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.

There’s an exchange from the comment section that deserves to be its own article:

Katarina Martinović: “It seems to me that pride and narcissism are innate and natural states in us and that, as soon as we relax a little, they take over our lives and lead us to ruin, because they convince us that we are right and on the right side. Is this a property of the body, hormones or soul or both?
It seems to me that Christians are right when they say that we should “crucify ourselves” every day precisely so that these evil innate things do not take over our lives.”

Me: “I wouldn’t go that far. Rather, I would say that people who tend to go very far in spiritual evolution tend to have certain properties that are very useful up to a point, and contribute to their success, but carry within them a seed of terrible problems that can materialise later on. For instance, you can’t really be humble and obedient in the beginning, and have a realistic chance of success, unless you happen to be more lucky than one has any right to expect and just miraculously manage to evade all the arrogant and malevolent people who will bark orders at you and force you to do things that will ruin you. So, essentially, people who survive past that phase tend to be the ones who react with a “go fuck yourself, and if you don’t, I have a knife that would really like to check the temperature of your liver”. Arrogance, pride, spite and aggression seem to be the bare essentials that keep you from the worst kinds of harm.
However, you need to keep them in check. Being arrogant keeps you from obedience to all kinds of assholes, but it can make you an asshole who will offend even God if you meet him. Being violent can keep you safe from violent people looking for victims, but it can also make you into a person who victimises others.
So, I would say that pride, aggression and so on wouldn’t be here if they weren’t extremely useful for surviving evil. People who go far in spiritual evolution tend to be selected from the group that survived long enough to get that far, and weren’t just ground into a pulp and used as resources by others. As a result, spiritually advanced people tend to have serious character flaws that need to be addressed at some point, usually long after those traits outlived their actual usefulness and became much more trouble than they are worth. Also, addressing them usually means restructuring your personality in ways that keep you sharp and dangerous without having you become evil or abusive. You want a God to have teeth. Christians are not a good example, because they take humility way too far and they tend to get nasty in a passive-aggressive way that’s actually even worse. As I said, there’s no substitute for using your brain for its intended purpose.”

This strikes me as a very good case of survivorship bias, basically. If you’re waiting at the finish line, you don’t get to meet people who failed in the early stages of the race. You don’t get to see those who were completely destroyed by misplaced humility, by the lack of self-confidence, by the attitude that everybody is equal so everybody else has the same rights as they. You get to meet people who thought they were better than anyone else, who thought they deserve the best, and who did enough things right to end up having to face problems that arose from the features that allowed them to get thus far. Basically, you get to treat the victors for consequences of excessive arrogance. You don’t get to treat people for consequences of excessive humility, simply because they failed much earlier in the race. What strikes me as completely fascinating with Christian saints – St. Paul, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, for example – is that they look very self confident, strong, and often arrogant. Sure, they can be humble, but humility is there as something to temper their arrogance, not as its substitute. St. Paul’s reaction to Sanhedrin was to call them all painted graves, not to repent for his sins and ask forgiveness for being a Christian. St. Jerome’s reaction to St. Augustine was “oh there we go again with that same stupid bullshit I always have to deal with”. St Augustine’s reaction to other philosophies was often harsh mockery. They didn’t apologise for existing, ask for permission or repent for thinking that they, as Christians, are better than others. Of course they are better than others, that’s the whole point. You can call it arrogance, but it’s the essential quality that allows you to get anywhere.

Let’s say you’re not a spiritually advanced person. What’s going to be the environment you exist in? Are you going to be surrounded by saints and God, so humility is the best and most elevating property you can possibly have? Highly unlikely. Rather, you’re going to be an ordinary person, surrounded by other ordinary people. If you’re male, you’ll encounter an arrogant bastard who will hold a whip or a sword and try to force you to be his slave. If you’re female, you’ll encounter both an arrogant male bastard who will hold a whip or a sword, and tell you to spread your legs for him, and an arrogant female who will order you to do chores for her as a servant. Humility might keep you alive, as a slave; in female case, a pregnant one. Also, being humble will keep you at the bottom of the hierarchy, where you’ll be guaranteed to have a life full of humiliations, and a short one at that. Is that conducive to spirituality? If you think so, in what way? Of what kind?

