From the forum:

Bhagavad-gita isn’t really the most accurate text if you want to understand karma, because Hinduism in general and Gita in particular don’t really get it, and at the time of writing the commentary I didn’t feel like getting into it in so much detail. I put much more thought into it in the later books. The Hindu concept, according to which one is born because of some karmic impurity, and no longer needs to return after this impurity is removed, is riddled with inaccuracies to the point where it’s actually the opposite of useful. There are better ways of looking at it: karma is not an extrinsic element, it’s the stuff your spiritual body is made of, and it’s not “removed” with the process of cleaning, it’s restructured. Excess “thermodynamic energy” of stress, desires, fears or misapprehensions is “excreted” like excess heat from a thermodynamic system, and as a result you get a more calm, “compressed” substance, liquid instead of gas, or solid instead of liquid. Yoga Sutra deals with this excess of energy and its removal from the spirit-structure. The other problem are the attachments and desires, basically, investments of energy into all kinds of stuff. In your cases, it would be investment of energy into ideas, and desire to have those ideas work in order for them to justify the investment. 🙂 It’s not necessarily stuff like houses, cars or family, the way it is for most people; for some, almost all projections of energy go into their religious worldview, or authority of scriptures or holy persons. This also poses another problem: it mimics the vertical connection, to the point where it would be difficult to describe to some people why their religious ideas are a horizontal structure and not a vertical connection to God, but nevertheless, that’s what they are, and once you are in the state of darshan, samadhi or something similar, it becomes quite apparent. For instance, in the process of initiation into Vajra those things are quite obvious.

From the forum:

Sometime between 1993 and 1997, I was dealing with incredibly hard issues and I was thinking something along the lines of “[insert some famous yogi here] had it easy, he was born within a Hindu tradition, had an enlightened guru, someone taught him yoga and the theory, and I’m rowing against the currents of shit creek without paddles”, at which moment something became clear to me: “at some time in the future, others will look at me and say, it’s easy for you, you were born enlightened and awesome, but we are having it so hard”. At which I thought “if anyone was stupid enough to think I was born enlightened, they should see me now, and they would be instantly cured of that misconception”, and the response, “they would never believe it; people instinctively don’t believe change is possible, that someone fucked up can become great, that you don’t get to be born enlightened regardless of what your soul looks like, that everybody has to carve paths into neurology in order to build the body-spirit connection; they believe every enlightened person to have been born enlightened and perfect, and every fucked up person to be doomed forever; they don’t believe that yoga is actually possible and that it works, and that’s one of the greatest obstacles everybody has to overcome; look at how hard I find it to accept that others had to go through a process, how I find it easy to debase myself because I actually know all the nasty parts of the process I had to go through, and find it almost impossible to accept that known enlightened people would have had to go through that”.

I must apologize for not writing anything significant here lately; I’ve been otherwise preoccupied, what with maintaining my level of physical fitness, what with transcribing the forum to another software, and answering questions there. Not to leave you completely empty-handed, I’ll re-post some of the forum content here:

One thing crossed my mind and I think it’s rather important.

It’s not just about samadhi and how your position changes then. it’s also applicable to how things are now, in the relative and limited mindset. Because, you see, that’s one of the first things I was taught from above, when I was thinking in terms of “all I need is to be in samadhi more, that will purify all that needs to be purified and solve everything that needs to be solved”, but that’s not how it works. The relative sphere of karma remains untouched by samadhi, because they don’t exist on the same reality level. It’s like hardware upgrade not automatically producing better software. What you need is write better software, and realization that it’s all run on hardware and is thus only a state of hardware isn’t really helpful. Software is a way of pulling hardware into manifestation. Let’s put it this way: a kalapa is the smallest possible manifestation of brahman in the relative. It’s a tiny spark of spiritual light. By itself, it doesn’t do much, but it’s a start. A tiny wisp of astral “smoke” is an aggregation of many kalapas, and it forms some consciousness, awareness, intelligence, desires, it manifests something more than the sum of its parts. A tiny “jewel” is an order of magnitude more, it’s a huge astral soul “condensed” into greater power, virtue, wisdom, will, spiritual music, bliss or whatever specifically, because they can be very different. Here, we already have something that is very clearly a local relative manifestation of sat-cit-ananda, and in the spiritual body of a God this progresses exponentially, and it becomes clear and obvious that you are dealing with a “relative absolute”, a presence in the relative sphere that is basically so much brahman that all beings that actually see it (have its darshan, in sanskrit) have an experience of self-realization, of atma-brahma-jñana, or samadhi. That’s what is described in the bhagavata-purana, that spiritual beings experiencing Krishna have self-realization moments, points where they understand their own true nature, position and purpose.

