I occasionally had weird experiences when strangers who found out that I “practice yoga” ask me if I can do this or that thing – can I slow down my heart rate, stop breathing, and so on.

Never have I been asked a question to which the answer would be “yes”. Whatever they could think of that they associate with achievements possible by yoga, I couldn’t do any of it; or, even if I could, it worked in a completely different way from what they’d imagined.

I never volunteer what I actually can do, however, because if I did, they would think it outright impossible. The things I can do are not even on the spectrum of what they would think of, not even the most ordinary things, such as being able to adopt and process foreign karmic mass and integrate it into my soul-structure, suffering greatly through the process, but retaining the ability to write in a sophisticated, calm and detached manner about very intricate things, while enduring emotional pain on the level that would make an ordinary person go instantly crazy, scream and kill themselves just to make it stop. To me, it’s a Tuesday. Also, this is a rather extreme case of a very fundamental set of skills acquired by yoga, and required in advanced practice: detachment, emotional control, mind control, perception and focus control, concentration and ability to direct energy, emotion and action separately and precisely. Also, faith, because faith is absolutely necessary when you lose control and direct insight of what’s actually going on, and that’s absolutely going to happen during this process; the first thing you lose is spiritual sight, and then you gradually lose your own normal spiritual state, as you are overwhelmed by foreign, extremely loud trauma. If you don’t have faith, you’ll panic. If you panic, it does not have a good ending.

It’s actually interesting how people expect circus tricks to be possible and attainable, but their reaction to anything real and actually useful is “no fucking way”. Unfortunately, that severely limits my ability to have a constructive conversation with people, because most of my experiences and abilities lie in the spectrum of “no fucking way”. They would expect me to be able to fart and whistle at the same time, or not close my eyes while sneezing, but I’m afraid I always have to disappoint them.

One of the interesting things people expect me to be able to do as a yogi is not care, and that one is almost universal. They expect me to not be touched by things, to be indifferent to anything that’s going on around me. I know how they got there – they are negatively affected by so many things, that they perceive being able to not care about any of it as huge relief. Of course, that’s not how it actually works. You actually get to care more, only about different things. You care about how a cat feels. You care about whether some person managed to achieve important milestones in their life when you hear that they have terminal cancer. You don’t care about living or dying, but you care about purpose, about important things being concluded, lessons being learned, temptations being resisted and higher things being accepted. You don’t care about neighbours getting a new car or local gossip. You care about global politics in a sense that it reflects spiritual choices and realities that will eventually trickle down to things like children being taught nonsense in schools, truth being persecuted and evil being mandated. You care about opinions of others, but that no longer works the way it did; now it’s a complex thing where opinions matter in a sense where it’s good that they are aligned with reality and lead to transcendence, and it’s important that they are not of the kind that is illusory, deceptive, ignorant and degrading. Essentially, you look at those things the way an angel would see them: things are good if they praise God and lead to God, and they are bad if they lead away from God. So you definitely always care, just in a different way. There’s a complex landscape of energies, spiritual states, destinies and trajectories that matter, and then there are the things people ordinarily care about, that you don’t even register except as noise.

In essence, serious yogic practice leaves normal human experience very soon after its onset, and soon after that your experience starts to differ so much from the normal human stuff, that communication becomes difficult at first, and impossible after several further steps. The development is not in the direction humans would expect, or even in the dimensions they register. I never talked about experiences that followed my first darshan, not even with my brother, because the experiences were either too far removed from the common ground that makes communication possible, too private, too subtle to put in any kind of terms, or I didn’t feel like it because his existence just lost any overlap with mine by that time. Not throwing pearls before swine is a thing. If I talk about any of it, the reason is usually to encourage others on the spiritual path, to show how those things work, what exists and what is possible; basically, to map the previously uncharted space, mostly because people would normally never think of any of it otherwise.

I frequently mention spending karma, and I know people have all kinds of ideas about it – from my idiot enemies who think I’m just making it up to rationalise my depression, to others who think all kinds of stuff, from question marks to “it can’t be all that bad since it’s not significantly altering his behaviour and he can write sophisticated stuff under it”.

No, it’s not depression, it’s much worse.

Patañjali defined Yoga as “citta vrtti nirodha“, cessation of the whirlpools/fluctuations in spirit-stuff. It’s a very easy thing to model thermodynamically; high energy molecules are having lots of kinetic energy, and if you imagine them in a container, they are bouncing around each other and the container in form of a gas. As they cool down, they form a liquid, simply because each molecule no longer requires as much space for its bouncing around, so they get closer to each other. As they cool further, they form a solid. This process of cooling down a substance from hot gas to a solid, when applied to mind-stuff, citta, is Yoga.

Translated to spiritual equivalents, all kinds of spiritual disturbance imparts spiritual particles, kalapas, with kinetic energy of sorts, which makes them bounce around and repel other similar particles, creating the opposite of cohesion within one’s spiritual body. At best, it creates weak spots that would fracture under pressure and thus need to be removed before any further growth. At worst, if there’s enough “hot stuff” in your spiritual body, it “explodes”, fragmenting fatally and ending your existence as a singular spiritual entity.