In order not to be everybody’s bitch, you need to be arrogant and proud enough to believe you deserve better than that, that you’re better than they are and they have no right to command you. If you’re male, you’ll likely use force to get out of a humiliating situation, and you will most likely die rather than submit, which will strengthen the karmic core of arrogance that will eventually make you too strong to be an easy target for various assholes. If you’re female, you’ll use cunning and manipulation, for instance get away from undesirable men by becoming attractive to desirable ones who will protect you. As a woman, you need to be arrogant to think that you deserve better than just anyone, and even more arrogant to think you deserve the best – the most arrogant one will think she will only accept a God, and if this arrogance is healthy, she will think about the properties she must have in order to be attractive to a God, and she’ll work on that, for many lifetimes in succession if necessary. So, when you encounter a Goddess who is married to a God, will it be surprising to find that she implicitly believes to be better than you, and to deserve more? Only if you’re really dumb.

Also, it’s not surprising to find out that the best saints are recruited from the folds of the most arrogant sinners. St. Paul was the main prosecutor of Christians. St. Augustine was a Manichean who mocked Christians and Christianity. Jesus constantly mocked the religious authorities and used them as an example of what not to do. Milarepa used to be a dark mage who caused hailstorms in order to punish people. It appears to be much easier to teach a dark mage humility, than it is to teach a humble person how to be a competent yogi, because in order to be a competent yogi you must be strong, focused, proud and not give a single shit about anyone’s opinion or criticism. Sure, such a person will end up having low-energy inclusions in their spiritual makeup that will cause problems later on and will have to be resolved in a painful manner. However, a humble person won’t have such problems because they will be busy dying as a slave in a salt mine, or being pregnant with a rapist’s child and dying of all kinds of disease and famine, because they don’t think they are better than everybody else. No, you first need to believe you’re better than everybody else, and then you need to work hard to earn it – develop the spiritual qualities that a better person should have. Then, when you actually became better than everybody else, you need to learn humility because being an arrogant cunt doesn’t serve you any more at that point. So, I think the Christians are misreading the humility thing. Jesus wasn’t preaching to the humble people, he was preaching to the arrogant ones, because they had the most potential to become virtuous. The humble ones just died somewhere ploughing a field, and being ploughed into it as fertilizer in the end.

Sure, you can read it in another manner as well, for instance if you see an arrogant drug dealing thug with a gun, you can imagine Jesus pointing at him and saying “yeah, this one will not inherit the Earth”, and that will be understandable. The thugs will exterminate each other and remove each other out of circulation and they will not inherit anything. However, there’s a big difference between being arrogant enough to think you deserve God, and being a stupid thug. If you think you deserve God, that’s arrogance, but if you have a brain in your head you will think about what you need to become to deserve God, and work on that. In order to believe so, and persist until success, you need to be arrogant, stubborn and have faith. You also can’t be stupid, because stupid people also don’t get far, because they have stupid ideas that result in their destruction early on in the game. So, the best material for success is someone with enough arrogance, faith, persistence and intelligence in just the right combination, and of course such a person will end up imperfect as they become spiritually big enough to deserve your notice as you observe the finish line. Everybody at the finish line will be limping, missing an eye and scarred. You don’t overcome Satan and end up looking pretty. So yes, you can complain about how spiritually powerful people have all sorts of flaws and do evil things, and complain even more about how God tends to value them enough to save them even after they did all sorts of evil. However, that’s how it works. “Good guys” don’t finish last; they don’t finish at all, they come to a bad ending early on. The ones actually finishing the game tend to be reformed murderers and dark mages.

As long as we’re dealing with the issues of karma, the issue of fucking up – making errors with catastrophic results – needs to be addressed. You see, people usually have it upside down; they think fucking up comes first, and karma comes knocking on your door later. In fact, the point of a karmic lesson is very often to allow you to fuck up, often very badly, in order to shock you out of your inertia-induced stupor.

