The fact that I’m using Buddhist concepts to explain some things doesn’t mean that I like Buddhists. In fact, that hell-plane that I purged contained quite a substantial number of them, and I’m currently processing their remains. So, how does it happen that a religion aspires to liberate people from suffering, and quite a substantial number of its practitioners end up in a godless hell?

Well, I can think of two reasons. The first is that the actually useful part is beyond people’s ability to understand and follow, which is usually a bane of all smart systems. The second is that a significant part of the reason for the practitioners’ downfall is inherent in the fundamental precepts of the religion.

If you take a look at the practitioners of Buddhism, they are usually materialistic people who hate the very ideas of God, transcendence and eternity, but they want to consider themselves spiritual in some way, and having to choose between something like outright materialism and Buddhism, they choose Buddhism, mostly because it’s a better source of ego trip. Also, Buddhist reductionism seems to be an excellent way to reduce everything to the point where it doesn’t matter, and here we come to the sources of trouble inherent to Buddhism itself, and not just an occasional practitioner here and there. I’m talking about the concepts of sunyata (emptiness) and nirvana (extinction), as well as the concept of impermanence of all compounds/aggregates. These concepts are the reason why reductionism is extremely popular in Buddhism, and reductionism, if you’re not very smart, gets you to terrible outcomes very quickly. If you’re smart, it allows you to break down and de-power complex problems, for instance it allows you to break down the feedback loops between emotions, thoughts and energy, allowing persistent negative systems within the consciousness to wind down and be extinguished. This is what vipassana is about, and if you’re careful about it, it can really effectively resolve karmic issues that are essentially pointless and self-serving, and I can’t think of another method that would be as effective. If you’re stupid and not careful, you can systematically break down everything that’s good and meaningful in your life, and use reductionism as a weapon against meaning and purpose, throwing out baby together with the bath water, because there’s no baby – only flesh, bones and other filthy substances that are further reducible to chemical compounds and elements. Everything you love will be reduced to nothingness and emptiness because every subject will be deconstructed as illusory and broken down to meaningless and even revolting basic components. For instance, a typical Buddhist exercise consist of imagining the woman you feel attracted to stripped down in layers – remove the skin, see the muscles and tendons beneath; remove those and see organs and bones. Put those together on a heap and get a supremely revolting sight. Essentially, you ask yourself whether that person would still be attractive after you run her through a wood chipper? Would she still be attractive after rotting in a grave for a few centuries? The problem with such an approach is that it sounds appealing to a certain profile of people who see it as a way of getting out of their emotional problems, and it’s very easy to rationalise with something that looks logical: the assumption that if something is lost in the process of reduction, it means it wasn’t real to begin with. However, let me show you why this is false.

Let’s take a computer you’re currently using to read this text on the Internet as an example. If you want to show that Internet and software are an illusion, you will disassemble the computer into components, none of which runs the operating system or the web browser, and none of which is able to access the Internet, and suddenly you no longer have the article, which proves that it’s an illusion. Especially if you disassemble the computer destructively and make it impossible to restore its functionality by reassembling it, the evidence will look even more compelling.

Another example is your car. If you want to prove that speed and acceleration are an illusion, take it to a mechanic and have him disassemble it to basic components – remove the wheels, engine, gearbox and suspension, and then further disassemble those, preferably in an inexpert and destructive manner that will make it impossible to reassemble them and restore car’s functionality. You now have “evidence” that speed and acceleration were an illusion to begin with, because they were lost in the process of reductionist analysis.

The problem with this process is that it’s very easy to do, and also very easy to make it convincing, which makes it very appealing for stupid people who want to make themselves look smart. It’s basically an illustration of that Arab saying that any fool can throw a stone into the well, and then dozens of wise men can’t get it out. It’s extremely easy to demonstrate loss of complexity and emergent properties in the process of deconstruction and reduction; it’s very hard to demonstrate why that’s nonsense.

