Digging out

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I’ve been thinking more about the “sins” I mentioned in the previous article. Yes, they may be a mere symptom of a fallen state, and “virtues” might be a mere symptom of being in touch with God on some level, but the problem with this line of thinking is that it leaves very little room for personal agency; if you don’t feel God’s presence, you will wallow helplessly in your fallen state, exhibiting symptoms of depravity, and if you feel God’s presence, the ecstatic bliss will be manifested as all kinds of virtues, as you adhere to it diligently and allow it to change you and make you grow.

However, how do you get from one to the other? If you’re not in the presence of God, how do you change that, because just decomposing in your misery or trying to find some pathetic amusement for yourself in this empty cardboard world is the opposite of helpful. It’s as if there are two parallel paths – that of the worldly and demonic, and that of the saintly and angelic, and they are distinguished by absence or presence of God in one’s consciousness, and this can feel like an unsurmountable chasm. This is where we get to the point where the concept of sins and virtues starts making a different kind of sense, if we understand them not as mere symptoms of absence or presence of grace, but a destructive or constructive approach to life in general and our spiritual condition in particular.

Because, you see, whatever your condition may be, your attitude and actions can make it much worse; and if so, it is reasonable to assume that they can also make it much better. This is why my approach to sin is “when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging downwards”. Sure, absence of grace and the resulting emptiness of spirit can make you want to lash out or do all sorts of things in either a self-destructive rage, or a misguided wish to make yourself feel better, but here is where one needs self-control, in order to stop thrashing like a crazy person, cool down, and do the exact opposite – in essence, practice kindness and goodness in little things. Make someone’s day better with a small act of kindness. Pet a cat and talk to it. Say “hi” to a dog. Notice how nicely the sunlight plays on the tree leaves. Take a deep breath. Notice how your eye movements from left to right are connected with whirlpools of your thoughts and emotions. Pay conscious attention to it, try to make it faster. Try to make it slower. Feel what it wants you to do. Let it go and just observe – ride the wave first, and then fly above it and observe. Feel the pain and suffering beneath, the force that makes your mind and feelings move, and let it hurt, don’t try to escape. Let it expend itself instead of just rolling off into motivations. As you suffer, you will see that you are calmer, deeper, no longer a leaf carried by the waves on the surface, but a creature of deep waters of your mind. As you do this for minutes, maybe hours, maybe days, you will feel a change – suffering is no longer the only thing in your consciousness, because you start to feel a hint of something blissful, ecstatic, yet calm and peaceful. Let it in. As you take a breath, inhale this bliss and open your body and mind to it. Don’t think about it, just allow its presence to heal you. Happy thoughts and pictures will start going through your mind; let them. Things where you saw and admired something good and beautiful. Don’t rush it, let it unfold slowly, don’t spoil it by trying to get all the way to God immediately; feel that peace and beauty of a sunset, or sunlight catching the yellow leaves over a waterfall. Feel the calm and kindness as you watch a cat sleep. Feel it unfold, as you feel touched to tears by someone’s beautiful and virtuous actions – it can be a character in a book or a movie, doesn’t matter. Feel touched by goodness and virtue, breathe it in, keep it in, breathe it out. Slowly, imagine yourself acting it out in the world, seeing yourself as this person you admire, and do little things at first – just imagine yourself doing virtuous and good things, and just release all the obstacles and counter-arguments that pop up. Once you feel no opposition, rest in this state, and when you act, act from it, in such a way that your actions don’t contradict your inner state, so that they manifest it and act it out instead.

Do it consistently enough, and go deep enough, and you’ll be the grace of God that is manifesting itself in the world, and the question of God’s absence will become quite ridiculous. Be to others what you want to receive from God, and you will become one with the grace and presence of God. In that state, when you’re acting out goodness, you will understand that you are on the upward-gradient, and avoid things that put you on a downward-gradient, and in this perspective the concept of sins and virtues starts to make sense – not for the sake of judgment directed at oneself or others, but for the sake of practicality on the path of making your existence not hell.

17 thoughts on “Digging out”

  1. Let’s consider a situation in which a capable force has the ability to simultaneously place you in three parallel universes where laws can be applied in different ways. The preceding construct represents a separate element that is to be applied to everything further written, and that’s it.

    Let’s now participate in another real-life event and allow the application of the above construct of simultaneous teleportation into three parallel universes. The event is as follows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm_0

    The three parallel universes are defined in a way that each universe carries legal frameworks as follows:

    1.) Universe remains the same as it was in the original case, representing the material world and planet Earth.

