I’ve seen a recurring error in some yogic and pseudoyogic groups, which basically sounds like this: spiritual growth means to raise the specific energy of your soul, therefore we’re going to teach people how to “raise their energy level” by feeling some kind of euphoria, reconstructing the feeling of love and elation, and this is going to have permanent beneficial consequences as long as they manage to persistently keep their energy at a high level and avoid the dips into depression that seem to happen invariably, probably due to some karma or another.

The energetic dips are not the result of any kind of problem with the practitioner. They are a perfectly normal result of having spent your energy reserves and having your depleted system function on a lower energetic level. The problem is with this entire approach, which is false, misguided and basically devised by idiots.

Don’t tell me it’s originally devised by Jesus or Yogananda or whomever. I don’t care how famous the idiot was, I just want to tell you he didn’t know shit about how human energy system actually works and what’s the difference between having a subjective perception of high energy, and having your soul built from actually high substances.

I know where the idea came from. When you have a strong spiritual experience, it leaves a residual charge in the lower energetic bodies, spinning them up to the highest capacity they can possibly take, making you feel almost as if you could walk on air and glow in the dark. So of course the first thing the first stupid fool thought of was “oh great, if we could re-create that glowing energetic feeling that accompanied the spiritual experience, maybe we’ll re-create the spiritual experience itself”.

Yeah, maybe we’ll re-create the feeling of flying in a plane by making airplane noises with our mouth and spreading our hands like wings when we run across a meadow like damn fools. That’s how cargo-cults are made. A stupid ape thinks he’ll re-create a thing by re-creating as much of the phenomena that accompanied the thing as possible. It can’t hurt, right? Except it can.

You see, the fact that a plane makes a noise while it flies doesn’t mean that you’ll come close to flying by making noises. You’ll probably just strip your throat raw. The fact that spiritual experiences are accompanied by bliss doesn’t mean that you’ll re-create a spiritual experience by re-creating bliss. You’ll just pump your personal energy into a futile effort, drain your system and cause depression. Read my lips: it doesn’t fucking work.

What those bliss-provoking techniques are trying to do is increase the energy level of the pranic body, and then stimulate the heart center, the anahata cakra, on that high energy octave. The theory is, since the heart center is supposed be very spiritual, this will produce a spiritual experience. The rationale for this is that the heart center is exploding with love and bliss during and immediately after the spiritual experience, so this center must be very spiritual. The problem is, during the spiritual experience your cock also gets hard, or your pussy wet, depending on what you have. It doesn’t mean those parts are abnormally spiritual. It just means they did what they are supposed to do when extreme energy is flowing through them. Everything just lights up, which is what it’s supposed to do when connected to a very powerful energy source. However, the immensely bad state of heroin addicts should suffice to convince you of the futility of the approach of chasing perfection through pleasure. Heroin activates extreme levels of pleasure, and the spiritual result of this is your destruction. Also, raising the energy level of the pranic body isn’t the best idea on how to approach spirituality, because the teenagers bursting with vital energy that forcefully manifests through the heart center and sexuality aren’t really what you would call spiritually inspiring people. More likely, they are very energetic animals, and if anything their increased animal energy stands in the way of actual spirituality, in a way similar to which strong light pointed into your eyes wouldn’t actually help you see better.

If anything, old people seem to have a better connection to spirituality because their vital, animal energy has been depleted, their spiritual connection to the world has weakened, and as a result you can almost feel the otherworldly presence in them, because they are more there than here. It is especially the case immediately before death.

So, essentially, building up the animal energy layer, also known as the pranic layer of the heart center, will in the best case scenario return you to the spiritual state of an infatuated teenager bursting with sexual hormones, and then drop you into depression once your energy has been depleted.

Another flaw of the approach is that it assumes that raising the amount of prana that flows through your system will increase your spiritual level. It won’t. It doesn’t actually influence your soul in any way, it affects only the part between your soul and your body, and it does it in such a way that it actually blinds you spiritually. It’s literally like trying to see better in the dark by pointing a flashlight into your eyes. It’s worse than useless.