But the important thing to realize, the thing I’m trying to say, is that it doesn’t begin with Krishna. It begins with that one little kalapa, which is the spark of asmita, of sat-cit-ananda, in the relative. You are all made of those little sparks that radiate Absolute into the relative. You need to draw power, virtue, knowledge, courage, awareness, love, respect, devotion, and yes, also the things like self-sacrifice and acceptance of pain and hardship if it is necessary, and if it is the cost of greatness. Drawing power of that kind now, drawing it through the center of self, through asmita, your “own nature”, makes those tiny sparks of light glow and coalesce together to form a greater power, they aggregate, they excrete disturbance through the process of suffering and they eventually crystallize, and the virtuous self-center progresses in God-manifestation to the point where nobody can tell a difference, and you give God a new name.

God is something you draw from, now. God is both a distant goal, and a present reality. As a present reality, it might be something latent, of low visibility, low manifestation, and that might be your state now. But you are the one who decides what happens there. You can crawl like a maggot on the ground, or you can rise up, as Mario said. Your call.

I’ve been thinking about something that crops up every now and then in discussions about religious traditions.

The atheists, arguing that religious traditions are not needed, state that every rational individual can figure ethics and philosophy on their own, without need for belonging to an organized religion.

The members of organized religions state that nobody can expect to attain salvation without accepting revelation from above, by which they invariably mean their respective religious systems and/or organizations.

I am quite annoyed by both statements.

To respond to the atheist argument first, if figuring out correct ethics is so easy and intuitive, how do they explain the vast difference between the customary ethics of the ancient Rome, and Christian ethics? What, there was a lack of rational people in the Roman empire? I assure you, there were lots of people trying to figure things out, and they were quite smart, and nobody managed to come up with Christian ethics. However, today some atheist like Dawkins or Molyneux thinks he can just pull ethics from the hat, because it’s so intuitive? It’s intuitive to them because they’ve been surrounded by Christians from an early age and everything they’ve experienced had the Christian ethical system beneath it. The problem is, they don’t understand the sources of their ethical feelings and thoughts, they think it’s “reasonable”. Reason has nothing to do with it; they are just stating the basic premises of their upbringing. It’s interesting how they don’t find Buddhist premises intuitive and think anyone could follow pure reason and come up with them. Ibn Tufail thought Islam was so intuitive, you could put a child on a desert island and have it brought up by animals, and it would follow pure reason and end up with mystical Islam. It’s also interesting how atheists think that anyone could come up with a their worldview if only they followed reason and evidence, when they themselves can’t do it – they just copy each other’s stupid arguments, including logical errors and illustrative examples. Diversity of thought among atheists is about the same as in any crazy cult, they just parrot their authorities and no significant thinking is either demonstrated or required. It is obvious that original thinkers, who are capable of creating entire philosophies that are actually innovative and revolutionary, are exceedingly rare, to the point where you can only expect to find a handful of them in a millennium. The expectation that one can follow reason and evidence and come up with a valuable and mature philosophy is therefore incredibly naive. Even the great thinkers usually produced derivative work, with few actual innovations. Jesus, for instance, introduced no significant original ideas; his thoughts were recognized as very much like those of the contemporary scholars, only spoken with the authority of direct knowledge and power. Sankaracarya introduced very little in terms of original thought; for the most part, he isolated the core thought from the Upanisads and made it into a succinct and powerful argument. Teachings of Ramanuja, Madhva and Caitanya essentially elaborate on the Puranas, Upanisads and the Bhagavad-gita. Even the Bhagavata-purana is highly derivative, for the most part explaining the teaching of Vedanta through many different stories, repeating the core thought ad nauseam. How is it, then, that everybody keeps stating that their own religious, ethical or philosophical system is intuitive to the point where every rational individual could discover it anew, if only they followed reason and evidence, when it is obvious that religious philosophies exist as separate and distinct islands of thought, where you have highly derivative thinking on each respective island, and huge and insurmountable differences between the islands? If atheism is so intuitive, how come there were no significant thinkers in the history of the world who were atheists, up until very recently, and now all of the sudden it became some sort of a fashionable “meme”? If humanistic ethics are so intuitive, how come owning slaves and working them to death was the ethical norm throughout the world, across all history? Nobody really figured out Christian ethics before Christianity, that’s why it’s one of the few original ideas in history. Believing that anyone could figure it out now without being exposed to an entire civilization that was built upon it, is just arrogant and stupid. Atheists who keep their Christian ethics but state that you don’t need God for that, are but fools. Of course you do, it’s just that they are too stupid and arrogant to understand where they got it all from. It suffices to see how many things the Christians got right, and how few of those belong to the category of trivial intuitive things anyone would get right; whenever Marxists or some other atheist bunch tried something they considered “reasonable”, “modern” or “obvious”, they produced a disaster. Their disdain for the sanctity of human spirit produced the slaughterhouses of modernity. Their “progressive” ideas about sexuality or human equality resulted in the nightmare that is today’s society. Every time they thought they will make “progress” by opposing the traditional Christianity, they produced a hellish dystopia. Apparently, getting ethics right isn’t something a rational intellectual can reliably do, and there’s a significant difference between thinking you can do something, and actually pulling it off.