    2.) Universe is a material world, but the same exposed female individual is, in fact, the sister of the supreme leader who, in that world, is believed to be chosen by God. Remember the obligations of the framework and all given data. You have freedom only in your actions towards the woman who has decided to grant you freedom regarding her material body.

    3.) Universe is a spiritual world into which you have been somehow teleported, and where the rules and possibilities of their application prevail.

    In all three universes, you initially have the same freedom in your choices. Rhythm 0 remains the same and lasts for 6 hours. However, in each of the universes, you will spend an additional, seventh hour, this time after the experiment. In what manner will people react in each of the three universes, and what will be the outcome and application of the laws?

  2. The soul, the entity with special capability, somehow comes into the newborn, physical body. It is this entity that provides the awareness. Not the brain of the gross body. Repository of storehouse consciousness of the new compound is empty. Then you begin to fill it with experiences and insights.

    If the transplanted heart has the ability to feedback astral of the recipient’s soul, then the soul can also provide the force to push something in the astral direction and balance the brain’s axes, which are connected to the body’s storehouse of consciousness.

    This raises an interesting issue. What happens if the soul somehow start to turn in the direction of her providing source at the same time as it is bound to the axis of the brain and the body’s consciousness repository?

      • I wouldn’t want to disappoint anyone by not replying on a fake news documentary about China. 🙂 However, since more or less every second sentence of this documentary is fake news (and I’m really not exaggerating by much), it would be a waste of time to enumerate and debunk all of that. Or any of that. I quickly gave up watching, but I’ll note that from the terminology and style this looks like a joint Western-Indian propaganda collaboration, and the woman seems to be someone who crossed the border from India into China, and not a native Chinese.

        Historical and political elements aside, I am puzzled by this:

        I watched this documentary yesterday and I have to say it hurts to see how this world brutalises and confuses people.

        The documentary is about a woman who says, right at the beginning, that she “sees all living beings as her children”. The way I see it, such a person is the world.

        Moreover, the place she considers the most sacred, where she feels “connected to everything”, is a place where according to folklore (retold in the documentary) the demonic energy is at the highest. There she comes to worship, and says: “It’s as if I can hear the heart of the demon still beating”. Obviously she’s not there to exorcise because she sees all beings as her children, which includes demonic beings.

        So a woman who likes to resonate with demonic energy, and who participates in filming a documentary full of lies (some spoken and some implied), is somehow a poor victim of a brutal world? I feel violated and brutalized by her and the rest of the crew behind the documentary, and I’ve only watched a dozen or so minutes. 🙂

        I prefer this, a Sino-Indian cooperation (Indian part being the background song “Nijamena”, that is often used by the Chinese in Douyin videos with religious theme):
        https://www.tiktok.com/@azt_chn/video/7262386005502741793

        • Propaganda or not? Well, the narrator can portray something that he can’t understand in the direction of his projections or inner fears. But that is useless on the level you insist that everything and everybody is black and white for good. Let’s rather focus on the line along which the woman is confused, although she is likely connected to the earthly astral plane. If the narrator could know the line of truth and after that intentionally portray the opposite as the preferred outcome, then that would be true propaganda. He simply unwinds his astonishment at the phenomena he encounters.

          Throughout the episode, the camera inevitably interacts with both the environment and the individuals related to the subject. The narrator and the woman about whom the ‘documentary’ is made are not the sole pieces of information. Conversely, I am interested in what she encounters, what is offered to her as insight, advice. The portrayal provided by the documentary at the end is intriguing. It is something that is a well-known outcome of various quests where people externally attempt to find an exit from suffering.

          • If the narrator could know the line of truth and after that intentionally portray the opposite as the preferred outcome, then that would be true propaganda. He simply unwinds his astonishment at the phenomena he encounters.

            That’s what you sensed after watching the entire documentary full of lies? ‘Innocent narrator is astonished at what he randomly encounters’?

            If this narrator knew absolutely nothing about Tibet the documentary would be completely different. Instead, the documentary is a professional work of anti-Chinese propaganda, with the same style and same tricks being used.