In fact, it’s so hard that I had issues with some aspects of this until very recently, where I simply assumed that any form I experienced in darshan was merely a temporary interface taken by The One God in order to show me something. Of course the form itself would have nothing to do with the actual properties on the other side? I basically assumed that form of any kind is taken, used for its purpose and then dissolved, and it’s basically just a necessity for conveying a message. When it’s disposed of, what remains is the formless ocean of sat-cit-ananda that is brahman. But wait, isn’t this the opposite of what you would expect from Buddhist reductionism, where you break something down into compounds and the thing is then irretrievably lost, supposedly demonstrating its illusory nature? If a temporary, illusory form is dissolved into an entity of a higher order, which can manifest anything similar at any time, is it actually an illusion? Isn’t reduction happening in the opposite direction, ie. God taking on a reduced, lesser form in order to communicate something to you in your language? When you reduce this form to its compounds, you don’t get less, you get more; the incomprehensibly vast true being of a true God, as you trace the form to its origins and true nature. Essentially, Buddhist analysis produces opposite results when applied in the spiritual sphere, rather than the material one. In the material, it seemingly demonstrates that the form you feel attached to is an illusion, and everything broken down from its compound top-level form ends up being less. However, in case of a darshan, top-level form, when broken down, instantly resolves to much more than you can either handle or comprehend.

So, which one did Buddha actually have in mind? Obviously, there’s enough evidence for both, because you have all those spiritually minded Buddhists who discovered vajra, had experiences with dakinis and encountered deities on their way towards indescribable greatness, for which they used the Buddhist label of emptiness. On the other hand, you have cynical materialists who dispose of anything positive and constructive and put everything good through the meat grinder until they end up with decomposing nastiness, the revolting sight of which makes them glad because it “proves” their thesis that everything’s shit when you strip it of illusory surface, and that’s why they all ended up in a godless hell where I destroyed all of their pathetic excuses for souls and now my wife and I are cleaning up after that mess.

I mentioned that I don’t like “enlightenment” as a word, because it means too many things to too many people, which makes it a bad word. I suppose “God” is a bad word as well, since it invariably causes misunderstandings about what is meant, but that’s because people using it usually don’t have an actual experience of anything the word is supposed to describe, and instead merely refer to scripture.

The problem with “enlightenment” is that lots of people actually have some experience that they choose to describe in that manner, but it is rarely the same order of magnitude of experience between them, and since the word is supposed to mean some kind of an ultimate achievement, some of that confusion is actually intentional, caused by the ego trip involved.

So, let’s see some of the uses. The most innocuous is “being made aware of something”. That’s how normal people use it, but not the “spiritual” ones. Then there’s the Zen enlightenment, which means something along the lines of suddenly understanding the true meaning of something, “getting it” after appearing to get it before, or merely having intellectual familiarity with the term. So far, we are still within the realm of common human experience – for instance, a person who couldn’t feel compassion with some people because of a lack of personal experience with their situation can experience Zen “enlightenment” when they suddenly find themselves in a similar situation and they understand what those people were going through and what the problem was. However, this is the different order of experience from what is meant by Buddha achieving enlightenment, or what the upanishads describe as realization.

When “enlightenment” is used in spiritual context non-trivially (which means “excluding Zen”) at a minimum it means a transformative transcendental experience, something that makes you aware of higher realities, and leaves you changed. When Vedanta talks about enlightenment, it means experience of sameness of atman and brahman, direct experience of “I am that brahman”, the experience which yoga calls samadhi, and further divides it into savikalpa and nirvikalpa, which directly translates as “with remainder” and “without remainder”, and actually means “incomplete” and “complete”. Some schools add further attributes to nirvikalpa, like nitya, making it obvious that completeness of the thing was in doubt in some cases, but since you can’t get more complete than complete, I find the practice pointless, yet revealing, because Vedanta believes that sufficiently powerful realization of atma brahma advaita is the ultimate knowledge that ends one’s imprisonment in the realm of the relative and the illusory, and yet this obviously doesn’t actually happen; rather, one has a powerful realization of something, but it doesn’t actually do what Shankaracarya said it’s supposed to do – basically, fry your karmic attachments and seedlings on the flame of knowledge, liberating you forever from the sphere of the relative world. Basically, knowledge dispels ignorance, light dispels darkness, and self-realization dispels all karma. Since that doesn’t actually happen, there was a need to distinguish between complete samadhi and truly complete samadhi, not like the samadhi of that other person who had some experience but is obviously having issues of a very worldly kind. It’s easy for me to find it funny now, but for the Vedanta people that’s actually a real issue. Basically, to them the issue is how deep and how much of a samadhi do you need in order to make it stick permanently and result in complete liberation during life (jivanmukti). The answer is: you got it completely wrong, and no amount of samadhi of any depth will produce that kind of result, because such an experience merely adds another structure to your karmic body, and while it does dispel some illusions and misapprehensions, the entire theory of what the actual problem is and what its solution is supposed to be is completely wrongly understood by Vedanta.