As for the opposing argument from the religious circles, where they argue that it would be dangerous to think independently because of the vast probability of error, stating that it’s much safer to just espouse their respective traditional worldview, what annoys me is the arrogance of assumption that they have the good stuff. Oh really? You are safe from doctrinal error? You are ethically pure, and only the others are in peril? You have God by the balls, so to speak? You have the truth that was revealed from above, and then kept, refined and explained by the tradition of saints? Why, then, if you have it so good, is the light of your truth so incredibly dim? Why is your “truth” always formulated the same way, in almost the same words, if God is the wellspring of creativity and intelligence? When I see most priests, they look stale and boring, like trained actors who fake “inner peace”, “confidence” and “balance”, they try to speak calmly and softly because they know that will make an impression on the impressionable, but anyone who actually experienced something from the direction of God will immediately understand them as poor imitation of a poorly understood phenomenon. Basically, you can’t even fake it properly, because you don’t have even the indirect knowledge of the phenomenon that would help you fake it. Every religious organization I can think of is oozing scandals of the basest kind – scandals that indicate profound spiritual depravity. Don’t you dare talk about ethical purity or safety from ideological error, you conceited buffoons.

What do I recommend then, since those two obviously fallacious alternatives seem to split the world between them? If I argue against trusting yourself and your intellect, and I also argue against putting trust in religious or philosophical traditions, what else is there?

First of all, you need to stop fearing error, as if it were somehow avoidable and, consequently, those committing it are somehow disreputable. The first thing you need to understand is that error is unavoidable, and the second thing is that error can either be a part of the learning process, or something you get stuck in, something akin to getting caught in orbit of a black hole. Error is something that exists as context of every single thought, word and action, where you are either in error, or you just missed it by a hair and you’re on trajectory to overshoot into error on the other side, because “too much” is as bad as “not enough”. There is error in form of insecurity, and error in form of arrogance, and there is the right path somewhere, in missing both Scilla and Charybdis. God is not something you choose once and you’re safe. God is something that has to be found again, and again, when formulating each thought, when you’re trying to linearize thoughts into words, and navigate proper action. That’s probably why Jesus was speaking of the “living God”, because if you’re not in touch with God as a living force of rightness and fullness, you are in error, by default. There’s never a safe haven of infallibility anywhere, regardless of how holy you are. Even if you are so firmly in God that you appear to be perfect and infallible, it means only that you are correcting every deviation from the proper path so quickly, that they are imperceptible by others. In essence, error is nothing to be feared, because the feeling of error allows you to quickly correct yourself until you are back where your inner spiritual compass points back at God.

The next important thing is to trust holy scriptures, persons and traditions, but only to a point. At some point you will have to deviate from traditions and figures of authority and carve your own path, but that won’t be soon, or all at once. I am a very original thinker, if such a thing exists at all, and I followed the recommendations of saints and holy traditions with diligent obedience, until I reached a point where I had to go my own way, which I never did lightly or without profound consideration. Spiritual traditions usually contain wisdom that is far greater than anything a smart, intelligent and educated individual could figure out on their own; in fact, they usually contain wisdom that is beyond what a great saint could do on his/her own. However, there is excess on both ends: in either arrogant assumption that you can do better, or in fear of carving your own path once your personal revelation had matured to the point where it actually exceeds collective historical revelation of others, and either breaks away from it altogether, or merely adds to it. There is a middle path between sinful arrogance and sinful humility, and finding that path is all but easy. If you think you are walking that path of rightness merely by virtue of belonging to a church, you obviously didn’t think about those things enough. There isn’t a trick that can give you safety from the naked blade of reality on which you have to make a choice. Correctness of choice exists only in the state of spirit where God is not only your singular point of focus, but also the way in which you do things. God needs to be the way, truth and life, and you need to be there, in way, truth and life, walking the sharp blade of rightness that separates two wrongs, fearing no error, because in darshan of God, you are that blade. Failing that, everything is error.