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.