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.