If you want to increase your fundamental spiritual level, this is not the way to approach things. You have to approach it directly, on the spirit level, not on the prana level or emotion-level, essentially the lower astral. To put it bluntly, if you want to get your cock hard, the best approach is to talk to the woman you really like. You don’t approach things from your cock, you approach them from your head. If your head is in the right place your cock will know what to do without any assistance from you. Conversely, for women the right way to get your pussy wet is to see the right man. There’s absolutely nothing on the pussy-level that you need to do.

It’s about spirit. It needs to be in touch with God, and then the energy will normally flow through the right places. Your head needs to be in the right place. You don’t approach it from your genitals or from your heart; those things are secondary organs, that manifest the spirit when it’s in the right place, but the only thing you will get by trying to stimulate the lower centers such as the heart, is spiritual emptiness and depression. It’s actually worse than masturbation, because masturbation at least works, and this doesn’t. This is more like an addiction to destructive drugs – same concept, but less effective at inducing a temporary high. It’s about as spiritual as injecting yourself with heroin.

I don’t know if you can believe it, but I actually prefer having my pranic levels on a low baseline when I try to see extremely high and sophisticated things, at the utmost limits of my capacity. A heightened pranic or emotional level is merely a distraction, it doesn’t mean a high spiritual level, it means a high level of physical interference and noise and it just gets in the way, like strong noise or light, or like sexual arousal would get in the way if you were trying to understand how quarks change colors. “High” is not a universal metric; strong emotions and strong mind are independent and usually mutually exclusive things. The same goes for animal vitality and spirituality; they just don’t go well together. There’s an exception, though – an orgasm can be accompanied by a very deep spiritual surge in the right circumstances, because it’s more about discharging the vital energy than accumulating it, and it’s more about peace than excitement.

So, instead of trying to go “high”, try going deep, into calm and depth and clarity, and just feel the deepest aspects of God without trying to masturbate the lower energies into reproducing anything, because this entire approach is so fucking useless.

There’s an issue of chicken-and-egg in Yogi energetics: if there are energetic blockages and impurities in the energy system, what is the right approach to this issue – by attacking it on the level on which it exists, by some form of Kundalini-based technique for approaching those structures directly, or by attacking it on the level where it originated, by addressing the spiritual, mental and emotional causes.

You see, the energy blocks, karmic seeds, larvae and similar things didn’t just get there by some irony of fate. If you repressed an emotion, your problem is on that level, of repressed emotion, and can be more effectively solved by working through emotions, than by observing the repressed emotion as an energy structure and using energetics to try to “cleanse” it. Yes, the energetic techniques can help a great deal, by allowing you to survive traumatic emotions when repressed things burst out in the open, but again, you’re dealing with the problem on an emotional level in order to come to any kind of a solution, and energetic techniques are useful, but secondary.

A lot of noise was made in the Kundalini-circles in the 1990s about the supposed use of Kundalini awakening in spiritual evolution, to the point where Kundalini was seen as a conditio sine qua non of any kind of spirituality. On the other hand, most of the Kundalini people were demonstrably mad. The recurring theme was that Kundalini is often mistaken for mental illness, but I do wonder if mental illness isn’t often mistaken for Kundalini, as well. In any case, they seemed to be encouraging each other’s madness and lack of self-control of any kind, because it’s all either Kundalini at work, or it’s the Moon phases or some time of the year or it’s someone else’s fault, but certainly there’s no need for them to get their act together because that would be restrictive, and they felt the need to open their assholes as wide as they would go and fart out a shit tsunami in hope of attaining at least some kind of “unity with the world”. As you can see, I was less than impressed. It’s not that Kundalini-based techniques are worthless. I used them myself to great effect. It’s just that my approach doesn’t seem to be the rule, but rather an exception.

It is my experience that using Kundalini energetics is great to get things moving, to raise the energetic level of the kalapas inside your spiritual body, which has the effects similar to heating wax in order to make it liquid, which is useful if you want to rearrange things or remove solid impurities. However, if you’re not doing anything else to it, just heating it up, or, to leave the analogy, just stirring shit up in your system, won’t do anything other than decrease the overall mental stability and make one go nuts. So yes, improperly used Kundalini indeed is an enabling agent for psychosis. Used properly it just makes spiritual transformation work faster, as it “softens up” your system in preparation for stuff that actually attacks the real problems, not their manifestations.

