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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.