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”.

I recently talked a lot about karma, with karmic structures from past lives having been discussed quite extensively in private conversations and on the forum, so I think I have to explain some of it here.

When karma from past lives is discussed, people almost always imagine some kind of a sin that needs to be paid off; basically, you killed someone, you had to be reborn here to learn a lesson by being killed in similar circumstances, and then you can move on. Let me start by stating that I never encountered this, anywhere. I’m not saying it’s not possible, or that it can’t exist; it’s just not common enough for me to have any experience with it. For the most part, karma is not about repaying past debts, it’s about inheriting the momentum of your past choices and actions.

Imagine a forest, with people and animals navigating through it every day. Eventually, as they walk on the ground and break off branches that are in the way, they make a certain path easier to walk. As time goes on, everybody just automatically gravitates towards that path because it’s faster and easier; you don’t have to clear all the brush yourself, because it’s already been done. Not only do you end up walking the same path every time, but so does everybody else, simply because it’s easier. The shortest, easiest path through the forest thus tends to get carved into the landscape by everybody traversing it, and after a while nobody even considers alternatives. Sometimes it’s for good reasons – the beaten paths go around marshes, cliffs and other hard terrain. However, sometimes it’s just because someone went that way first and cleared the brush enough to make it easier for others. I recently did exactly that, by going through a forest path with a chainsaw; the path I cleared became the new default path for others. The paths I didn’t clear because I didn’t need them or didn’t feel like doing the extra work fell into neglect and became so hard to traverse that people stopped walking there. The thing is, the path I cleared isn’t necessarily the optimal path for everyone; it was just the path I found easiest to clear with the chainsaw that day. The others just went along with it.

So, that’s your karmic heritage: it’s the momentum of all the things you did before; if it was playing music, learning music will be incredibly easy for you. If it was speaking Latin, this language will be very easy and intuitive for you to learn. If it was a certain type of religious practice, you will tend to find it the most reasonable and intuitive and just fall into the beaten path. The arguments that reinforce your momentum of beliefs will be heard and understood instantly. The arguments that contradict it will just pass through your ears without even being registered, like the background noise that you automatically ignore because it doesn’t matter, or is intuitively wrong. So, in every following iteration you will instinctively gravitate towards doing the same thing you always did, because it feels good and natural, it’s the “voice of your heart” that tells you you’re in the right place. The alternatives will feel wrong and you will tend to ignore them at best, and usually even have strong negative feelings about them.

As you can see, none of this is inherently good or bad. It’s just what you did before carving a path in the woods, that will become easier for you to just follow intuitively later on. The good and bad parts are up to you, and they don’t necessarily negate each other. You can be an asshole to others, and you can at the same time be very studious and diligent. As a result, you will find it very easy to treat others very poorly, and you will also find it very easy to learn new skills through application of diligence and hard work. Again, whether your karmic heritage is a burden or a boon, is entirely up to you. However, the more you did something, the greater the momentum of inertia behind it; once you carved Grand Canyon into the rock, you will find it incredibly easy to just flow at the bottom, and incredibly hard and unintuitive to climb the cliffs and try to find another way. If you did evil things, you will find it incredibly hard to stop doing evil things and do something kind, good and constructive, which will make your doom likely and your success incredibly improbable. If you did good things, you will find it incredibly hard to be diverted from them, which will make your success likely and your failure improbable. Sometimes it’s about things that are neither good nor bad – if you had multiple male incarnations, you’ll just gravitate towards future male incarnations. If you had multiple female incarnations, being female will feel right. You’ll just fall into a pattern, as you carve yourself from karmic substance in your evolution. Everything that feels more like you is accepted, and what feels as not you is discarded, the way Michelangelo carved Moses from a rock. What felt like Moses stayed, what didn’t feel like Moses got chipped off.