            I’ll explain a subtle one. It consists of intentionally provoking security personnel, filming that, and presenting it as a proof of “oppression” and the “police state”. In this documentary Buddhist monks were cheerfully chatting and spending time together (which is bad if you’re trying to portray everyone as oppressed), and then this demonic woman went off the pedestrian path and started to head straight towards the monks. One person in security guard clothes extended hand in front of the woman and then politely signalled at the path. The woman, who all this time pretended to be dumb, then nodded, returned to the path, and moved along. What target audience of these propaganda hit-pieces is unfamiliar with is the difference between Chinese security guards and the police. And propagandists will make sure that the audience gets the “right” idea that all these people are police officers, and that they are there to oppress because what else would they be doing. As for why he stopped her, it’s of course not stated in the “documentary”, but the very next comment implies that it’s because of a controlled environment. Controlled by who, well, hint hint, by the oppressive Han Chinese police state. I can easily guess why the woman was stopped and redirected. It’s because.. she’s a woman. Han Chinese don’t care whether men and women mingle. However, Tibetan Buddhist monks keep distance from women, and nuns keep distance from men. The woman knew that. She and the rest of her infernal crew staged the entire scene.

            An example of someone who actually innocently films what she encounters is a girl behind the “Little Chinese Everywhere” channel (it’s not a religious channel though, so it lacks religious depth). In this video she talks about the strict gender segregation in a Tibetan Buddhist town (around min 14 of the video):
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mb4-vpgI74

            • I think you are fighting the wrong battle here. Somehow, you have entered a narrative that I completely omitted in the issue I was trying to address.

              The issue of positioning an individual in this world is the most personal matter one faces with no possibility of partial resolution. It has nothing to do with a specific historical epoch, as the entire history revolves solely in relation to the world. So, you have a crusher called the world, and it’s evidently been there since before Buddha and Jesus.

              Can you continue the discussion in that direction?
              Can you identify a repetitive problem that occurs over the generations?

              • I don’t like that direction, and this is why. It reminds me of the way the leftists think. Feminists think the biggest social problem is male oppression, and they see it everywhere. If a man says a woman is beautiful, a feminist concludes that this is “objectification of women” and it’s a bad thing. Communists think that the main economic problem is inequality caused by the exploitation of workers, and the solution is to get rid of the oppressor. Libertarians focus on removing or reducing the oppression of the state, and think that the winning formula is more freedom less restrictions of any kind. All these groups tend to ignore the context, ignore the results, and adjust their perception so that there’s always more of whatever negativity they like to perceive, as if they feed on it. The inevitable and predictable result is that feminists end up more miserable, communists end up more poor, and libertarians end up more enslaved than they were to begin with.

                Your thinking seems to be in the same direction, just in a religious sphere. ‘There’s this big bad world that is oppressing its inhabitants. Nothing else matters. We should open the gates of Hell and let everyone out. Until that happens, the solution is in focusing on the oppression and the suffering caused by the world, and where that is not the case we should imagine the oppression and the suffering because after all we are in the world so even if we don’t see it it must be there. And we can’t do anything wrong if we do it in the name of opposing the big bad world.’

                The history of this world is also the history of beings who were incarnated here during that time. The history is not irrelevant just because it occurred here. You have completely ignored everything in the documentary you linked, except what you wanted to see: the negativity. You also interpret things in a way that do not reflect reality: ‘innocent people oppressed by the world, seeking exit and heroically fighting the world’.

                I don’t care whether someone is in prison. I don’t care whether someone is suffering. I don’t care whether someone is oppressed by the world.

                I care about the context. If someone deserves to be in prison, I’m not going to unlock the cell. If someone deserves to suffer, I’m not going to lament. If the world is crushing those who like the world and share the same values that this world is a physical manifestation of, I call that a poetic justice.

                I did not watch the documentary long enough to know what the woman is searching for, other than some long-lost mythical Tibetan teaching (which is but a selling point for her audience). But I did watch it long enough to see that she’s manipulative, deceptive, lying, slanderous and so on. I am not going to sympathize with her and help her escape to Shangri-La. I’d rather throw her in a dungeon.

                The documentary increases the amount of lies and deception that exist in this world. The make-believe that the documentary is something it is not increases the amount of delusion that exists in this world. Both of these increase the amount of suffering that exist in this world. How is any of this beneficial in terms of liberation, and in what way does that represent the fight against this world?

                Here’s a tl;dr version of the above:

                Wardens are not prisoners

                Seeing oppression
                Where it doesn’t exist
                Increases oppression
                In the mind

                The worldly can’t escape the world
                That they carry within

                • If the world is crushing those who like the world and share the same values that this world is a physical manifestation of, I call that a poetic justice.