There’s a Hindu story I heard, I’m not sure how accurate it is but it illustrates the point I’m trying to make. Kali is usually depicted amidst a murderous rampage, stepping on Shiva, and with her tongue out. The tongue out gesture, as I was told, means embarrassment, an “oops!”, and the story goes like this: Kali was on a destructive rampage and instead of stopping after having destroyed whomever she was supposed to, she went completely out of control and threatened to destroy everything and everybody, and the Gods got concerned. Shiva volunteered to solve the problem, by allowing her to step on him in her murderous rampage, at which she instantly understood she committed an insult against Shiva and was embarrassed to the point where all her rage instantly vanished.

So, the point of the story is that sometimes you need to induce someone to make an error, of the kind that they themselves would find shocking, because that’s the only way to make them stop whatever destructive thing they are doing in their inertia of self-righteousness. Such karmic lessons can seem very harsh, but considering what would have happened without them, they are actually very merciful. A mild case is having a careless driver almost hit a pedestrian, because that will awaken him to the consequences of what he’s doing. A more extreme case would be to participate in genocide in order to realise the danger of just following orders and thinking that the “higher-ups” know what they are doing and you can abdicate moral responsibility.

A typical case of this would be following your beliefs right into actions that you recognise as mortal sin. Then you wake up and smell the coffee, so to speak – you understand that your actions, as well as the beliefs they were based on, are so fundamentally flawed, that they either caused, or would have caused a great evil. At that point, you stop and reconsider your entire existence, as well as the foundations of your entire personal universe.

So, the point of those extreme karmic lessons, that take place after all kinds of milder warnings have been exhausted, is to allow you to fuck up in a major way, and face the consequences of what you did, so that you would wake up enough to understand that something in you is built so wrong, that you would do terrible things while in deep sleep of the inertia of self-righteousness. Karma, in that respect, isn’t something that punishes you for fucking up. It enacts a wake up call by allowing you to fuck up hard enough that you would stop and think.

One could say that a person who fucked up needs to be punished for it, but that’s not how it works. At that point, that person likely already experienced severe spiritual degradation and was on the verge of destruction anyway, because punishment is not something some external force does to you when you’re on a wrong path; punishment is an automatic consequence of walking the wrong path. Punishment for smoking is that you get cancer; you don’t get slapped on the wrist by karma, or some similar foolishness. Punishment for a drunkard who mistreats his family regularly is that his family wants to have nothing to do with him and his life is ruined by his actions. At the point of a wake up call, one is usually so far removed from their ideal state, that additional punishment would look like giving someone a ticket for speeding after they crashed into a tree and killed themselves. Basically, an extreme karmic wake up call is something that has a function of preventing culmination of a fatal course of action after it had already gone on for quite a while, and, basically, you’re forced into a situation that will limit your self-destruction at 75% or 90% rather than just allowing you to reach complete destruction.

One would ask why are there no warnings at 1% or 10%. There are. There wouldn’t be a need for extreme shock therapy at 90% if those were heeded, unfortunately. It’s words first, then stronger words, then a bullet to the knee, basically.

Another question would be whether this is a normal course of action – whether everybody gets a warning to save them from themselves. No. I think it’s a special case that happens when God actually wants to save you. I think there are terrible people who are allowed or even encouraged to proceed further on a course that would result in their complete destruction, because they are completely rotten to their core. Basically, there needs to be something good about you that will make you worth saving, and it’s always grace, and not something that happens automatically because there’s some karmic law or a mechanism that mandates it.

Doom happens automatically, as a result of inertia of wrong action. If nobody intervenes, you find yourself at the bottom of a very deep hole holding a shovel, and there’s nobody there to hear you or to save you from what you did to yourself. An intervention, however, is personal. It doesn’t happen because there’s a law mandating it, because there’s no law mandating actions of free and unconditioned beings. It doesn’t take place if there’s nothing about you that will make someone want to make an effort to save you. So, when an evil person asks, “what kind of a God would allow me to fail so completely”, the answer is “a good one”.