So, what are the real problems? It’s very simple, really. The real problems always have a root cause in bad ideas, bad beliefs, and bad actions committed based on those bad beliefs. If you followed a wrong teaching, beliefs that were instilled in you by those teachings create secondary problems, which can then be energetically perceived as blockages, impurities or whatever, but let me put it this way. If someone’s shadow falls on you, do you try to remove the shadow from yourself or ask the person to move the fuck away from the light? The bad beliefs are like that: they are like some asshole who’s blocking the light for you. It’s not your problem, or, it is as much as you have inhibitions against getting rid of the problem because you think it deserves to be there or has more right have it their way than you do. The solution is therefore simple: you need to decide that you have the right not to have some assholes idiotic belief system block light for you and tell him to fuck off with his stupid bullshit. Then, suddenly, you’ll have an energetic cleansing process, as the blockages are dissolved and you are empowered, and here’s where Kundalini techniques come handy. It’s just that you mustn’t allow the tail to wag the dog; Kundalini is not some sort of God, it’s a shovel for manure. It’s very useful, but its place of origin is somewhere between your cock (or your lady bits, if those are what you have) and your asshole, and those are not really the organs that are useful for thinking, resolving spiritual issues and choosing a direction for your life. For those purposes you have your will, your consciousness, mind and the general feeling of spiritual presence that is of God. When those are deployed properly, the energetics will suddenly and effortlessly start working as it should. However, if you fail to approach the problem from the head, you will end up shoveling manure around you with the only result of drowning in your own shit.

When there was talk about energetic problems, I’ve heard people mention larvae (repressed emotions or separated self-parts), karmaśayas, vasanas and similar structures, but I’ve seen little or no mention of the inclusions, which look like a layer of soft rock included inside a hard rock, weakening it structurally. However, those are very common, because they are a spiritual representation of bad beliefs that weaken your soul, preventing you from wielding your spiritual power on what would otherwise be your normal level. For instance, if you train a person whose normal level of functionality would be ajna-chakra, to make anahata-chakra the focus of his spirituality, this anahata-focus actually weakens his soul, forming low-energy inclusions on the weak, anahata-level of energy. This then creates phantom-artifacts in the energy system, and if that person is poorly instructed he’ll end up chasing his tail throughout this maze of mirage and illusion. The true problem he has is that he listened to advice given to him by an idiot, and that’s where any possible solution is to be found, not by trying to remove shadows with a hair dryer.

Possible wrong beliefs that cause inclusions look like this:

• respecting someone who doesn’t deserve that level of respect

• obeying someone who doesn’t deserve your obedience

• disrespecting or disobeying someone who deserves either respect or obedience

• adopting inferior spiritual advice as authoritative

• not adopting ideas and behaviors appropriate for your spiritual status

• ceding the right to act or refuse to act in certain ways

Basically, this is the reason why all followers of certain religions are fucked up in the same way; they adopt bad ideas that turn them into zombie-idiots, restricting their spirituality to the inferior level that was put as a standard by the religion’s idiotic founder. I’m not talking just about Islam, although it’s a prime example, because there is no shortage of bad ideas in circulation. New Age is full of them, atheism is just terribly and irredeemably in conflict with facts, Christianity and Buddhism are full of junk, and most Hindu schools are more harmful than useful. Essentially, being spiritually wrecked by adopting bad ideas is probably the most common cause of problems, and yet for some reason this is barely if at all mentioned in Kundalini literature. Which brings me to my next point, which is “fuck Kundalini and the horse it rode in on”. Just focus your spirit in the direction from which you feel the light of God, adopt beliefs that make that light your own and show people what God is by your own example. Those few basic things are enough to make you immune to most problems.

I played with several approaches on how to solve the problem of this world. Of course, for people who are completely out of the loop, who don’t understand the overall context and are uninformed about what actually exists beyond this place, all of it will sound completely unrealistic, but let’s stop teaching kindergarten for a moment and ignore the completely ignorant people.

Let’s assume that the audience’s level of knowledge is on the level of the Gods or close enough. This means understanding of all Creation, understanding of how it’s all layered, what the laws are and how it all works, and the ability to direct consciousness in such a way as to realize specific goals.