                  I would add one thing to that; if the world is so obviously bad, and its victims are so obviously innocent, why did it take millenia and super-special circumstances to prove any wrongdoing to its creator?
                  Obviously, the Devil’s arguments were exceedingly hard to disprove, which is why I find it annoying that now it’s become a thing for people to complain about the world design and Sanat Kumar, both of which were apparently fine before I started writing about them. Also, Tibetan Buddhists are for the most part ignorant peasants and their religion is unremarkable. When I talk about Tibetan Buddhism, I usually mean Padma Sambhava, not the peasants rotating prayer mills like idiots.

                  • I suppose the goal is to overcome the world, to have no more worldly desires, and not to hate the world. Hate is not the same as detachment.

                    • I suppose the goal is to overcome the world, to have no more worldly desires, and not to hate the world. Hate is not the same as detachment.

                      Yes; choose God, and not only once and symbolically, but continually, with every thought, every action. Discern between phenomena and demonstrate that your choice for God is not merely a “it’s easy to be a saint in heaven” thing.

                    • Perhaps, when we overcome worldly desires here, we also overcome the desires we would have on the astral plane, because the astral plane is also related to appearances and forms?

                    • Perhaps, when we overcome worldly desires here, we also overcome the desires we would have on the astral plane, because the astral plane is also related to appearances and forms?

                      Don’t underestimate the astral plane; yes, in theory it’s about appearances and forms, but those are to the astral experience what protons and neutrons are to the physical world; the basic structures to be given meaning. What one does with appearances and forms can be either trivial or amazing. God can take form and appearance, for instance; things that bring you into extremely high spiritual states can start with form, sound or emotion. My developing theory is that nirvikalpa samadhi might merely be what astral plane feels like to incarnated humans. The lower astral plane consists of all kinds of hellish and limited mess resembling the physical plane; the higher aspects of it, however, are the playgrounds of the Gods, wearing jewels that contain more spiritual essence than billions of human souls, and robes made of enligtenment, making sounds that would instantly burn your soul with ecstatic bliss if any of it touches you unprepared. Never, ever underestimate what the higher worlds are about because everything we see here is just wisps of smoke compared to a galactic black hole.

                  • Also just one more thing – my annoyance with ‘good people, bad government’ extends into religious sphere. I can’t see things directly the way you do, but I’ve learned a lot about the world indirectly, for the most part by studying the pathologies of its inhabitants. The way it seems to me is that not only are people not heroically opposing the world trying to find an exit, but they are actually invested in there not being an exit (except perhaps in very rare cases when they’d rather see someone leave than spoil their environment). With all their fears of abandonment, fears of being alone, this is something that makes logical sense. If two kids play and the first one is misbehaving, the second one can react with ‘screw you, I’m going home’. If someone knows their behavior drives others away, but doesn’t want that consequence, and doesn’t want to change for the better, the ideal solution is to structure the environment in such a way that grouping is rewarded, distancing is exponentially penalized, and leaving at will is not possible.

  3. Google today features a tribute to Chinese-born Australian cardiac surgeon and pioneer of modern heart transplantation in Australia, Dr. Victor Chang, born on November 21, 1936.

    I remember coming across two journalistic articles in the past that described or interviewed individuals who had undergone a transplant of a specific organ in their body, such as the liver in one case. I don’t remember the exact details of the second case, but I believe it involved a heart transplant. Both cases had a common thread of very interesting outcomes.

    The person who received the transplanted liver had never enjoyed eating French fries before the transplant, while the deceased donor, whose liver was transplanted, absolutely loved and passionately enjoyed eating French fries.

    The person with the newly transplanted liver was okay but was bewildered by a profound shift in dietary habits and a strong craving for French fries, which they began to eat passionately. It was so pronounced that she sought information about the specific consumption of French fries by the person whose liver she had received. And bingo, it was confirmed that the person whose liver she received was indeed passionately indulging in French fries.

    Buddhist concept of Metta or loving-kindness, as such, represents a voluntary psychoenergetic emission. It is not tied to the liver or reproductive organs, but it is associated with the heart (of course, originally the rest of the vertical is involved, but given the term ‘loving-kindness’ in the name, let’s still focus on the heart as the organ through which a significant part of the emission flows).
    The heart through which Metta has been flowing will be magnetized and have the flavor of Metta.

    Now it’s good to reread Daniel’s article in that light.

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