I’m not going to even touch the Buddhist misapprehensions about nirvana and enlightenment. Their teaching is such an incredible chaos of various misapprehensions and lack of any kind of personal experience with the subject matter, that it’s obvious that they, themselves have no idea what they are talking about. However, if we follow Buddha’s talk about extinction of the four elements into the fifth, it seems that nirvana is actually his description of the initiation into vajra after all personal definitions were withdrawn from the four lower elements. This condition is actually transformative and converts a lower, “gaseous” soul-type into a crystalline one, and is something that happens when an astral soul grows big enough through compassion (meaning that the forces that repel soul-particles from each other have been diminished), and then this large amount of astral substance is compressed by removing the rest of the “kinetic energy” of the astral substance through suffering, until you get perfect purity and stillness of all four lower elements, starting the process of transformation of the soul into a crystal of vajra. Vajra means both “diamond” and “lightning”, which is quite descriptive because this substance feels like both – it’s incredibly “hard”, and incredibly “bright”, and “enlightenment” is here much more than a metaphor, because you are literally being “made of light”, of the kind that is harder than a rock and denser than a core of the star, of such density that it goes through all other matter as if it were mere gas. A diamond made of pure lightning, dense as a neutron star or a black hole, without any worldly attachments and definitions in anything lower, is what it subjectively feels like. So, this is the first thing where I would use the word “enlightenment” in the meaning that is both completely non-metaphoric and descriptive, and also means what it’s supposed to mean – a permanent transformation of the nature of one’s soul from worldly to eternal. The number of such souls in this world is, of course, low, but it’s greater than what people would think, since the majority of such souls incarnate in order to process further karma that would end up magnifying their soul core, essentially making them a bigger soul-crystal, both in quantity and further sophistication, because yes, there are higher things than vajra, of such wonder and majesty that I don’t even wish to go there at this point. However, when a crystalline soul incarnates here, it is basically creating a “gaseous” provisional-soul for the purpose of incarnation, meaning an astral body and a karmic structure that defines its purpose in this life as a being, and in order to make actual spiritual progress, it needs to re-experience initiation into vajra in this incarnation, essentially “hardening” the provisional soul-stuff to the level of its own true being, and only then it’s actually starting to do actually advance its karmic position. Obviously, this is a rare achievement. But let’s say that the incarnating entity is not merely a small vajra-crystal, but one of the major Gods. The process is essentially the same – attaining self-awareness as the incarnating entity by passing through successive initiations into progressively denser and higher substances, and learning how to wield them from the physical body.

But what happens when a major God attains full self-awareness in the physical, and even out-initiates their former state?

