faults as something that is directed at this profile of people, then I can find nothing objectionable about it; however, I usually deal with inquiries from the opposite spectrum, from people who were actually harmed and who think they are required to just suck it up and not complain, while the evil doers will get some universal blanket pardon, which makes them feel injustice of the whole idea. Basically, the answer is that God is so inherently opposite to and intolerant of all kinds of evil and darkness, that there is no fear of Him just forgiving it; cleansing bad karma is a very unpleasant and painful process, and I guarantee that all evil-doers will either have to go through that process, or die. There will be no forgiveness, not in that sense.
However, I saw evil people with their lists of complaints directed at good people who “sinned against them”, and if those think that God is going to play along with that tune, they have a surprise coming.

There’s also one thing that needs to be clearly stated: there is a big difference between being contaminated by darkness because you endured suffering inflicted by others, and being contaminated by darkness because you inflicted suffering upon others, and you chose to be and do evil. The first form of contamination can be trivially removed simply by seeing the light and letting go of darkness – to forgive, if you really wish to state it that way. That is so because the darkness doesn’t really have a hold on you; you just got used to it because of the lack of light, and you are the one who can simply let go.
However, in the second case you are integrated with darkness on the level of your spiritual structure, formed by your choices, and no matter how much someone would want to forgive you, it just doesn’t work that way. As I said, dealing with this form of karmic contamination requires a great deal of suffering, and it’s a very nasty process. This is why I’m having problems with forgiveness – you can’t really forgive an unrepented sinner without actually accepting his sin, because there really isn’t a difference between the two; the choice hasn’t yet been made and paid for. Rather, one should surrender all judgment to God, and simply distance oneself from souls who are entangled in darkness as a result of their own evil choices, and let things be resolved in one way or another.
Of course, it is quite difficult to know whether one is dark because of external contamination, or because of a choice for darkness. While we are in this place, it’s easy to misjudge those things, because they can appear similar, which is one reason why it is not wise to be hasty with judgment of others, and it’s also the reason why I appear to be so easy to deceive by the evil ones: I prefer to be deceived, because that is the sin of others, but if I judge someone wrongly, that would be a sin of my own.

There are two interpretations as to why we are susceptible to this. First is the obvious one – there is some latent desire within, in “seed-form”, and this seed is “watered” by external influences and made to grow. The second interpretation is that this world creates its own problems, and by the necessity of being incarnated here, we are “persuasible” – we keep trying to find solutions to extant and obvious problems, such as food, shelter, transport, protection from harm etc., and I think this is the correct interpretation for your example. It’s not that you have a latent desire for owning a house, that would survive the death of your physical body and cause rebirth, as those things are explained in classical literature; you just have a realistic issue at this point of your incarnate existence, and you can be “persuaded” by the world-based forces to try to find workable solutions to the problem while you are here. It’s in the same order as knowing you’ll have to eat in the future so you need to plan ahead and buy groceries to make lunch.
I think the most important thing about it is to be constantly aware and vigilant. We need to do things while here, yes, but there is a difference between doing and overdoing, which is something I’ve been made aware of recently. 🙂 Also, we need to be able to let go instantly when the duties and services we perform here are no longer required, and that’s basically not always easy; when I test myself for this, by creating a hypothetical scenario of having to leave this world today, it’s not attachment to things that would bother me in the slightest, it’s the duty and responsibility to people. How would they pay the bills, how would they manage logistics, did I leave them with sufficient knowledge and abilities to make due without me? Am I leaving them in a death-trap, or in a workable situation? If I am told from above that it’s my time to go, so it’s not a matter of choice, would I still feel bound by responsibility?
It’s not an easy thing to quit “cold turkey” something you’ve been doing for the better part of your life, and this, I think, is the problem with attachment. Not the silly things the scriptures warn us about, the stereotypical nonsense about people worrying about their business, money, property and so on. It’s the real issues that are the problem, not the obviously illusory ones; and if there’s anything real here, it’s the souls that are incarnate, especially if it’s your specific duty to care for them, and it’s not easy to just stop doing that when you’re told it’s no longer up to you, because your time here is up. I’m not sure I have the right answers here, at least not the universally applicable ones, because the entire situation might feel like a non-issue from a different standpoint that includes a wider perspective, such as viewing the totality of karmic intersections and branches of all involved, and understanding that there are no good solutions and stable states in this world; it’s by definition a quagmire of quicksand and landmines and not a place to build your lasting home, and that is as true for me as it is for everybody else, so if I am completely accepting this fact about my own life, why am I still insistent on trying to fix everybody else’s situation, as if that were possible here? It’s obviously something I’m struggling with, the over-exertion of responsibility for others into the realm of unhealthy, where by “unhealthy” I mean behaviour that doesn’t accept that things are inherently unfixable here, and no amount of investment of effort will change the fundamentals.
I think the real answer would be that the struggle against the nature of the world is the right approach while we are here, because that’s the only way to maintain your spiritual sanity and have a working soul-presence in the world; however, it needs to be understood that it’s not a battle against the world, but the battle for presence of God in one’s life, and once you’re out, you’re out, and we need to preserve sufficient awareness as to cut all energy investments and expenditures instantly, when it is no longer required for the actual goal, not the fictitious ones that constantly spawn in this mirage of a place.

