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.

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.