Conventional yogic practice is performed by a person whose spiritual body contains all kinds of issues; low-energy inclusions, fragmentations, and so on. In spiritual language, those are the wrong ideas about things, limiting beliefs, consequences of sinful actions, consequences of other people convincing you of things that aren’t true but you kept believing in them to your own detriment, latent desires, and karmic structures you inherited from your past lives or what not. Essentially, the worst problems are the beliefs that are completely intuitive to you, but are completely false; however, due to your conditioning you don’t want to understand that they are problems, and rather see them as solutions. For instance, someone conditioned in a certain spiritual tradition will see a priest as more holy than a carpenter; that would be simply intuitive, something he doesn’t even test. Of course a priest is more spiritual. However, then you encounter a carpenter by the name of Jesus who says he’s the son of God, and you encounter priests who accuse him of blasphemy, and if you go by your intuition, you end up being one of the guys who spat at Jesus and ridiculed him as he carried his cross to Golgotha. Basically, your implicit, intuitive belief that seemed self-evident got you in a world of trouble. That’s what the problems with karmic makeup look like. If you look at them energetically you see a low-energy inclusion in an otherwise uniform spiritual crystal, but that inclusion is a wrong belief that refuses to go away because it’s something you don’t see as a problem, you see it as one of the foundational components of your correct spiritual understanding. See how that can be a problem? If it’s an obvious problem, it usually has an obvious solution. For instance, you’re lazy, you see it as a problem and you get your shit together. But what if your laziness camouflages itself as detachment from matter, and any attempt to deal with it gets judged and discarded as material attachment? Then you have a problem, and it’s not one that can be easily attacked either, because any attempt to deal with it will face opposition from the deeply internalised wrongly assembled spiritual structures that see the problem as part of any acceptable solution. That’s how you end up with people who resist dealing with their core issues until something fundamental enough happens that shatters their entire core of confidence in their wrong beliefs, and they don’t just remove inclusions in the crystal; usually, the crystal shatters as the inclusion is removed, and is rebuilt from the ground up. In any case, obvious problems that are perceived as problems are easy to deal with. But if a problem camouflages itself as part of the solution process, the person might defend it to the point where the whole structure needs to be shattered.

So, what about karmic transfers, where foreign karmic mass is absorbed by your karmic body in order to make it grow? Well, if Yoga is calming your spiritual mass down, this is anti-Yoga. It’s like having a bowl of cold water with ice slowly forming on top, and mixing it with an amount of boiling water. What happens is that your entire spiritual mass becomes a turbulent mess of strong emotions, strong trouble-causing ideas, and strong emotional pain that wants to hide itself away because it’s too much to bear. To spend karma means to face each of those turbulent thought-emotions, and extract its energy from your system in form of suffering. Basically, to absorb such a wild mess of karma means to experience a karmic regression, to return your system into a past state where it was less cool, less calm, with all kinds of insane turbulences in citta, and if you have enough detachment, discipline and experience, you will gradually go through this mess and process it, eventually returning to your previous state of cool water with ice forming on the surface, only with greater amount of water.

The reason why inexperienced people should never do this is obvious – if you don’t have enough detachment, skill and holiness to begin with, you might lose yourself altogether in the process, and forget that Yoga is a thing. You’ll get angry at this and that, find more reasons to be angry, feed the karmic mess with your own energy and end up growing the problem instead of solving it. If that happens, the boiling mess becomes a bigger boiling mess.

The reason why I say it’s worse than depression is obvious – sure, this is spiritual darkness, because that’s what disturbance of soul-stuff feels like, but spiritual darkness is not just some depressing apathy; it’s anger, hatred, self-righteousness while being completely wrong and inventing all sorts of defensive worldviews for the wrongness, it’s making a religion out of your stupid ideas, and so on. People imagine sin as some kind of a stain on the soul, but it’s much worse than that. Sin is an active thing that defends itself. Sin creates rationalisations why it’s not sin, why it’s other people’s fault, why it’s God’s fault, why you’re a victim persecuted for your righteousness by a cruel unjust God. Sin bitches, moans and whines, it turns you into its servant, into its beast of burden, and that’s what Jesus meant when he said that he who sins is a slave to sin. It’s literally true, and sin would ride you into the ground, until there’s nothing left of you, rather than stop defending itself and admitting that it’s a sin, that it’s a bad thing, that you did wrong, that you thought wrong, and that you need to reverse course and rethink your life from a new perspective. When a sin is easily recognizable as sin, it’s a very easy problem to solve, and your core issues are never like that, which is why it is easy to spend decades and lifetimes dealing with such non-issues, while the actual problems pose as some kind of a glorious past that needs to become your glorious future.

So, Yoga is almost always misunderstood as a technical process of, basically, transforming nondescript energetic disturbance into deep spiritual calm. It’s not how this works, because in order to solve something you can’t keep polishing the surface. Sometimes you need to break the whole thing, because the root cause of your spiritual problems is too fundamental, and you need to suffer the pain of this breakage, and re-grow yourself from dust.

The only difference between a beginner and an expert is that an expert has lots of experience, technical knowledge and detachment that helps them endure the most traumatic parts of this process without going insane or evil. One would expect an expert to be facing only minor imperfections on the surface of their soul structure, but that’s not how those things work. If the imperfections are superficial, they are not an issue and you undergo immediate higher initiation. The reason why you don’t undergo initiation despite being apparently ready are the inclusions of low-energy stuff deep within the structure, meaning that you have fundamental misunderstandings that would require completely reworking your entire soul-structure, worldview and understanding, before you are ready to go forward.