Oh, I’m certainly not above such things myself; I would just have to be in a realistic position where I actually needed a new car. 🙂 But barring that, I can be persuaded to pursue desires by proxy, and since those have the false legitimacy of being “selfless”, they are easier to fall for. Sure, there’s a core of legitimate responsibility in getting your kid a car, but what I ended up buying him is shooting past this legitimate core and into the realm of wild overachievement by a huge margin; I got him a fancier car than I’m driving. 🙂

I don’t know about that; it might actually be more of a problem, because it’s masked by virtue and therefore reduces your ability to control it. That’s what women usually tend to fall for; they project their desires into their children, and since that is falsely perceived as “altruistic” by the society, they get so wildly crazy about it, that it is possible for them to completely lose their spiritual detachment and identity in it. Basically, how is women projecting desires into their reproductive vector any different from men trying to inseminate as many women as possible, which is perceived by society as sinful? I don’t see a real difference; both are pure biology, animal behaviour, but one of the two managed to successfully cloak itself in the appearance of virtue.

You absolutely feel everything because, once you absorbed the additional karmic mass, it *is* you. It became integrated into your soul-core and you feel all the emotions, trauma, stress, pain, attachment and other wildly energetic emotions that came with it; that’s the “increase in temperature” I so abstractly talked about, but it doesn’t feel abstract, and the “kinetic energy of the particles” feels like spiritual whirlpools, savagely violent; sin and justification for it, and when sufficiently detached, remorse and pain, violent pain you live through, and it’s no longer someone else’s, it’s yours because you integrated it within yourself. You need to “learn” the lessons again, because in this new state you “forget”, because you’re at the “higher temperature” now, and none of it feels like somebody else’s problem, because you are swallowed whole, and it often takes some time before you even understand what’s going on, why you are feeling all those things and why you are disturbed and in pain, or full of desires pointing in strange directions, and when you understand what’s going on, it means you achieved the first degree of control, that you attained detachment sufficient to understand that it’s energy vectors and not “yourself”, and as you increase in detachment and re-acquire the ability to observe the process with detachment and let the wild emotions unwind without you whipping them back up, you gradually remove “heat” from your system, which is the “secret” of vipassana, of just observing the emotions and thoughts and fears/desires, which divests energy from them and creates the conditions necessary for the gradual cooling of the system, and this process of cooling can be called either “suffering” or “remorse”; it feels like both, with a slight difference that makes “remorse” a better word, because it implies detachment; you can “suffer” while holding on to the “sinful” structure, and the pain of suffering can be selfish and arrogant, but “remorse” means the distinction of letting go.