I am not allowed to write more at this point, but stay tuned. 🙂

There’s another thing from the comment section that needs to be elaborated upon:

Me: “So, judging from that, even the worst version of this dungeon was allowed from the very start, because God knew what Satan was planning from the very beginning, even the stuff Satan himself didn’t yet know. However, God obviously decided that something good will come out of it that more than makes up for all the evil. However, mind you, that’s from God’s perspective. If you happen to be one of those who got destroyed here, you might disagree with his assessment of what’s worth it, and what’s justified. However, from God’s perspective, destruction of billions of inadequate souls might not in fact count as a bad thing, if on the other hand some of the greatest beings become the crown of all Creation. We here are conditioned to treat tragedies as a matter of accounting; the more beings die, the greater the tragedy. God, on the other hand, might see destruction of all kinds of inadequate or evil souls, or dead ends that kept existing merely because nothing said “boo!” loudly enough, the way we see lawn maintenance. From the position of a lawn, mowing must look like a great disaster and a tragedy. From the position of the owner, it is a good thing.”

I think we are having a persistent problem with the definitions of a soul, both from Hinduism and Christianity. In Christianity, you have four essential soul types: God, celestial, fallen celestial (demonic), and mortal. God is a unique soul-type of the three persons of God – Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. Celestial is the soul-type of angels, in their various choirs. Since a third of celestials fell in the rebellion, they can be seen as a slightly different type, in their destiny at least. Finally, we have the soul-type of mortals, which in Christianity means only humans, because they don’t think self-aware animals such as elephants, dolphins and others amount to anything.

Hinduism has a somewhat different perspective on this. For instance, they don’t separate celestials, demons, gods and mortals into different categories, because all of them can incarnate as either animals or humans. Hinduism recognizes that Gods are in some way much greater than typical human souls, but the mechanics of that are completely unclear, vague and often contradictory. For instance, in one place it is said that the only difference between souls is the level of self-realization, in other places the difference is attributed to the amount of unresolved karma, and in some places the difference between Gods and ordinary souls is attributed to a new element, vishnu tattva, as opposed to the normal tattva that makes generic souls. Hinduism is a mess in that sense, but in other ways it provides the best description of what things actually look like in practice.

Buddhism introduced a new element it inherited from Jainism, but then took it to a whole new level. You see, it understands karma not as something a soul has, and needs to work through in order to become pure, but as something a soul is actually made of. This is a revolutionary concept, because it explains how souls grow through karma, and why having less karma is in fact the reason why some souls are small, and having more karma and in different states of organisation is a reason why some souls are bigger and better, and the concept of mahatma, great soul, for the first time makes actual sense, because they are made of more kalapas, the fundamental particles of karma. The concept of crystallization of karma also explains the differences between less evolved souls that look basically like a cloud of astral gas, and more evolved souls where this gas was cooled down and compressed into a solid, crystalline form, after the excess kinetic energy of the individual particles was removed by suffering.

I’m trying to write as little of my own experience as possible up to this point, because I read about all of this at some place or another, but the source material is much more chaotic, disorganised and full of imagery that’s hard to understand today. I just organised all of it into something coherent based on my own experience and understanding. The reason why I’m not just using Buddhist imagery of kalapas and karmic substance is because Hinduism and Christianity sometimes have better explanations of how some things actually work in practice; for instance, Hinduism will speak of Gods and their jewellery, armour, robes and weapons, but it won’t be able to explain how those things actually work. Christianity introduced the concept of God’s persons, which is very useful in explaining what the Gods of Hinduism actually are, but despite its excellent understanding of the low-level mechanics of karma and soul-stuff, and also of the concept of incarnation of Divine beings, Buddhism has some issues on the higher echelon of things, tending to misunderstand the point of spiritual evolution altogether, where for instance both Christianity and some flavours of Hinduism get it more-less perfectly. This is why I tend to credit all three systems, rather than trying to reduce everything unto one. So, if something looks like a mixture of Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity, where for instance I take imagery from Hinduism, explain the mechanics of it in Buddhist terms explained in ways of particle physics and thermodynamics, and use Christian-sounding words to tell you what it means and feels like, that’s completely intentional, the way you can use engineering terms to explain how a car works, and poetry to explain how it feels to drive.

All of this is more-less an introduction that is necessary for understanding how certain things work, why they make sense and why some things that look like chaos or cruelty are none of that. One of those concepts is that of pralaya, destruction of worlds.

