I was kind of preoccupied last week or so, and it wasn’t just one thing. I did, however, get some nice pictures this evening.
A7CR with the Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN kicks serious ass for such walks; mostly because the combination is very small and light.
I was thinking about many things.
For instance, how people routinely misunderstand everything I say about spending karma, because it’s such an uncommon thing that almost nobody has any experience with it, and they misinterpret it as some kind of rationalization for depression and so on. It’s absolutely nothing of the kind. People have no experience with it because they are mostly busy creating sinful actions and rationalising them; if they actually ever feel remorse for their actions, it’s usually a rare, almost once in a lifetime event. Spending other people’s karma… that’s exceedingly rare, and most people don’t even understand the mechanism, or the possibility of such a thing. People are afraid of this kind of a spiritual pain to the point that they wrap its potential causes under all kinds of insulation, and when that fails, they tend to completely break down. That one would willingly endure that, and to no fault of one’s own, is beyond their comprehension. So, they invent interpretations, which are of course as wrong as they are silly.
The same goes for darshan. No, it’s not something I can pull out of my arse when I’m feeling bad. I wish. It’s not something you can remember, invoke, reconstruct or imagine. When it’s not there, it’s not there and there’s nothing you can do about it. When it’s there, it’s like the light being suddenly turned on in the dark – and human experience in general is a very dark thing, compared to that. This is the true light, something you can’t even imagine until it’s there, and it’s so much not under my control that I had literal decades without such experiences, and I couldn’t do anything about it either. You can’t remember it, because a memory is merely a shadow, something of a lower dimension of existence, like a faded photograph compared to the actual person. You can’t cause it when it’s absent, the way you can’t cause someone dead to appear merely because you miss them. When people think it’s something I imagined in order to comfort myself, I find it incredibly silly, because if that were so, I wouldn’t have to endure decades without it then. No, it’s an absolutely genuine phenomenon: a person of God stopping by to say “hi”. If you haven’t experienced it, you certainly can’t imagine what it’s like.
There’s a good reason why those two things – spending of karma, and darshan of God – are such opposite experiences. Sin by definition binds you to darkness that is the opposite of the light of God. When Christians talk about sin being something that removes you from God, they do actually know what they are talking about, because that’s exactly how it works. So, when you’re processing sin, it’s the least desirable experience possible for someone who loves God. It’s a combination of pain and spiritual darkness, low energy and all kinds of energetic, physical and emotional damage. It is, however, an extremely effective way of growing your soul and increasing your spiritual powers. It doesn’t feel like it when It’s ongoing; in fact, it feels like being immersed in a spiritual equivalent of raw sewage. But in pauses, when you can feel your purity, power and all sorts of new good stuff that wasn’t there before, it feels very much worth it. But when it starts again, you think: if I ever say anything is worth this, beat me with a spiked club please. 🙂
It’s a vastly unpleasant cure for a terrible thing, but its ultimate fruits are incredible.
Can anyone do it? Well, start with your own, I guess. Everybody has abundance of sin to purify with remorse, and if they don’t think they do, it just means they are so totally immersed in darkness, they lack even the concept of God’s light. There’s a reason why saints talk about their sins, and sinners talk about how much they love and accept themselves. The reason is, when God’s light turns on, you see yourself in true perspective, and you can finally admit what you truly are, in an absolute sense. When you are in complete darkness, you feel the need to comfort yourself, convince yourself you’re fine. None of that exists in the presence of God. If there are impurities, they hurt. You feel a strong need to do something about them. The true perspective is so great that it makes it possible for you to admit things you had to hide from earlier. It’s a strange thing – in a sense, both sinners and saints lie. The sinners lie that they are good, and the saints lie that they are bad.
As I said, I’m thinking about many things.
I’m actually amazingly calm, considering what’s going on. At least, I’m calm now that the karmic load had subsided somewhat and I’m recovering from earlier today. The photo above looks very much the way I feel now.
