And there’s another conversation from the comment section that needs to be its own article:

Božo Juretić: “I have a question about this. What happens with their character after such guys and girls pass the finish line? From what I understood, passing the finish line here means basically getting out of the clutches of Satan, or attaining liberation/enlightenment in different terminology. That does not seem to me to actually change somebody’s core character structure. Do you end up with a warrior and dark mage, to use your examples, who are beyond satisfying their personal desires and doing things out of personal and/or global delusions? It actually kinda sounds like that to me. As Milarepa said after attaining liberation and before death: “Neither my deeds nor my miracles depend on (the wishes of) worldly gods”. It doesn’t sound to me like he stopped being Jetsun Milarepa, a (wiser) mage.”

Me: “The whole thing is of course a metaphor, but a clear one: organic growth of karmic aggregates is messy. We all look like that abomination thing from Warcraft that’s been stitched together from multiple corpses, with the exception of Biljana, who looks like a mathematical equation. That, of course, is what we start with. Whether we end up looking like undead creatures stitched together by vile magic, or do we turn this structure into a monolythic crystal of vajra, grow it past all expectation and end up giving God another name and person, that’s entirely up to us and what we do here.
So, basically, you can start by being a dark mage, then suffer greatly to break and rebuild yourself into a true yogi, and from there you can become a person of God as a best possible ending. Or you can end up somewhere on a spectrum between a dark and light mage, or light mage and a yogi, or a yogi and God.
It’s a similar but somewhat different thing with avatars, or tulkus, to be more technically accurate. They consist of a Divine aspect and a karmic structure necessary for incarnation. Best case, they transform the karmic structure through higher initiation and create vajra bodies for themselves, which seems to be a prerequisite for becoming a person of God in their own right. However, if that fails, there’s a secondary success mode where the Divine aspect is re-integrated with God and thus saved. Also, there’s the possibility that the Divine aspect never really takes hold, which is probably the most likely case. Or, I guess there’s a possibility that the entire structure gets corrupted, and a God who cast the tulku has a choice of either being bound to evil or losing whatever part of themselves that was invested in that incarnation, which is the ultimate bad ending.
So, essentially, there are no guarantees that things will end well for you, whoever you are and whatever your starting point. There’s also no singular possible outcome, or a dichotomy of outcomes, where you either fully succeed or fully fail. That’s why I said that some end the race like Odin or Tyr, without an eye or a hand. You can mostly succeed, but lose something that couldn’t be recovered or transformed. You can lose something, but gain something else. That’s why it’s all worthwhile, because it’s not some stupid Vedantic game where everything ends up at where it began, only with lots of suffering in between.”

So, essentially, we have a problem with the definitions of terms such as “enlightenment” or “liberation”. Even Vedanta, at least in its dualistic variant, understands the concept of multiple good endings of a soul’s evolution; for instance, demons who fought Krishna ended up absorbed into Krishna’s spiritual body, while his companions maintain separate existence that, presumably, makes them some kind of deities in their own right. It’s not formulated in terms as exact as I prefer to be using, but the point is vaguely discernible. Even the bad endings, where a soul falls apart into basic constituents, can turn into a good ending when someone like myself mops that stuff up and, after enduring suffering necessary to purify it, integrate it into my own soul-structure. It’s not a good ending for the soul that fell apart, but the kalapas themselves are not lost, and they end up being a part of a God, and thus have a glorious outcome.

Also, complexity of outcomes is absolutely not to be underestimated. I am annoyed by all the quasi-Hindu New Age speak about “returning to God”, because that sounds diluted, stupid and incoherent, and is nothing like the incredible sparkling complexity that I see. They imagine waves being absorbed back into the sea after understanding that they are the sea, but that’s not how it works, or what happens. For the most part, it’s more like finding purpose in God’s great plan of manifestation, where your very specific qualities enrich the totality of God’s glory.