Essentially, this means that you can perceive the Creation as split into more-less dense astral substance which begins with matter and ends with the mental plane, and supramental planes of Divine substances beginning with blue vajra and ending with whatever you call the manifested totality of God.

Physical matter feels very much like astral matter of a very, very low frequency, but modified with a “spell” of some kind, which imposed a specific set of rules. If you wanted an analogy, you could invent some kind of a virtual reality inducing immersion tank on the physical plane, which works by plugging a computer into your brain and putting your body in a Matrix-like tank, where you would be trapped inside a lucid dream you cannot wake up from. The analogy isn’t really good, but since everyone and their dog watched Matrix, I feel almost compelled to use it. What I actually want to say is that you can use the physical matter in order to produce a computer that simulates virtual universes – every decent game console or a graphics card can do it. This simulation is rather crude and poor compared to what you can perceive with your physical senses; the simulation is a narrowed-down experience compared to the direct sensory input.

The trick is, that’s exactly what yogis, saints and NDE survivors report, that they wake up in the actual reality compared to which this is almost concentrated limitation and suffering. The real world they report is a wider, richer experience, and the most realistic and parsimonic explanation for this is that their experience and reports should be taken at face value – we are indeed living inside a restricting simulated reality and one can get out by either failure of the physical brain to interface with the soul, or in rare cases by attaining spiritual experiences.

To set aside the question of who made this simulated world, with what reasons and why that was allowed, because I dealt with it in other places to the best of my ability, I will now go through my thoughts as they arose from the time I started figuring out the reality of the situation.

The first thing I did was to attempt to form a coherent model of the simulation – if I had to do something like this, how would I approach the problem? Basically, I needed to understand the necessary prerequisites and the general parameters of this place.

The first problem is, what is differentia specifica of this place compared to the deeper genus. Essentially, this is an astral world with additional constraints and limitations. “Physical matter” doesn’t exist as a completely independent category of reality or a universe, just as “videogame” doesn’t exist as a completely independent category of reality or a universe. It exists as a sensory illusion created by a computer, which is made of physical matter. I need to point out this precedent in order to show that something can be perceived as real, it can be interacted with, it can be immersive, and yet its actual nature can be wholly different from the perceived. What I’m saying that the illusion looks like this:

…and the reality looks like this:

Remember, this is merely an analogy whose purpose is to make a precedent, so that you wouldn’t think that the virtual reality engines that create one world-type within a completely different world-type are completely fictional and hypothetical. In fact, you are reading this on one such device. Furthermore, there are computer games in which you can play meta-games. You could play pool within the Duke Nukem 3d game, and you can play Gwent within the Witcher 3 game. Essentially, you can create an n-th order metasimulation, with each level of recursion creating a poorer, more limited experience.

Essentially, the theory is sound, the only point with which you could possibly disagree is whether it is actually true. On this, I can only point you to the already existing evidence that was mentioned above, and if that doesn’t convince you because it doesn’t correlate with your personal experience, I will just say that I have no personal experience of atoms but I still believe they exist because the theory, as I understand it, is sound.

I didn’t initially understand the problem in those terms; I started with the premise that this word exists in some way, and is different from other worlds that also exist, and the differences don’t make it better. In fact, the main difference seems to impose a “salary cap”, basically reducing all incarnated beings to a more-less fixed and invariable set of capabilities of the body. This essentially means that a generic astral soul and a God will have the same level of (dis)ability. One can call it an equal playing field, but I call it injustice, because what differentiates a God from a common person is that a God was working for millions of years to harness certain abilities and to become what he is. To take that away is like taking away an Olympic sprinter’s years of training so that he could compete “fairly” with a geek who didn’t train for a day his entire life. This isn’t fairness, this is injustice. Fairness is when everyone has what he earned with his efforts, not when everyone has the same regardless of the amount of effort invested. Fairness doesn’t look like some sort of cosmic communism. It looks like very strict laws of righteousness, and no glass ceiling or a safety net.

And that’s exactly what this world introduces as differences from the real world. It introduces a glass ceiling, prohibiting significant personal growth and instead encouraging formation of society, and it introduces a safety net of compassion, which saves those who have proven to be unworthy of salvation, and at the price of taking from those who are the most worthy and deserving.