Basically, a world is created, endures for a long while, and is then destroyed. A good example of this is the solar system. At some point it was created by gravitational condensation of matter within a supernova remnant, which created both the star and the planets. At some point, Earth became capable of supporting life, the basic compounds for which were already formed in the supernova remnant gas; the nucleic acids and so on. Then life started on Earth as it barely cooled, evolved to greater complexity through time, and was occasionally interrupted and reset by cataclysmic events, shifting evolution into different directions. At some point, Earth will become unable to sustain life; either in a global glaciation event, or when the Sun leaves the main sequence and becomes a red giant. Realistically, within half a billion years the Sun is expected to become much brighter, and that would already cook Earth quite nicely, making it uninhabitable. So, the concept of pralaya is not something that’s very hard to understand or accept as reality. I just want to explain why, from God’s perspective, it’s a good thing, and not a terrible disaster.

From a position of a single kalapa, it is the most fundamental manifestation of the Absolute in the Relative. It’s a spark of momentum of sat-cit-ananda that wants to be God in the Relative. For a kalapa, and for Absolute as well, the best outcome is aggregating with other similar elementary particles of karma into a structure that will manifest the full glory of the Absolute in the Relative. It doesn’t want to get stuck in a soul of a trilobite for a zillion years. That would be a terrible outcome. From a position of a trilobite, of course it wants to keep being a trilobite. It sees nothing wrong with that, and everything wrong with its cessation. However, when God sees that things aren’t going anywhere, he slightly massages the reset button.

I’m using terms from this world in order to make it more understandable, of course, but let’s switch to the actual world, rather than this VR. You can call the real world spiritual, astral, heaven or whatever you like, but I prefer to call it the real world created by God, because that’s what it is. It has many layers, and each layer has sections and compartments that make it complicated, but I’ll try to keep it as simple as possible. So, there you have all sorts of souls, from barely detectable clouds of karmic gas that would normally power insects, through human-type souls that are also karmic gas, but much bigger quantity, denser, more organised, capable of complex emotions and thoughts, and small soul-crystals, of karmic substance that evolved to great peace, sophistication and power through suffering that cooled down karmic stuff from gas to solid, removing both chaotic energy and impurities in the process. I could say that all soul-crystals are some type of vajra, but I don’t want to introduce unnecessary complexity into something that’s already hard to understand even for the advanced practitioners, let alone beginners; however, I don’t feel like teaching kindergarten level physics for the rest of my life either, so try to keep up. Essentially, the crystalline soul-type is where the actual fun starts, and you can justifiably perceive everything that precedes it as some kind of an attempt-to-become. Such a crystalline soul exists in what you can call a first credible state of enlightenment, although the term itself is vague and I don’t like to use it. If a crystalline soul doesn’t do something to mess things up royally, it is essentially destined to eternity and will come to some kind of a glorious ending. The gaseous attempts-to-become, however, can be wiped out and reset in a pralaya, when God grows tired of their crap. That’s why I was always hurrying my students to achieve initiation into vajra, because prior to that their fate is highly uncertain. To remain in form of gaseous karmic state is precarious and just invites trouble of all sorts. Some already existed in crystalline form prior to incarnation, but they had to repeat the process of crystallisation in this incarnation, in order to start improving upon their past achievements, and resolve issues in their crystalline structure that resulted from past errors – inclusions, cracks, impurities and so on. Every such issue can be described as a fundamental spiritual problem with understanding and approach to reality, but going into details would make this article into a small book, and it’s quite long already. In any case, soul crystallization is an important step, but it’s a step and not a destination. So, what does a crystalline soul do? The first obvious answer is that it can achieve purity and uniform integrity, resolving issues that arose from its organic, messy evolution. The next answer is that it can grow bigger. However, this is where things get more complicated, because it can also choose to belong to one of the Gods. Why one would want to do so is quite obvious; it’s the reason why Christians want to become saints in order to be able to belong to Christ in eternity. They see themselves as servants of God, as beings whose purpose is to spread and increase God’s glory. Essentially, every good Christian life is something that exists to magnify the glory of Christ, and if you remove human forms from souls and observe them in their pure, original state, the Christians would be observed as crystals of spiritual light that belong to the much larger structure of the God-person they belong to. They are, in essence, holy companions of God, and this explains why Gods in Hinduism are described as having companions and adjacent structures and entities. That is because lesser holy beings find their purpose and fulfilment in company, service and proximity to a major Divine being, whose glory they magnify and manifest. What happens to those adjacent crystals through time? They can grow by taking tasks upon themselves, in order to spread the glory of their Lord, and as they are successful, they accumulate, absorb and purify further karmic substance. However, since this is inherently risky, they can fail and be harmed or even destroyed in this process. They can also remain satisfied with their level of progress. If they grow big enough, they become companion-Gods; that, basically, is how Gods “reproduce”, and that’s also why they are all on extremely friendly terms, because all help each other grow greater and more glorious, and praise each other endlessly, because that’s completely right and proper, knowing what kinds of glorious deeds of wonder and sacrifice one had to perform to grow this big.