There’s also a mention of karmic lessons. Those are about aspects of your karmic makeup that give you wrong ideas about things because of the inertia of your experience, and you are so stubborn that you refuse to learn that you’re wrong about it, and it’s something that’s important and can’t be just ignored or used for a constructive purpose. It can be many things, and they usually come in clusters. For instance, you have a person who gravitates towards a Pharisee mode of existence – oh, thank God who made me so holy, Jewish, male and pure, unlike those other lesser people. The karmic lesson is of course to be born as all those things you think you’re above – an Arab female, for instance – in order to see that you’re still you, no more or less pure than before; some things are just different, and that doesn’t make them better or worse. Making a whole worldview around stupid prejudice is always a bad idea, and bad ideas need to be crushed through educational experience in order to clear space for better ones. Sadhus in India are a particularly bad case of stupid prejudice that needs to be crushed by particularly unpleasant measures, because those people tend to think in patterns to such a degree that their entire existence becomes entirely formulaic. Shankaracarya literally starts Vivekachudamani by stating that optimal birth is that of a male brahmana learned in vedas, and that such a birth should be used for attaining liberation. The next obvious step for such an enlightened sage is, of course, to be born as a female somewhere in Bosnia, to a family of village idiots, and still have all the necessary requirements for liberation. The karmic lessons of this kind are something that looks more like a blessing from God than a normal way of things. A normal way of things would make you more of the same. However, if you get to be on good terms with God, your path will start looking more rocky in the well established places, and more appealing in places you haven’t explored before. When your life consists of a series of karmic lessons, it means your past became such a problem, that no further progress is possible until you literally dismantle all the momentum of wrong nonsense you convinced yourself to be the only true path that leads to a bright future. That is obviously hard to do, the way it would be hard to teach a river to flow uphill, but sometimes your past experience stands in the way of correct understanding and development to such a degree, that radical changes need to be introduced in order to shake you up – or, rather, pulverise you into cement and then rebuild you from the resulting concrete in a better shape.

So, when I talk about learning karmic lessons, that’s what I mean. It’s a different thing from spending karma – a routine if unpleasant practice that transforms low-energy kalapas into structural elements of your soul, that need to be energetically elevated in order to be integrated, and the process is basically suffering without forming a reaction. A karmic lesson is something else – it’s being broken where you thought you were good and solid; it’s finding out that your glorious and pure past is basically stupidity, nonsense and obstacles to enlightenment, which can mean many things, from silly ones like understanding you don’t need to be a male Hindu from brahmana or ksatriya varna and a good jati to be qualified for spiritual practice, to understanding that monotheism isn’t necessarily a good, healthy and useful way of conceptualising transcendence, or that spiritual advancement and purity can take forms completely different from your expectations. Sometimes, it can mean that being an advanced dark mage who sees “common people” as hardly more than cattle is not an evolved form of spiritual existence and is rather a sinful and fallen state.

Sometimes, it means learning that this world isn’t created by a good and loving God who rewards the good ones with fortune and fame, and punishes the bad ones with poverty, ignominy and hardship. It will definitely mean learning that being in comfort of a beaten path doesn’t mean you’re on the right path, or even The Right Path, as some love to call it. It just means you’re doing what you did so many times before, and what others did alongside you.

As you can guess from all of that, spiritual evolution is a complex thing, where good things can take many shapes, and bad things even more so, and appearances can be deceptive. Things that feel right aren’t necessarily “a sign from God” that you’re doing the right thing; more likely, it just means you’re following gravity downhill, walking the path of least resistance, and whether it’s actually a good one is a completely unrelated matter. Sometimes the feeling of rightness actually does mean you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing and you found your true calling. Sometimes, it just means your karmic momentum is making decisions for you. Sometimes, the feeling of freedom and levity means you fell from the 100^th floor and are currently falling towards your death.

In any case, there’s no substitute for actually using your brain for its intended purpose and actively thinking about what’s happening to you and around you, instead of just following instinct and inertia. This means that similar symptoms can mean multiple different things, often with different moral significance, and nobody can rescue you from having to make hard decisions on your own, and facing their consequence, whether in the case you failed, or in the case you made the right call that opened up a whole new horizon that will require thorough re-learning of things you took for granted.

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.