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.

( 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 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.

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.