Without intervention, there would be too much of a separation of destinies of karmic substance, where some of it would be permanently stuck in gaseous structures that aren’t going anywhere or doing anything worthwhile, and none of it is doing much in terms of participating in or manifesting God’s glory, so God occasionally performs “controlled burns”, as forestry service would call it, where they burn down the underbrush in order to give the big trees room to grow and remove stuff that’s not doing anything other than providing fuel for big forest fires that can be quite destructive. Basically, the stuff that’s not doing anything nor going anywhere is reset in ways that either accelerate evolution in other forms, or allows greater Divine beings to absorb their karma and thus allow it to take part in God’s glory and increase his or her greatness. This is described in Bhagavata-purana, as demonic beings try to kill Krishna and thus essentially karmically offer themselves to him, because that’s what you do when you sin against someone so much greater than yourself; as he kills them, he absorbs their souls into his Divine core, and thus demons swap their miserable individual existence for being part of a God’s being and magnifying his glory. Enemies of God thus get to be absorbed into God and lose their individuality, but friends of God become companions and adjacent beings who increase God’s greatness by creating the complex field adjacent to their God. This adjacent field can change shape, for instance Krishna can cast his jewels into the world when he himself descends, and they become his companions, and demons also choose to join their destiny with his own by incarnating to oppose him, be destroyed in the process of magnifying his glory, and being absorbed into his being. After this process of group incarnation, all the involved are changed; some are greatly magnified by their glorious deeds, some remain more-less the same, and some are diminished or destroyed by betrayal and cause their God loss and suffering. The entire process, obviously, has a purpose, and everything is dynamic and quite complicated. As God himself can change shape, so do his adjacent entities, who can be seen either in their original form of spiritual crystalline structures of light, beauty and power, or in form of jewels adorning their beloved God, or in form of weapons, robes and other aspects and attributes of the Lord, or Lady in question; or they can manifest in all kinds of forms, for instance human beings inhabiting a heavenly castle, performing some lila. And of course you have major Gods who are basically all family, forming married couples and all kinds of friendly connections. Those major Gods are so immense, that it’s hard for me to even begin trying to explain the order of magnitude, but they are in practice the kindest and most friendly and approachable ones around, really; their size doesn’t make them more distant, but more everywhere, so to speak. The Christians who worship saints, because they feel closer than the great Lord, got it completely wrong; it’s the saints who feel distant and rigid, while their Lord, the major God-person, feels approachable, human, kind and lovely. It’s weird, but that’s how it is. It’s also logical – when you want to approach a person, you don’t talk to their shoes or their wedding ring, you talk to them, because that actually works. 🙂

Essentially, pralaya is a form of mercy that wipes out stagnant cesspools where karmic substance is basically prevented from taking part in God’s manifestation by being stuck in various godless forms that don’t want to go anywhere. From a position of weeds, gardening is genocide. However, nobody’s asking weeds for their opinion. By allowing karmic substance to be liberated from stagnant inferior forms and taking part of a Divine destiny again, pralaya is the supreme form of dharma.