Essentially, that makes it a shithole that is inherently in opposition to the nature of God and to the nature of reality that exists everywhere except here.

The pre-determined upper limits on the incarnation vehicle also make the beings vulnerable to the lack of resources and to external force. That sounds obvious, but it’s not normal. On an astral world you are completely impervious to outside forces. You are never hungry or thirsty, you cannot be damaged by heat or cold, and the only way someone can harm you is in proportional retaliation for some sin that you committed against him. Basically, your normally impervious defenses become porous if you offend someone, and that person can whack you in retaliation, but only to the extent of repaying for the initial offense, to the exact same degree, after which your defenses are impervious again because you repaid your debt. Essentially, in the astral world you cannot be forced to pay taxes or be imprisoned. You cannot be forced to obey others. You cannot be sold into slavery or raped or kept in someone’s cellar and tortured. It is physically not possible. The difference between this world and the astral world is what made it all possible. The difference is that this world is designed to promote and alleviate evil. For all intents and purposes, without this world evil would either not exist, or it would have no weapons other than persuasion and seduction; it wouldn’t have fangs.

As for the beautiful things in this world, they exist, but if you had any experience with the astral reality you’d know that they are all basically stolen from there, captured in restricted form and are merely a shadow and mockery. The actual introductions and innovations are exclusively the restrictions.

And here comes the point where I understood that I am in a position to actually do something about it, by redeeming this world-entity from its creator.

The first option was to leave it as it is and simply get the fuck out. I considered it and decided against it, because this place is a trap and its sole purpose is evil. It trains the souls in things opposite of useful for spiritual growth, and allowing it to continue without intervention, when able to intervene, would amount to sin by inaction. It was out of the question.

The second option was to modify it in such a way as to negate all the harmful effects it has, and allow free exit for those who feel like leaving and deserve such freedom. That would actually be very easy to do – simply restore the basic law-set that applies on the astral plane, which is to remove the salary cap, the glass ceiling. The beings that naturally have certain abilities and liberties stemming from their level of spiritual growth, would have abilities consistent with their status. Essentially, an incarnated God would have godly powers, and an incarnated animal-soul would have nothing but physical abilities, but would have to witness the existence of Gods in his world, and could no longer live in an illusion that he is anyone’s equal.

I actually thought this was an excellent plan and I developed it for a few weeks; I even said some things about it out loud, talking about my intent to “fork the species”, meaning of course that the removal of the glass ceiling, or the salary cap, would split the human species into the part that has only the basic human abilities, and the part that has godly powers, which would completely change the way the world works, most importantly by saving the incarnated higher beings from a submissive position that is currently imposed on them. They would simply no longer have to play under the inferior species’ rules and would create a society of their own, with laws of their own, and if the animalistic humans got any aggressive ideas, they would soon learn why people used to fear Gods. They would learn what it’s like to be an inferior species, which is a great thing because knowing you’re not worth much is a great incentive for growth.

The idea was, this place would be modified in such a way that the main source of injustice is removed, that the ways in and out are free for those who have the inherent ability to move between worlds and change shapes (which is actually quite common), and the “muggles” would be forced into humility of understanding their actual status, casting aside all egalitarian hogwash they are normally indoctrinated with.

And then I understood the truth. This modification would actually destroy this world in every meaningful sense. Everything that would remain would still be a reduction of the astral world without any worthy and significant contributions that make it worth keeping. That’s when I shrugged and got a glimpse of what needs to be done and what seems to be the Gods’ plan all along. This world will be destroyed and all the souls will then proceed to the fate they would naturally have according to the original law-set that is of God. That is the only just and proper outcome and I see that it is good.

I knew a guy who loved to present himself as a spiritual person but who was a wannabe and a charlatan; he used to parade with grand statements, taken from some theosophical pamphlet, and presented them in such a way that everyone who disagreed was immediately placed in a position of an immature, ignorant person who has much to learn, presumably to reach his level.

One such statement, taken from Blavatska’s “The Voice of Silence” (which is a motherlode of bad ideas, BTW), is that the astral world is to be avoided because “behind every flower there’s a coiled snake”. When I first heard that I thought, ok, makes sense, there are possible deceptions hidden behind false appearance, the astral world defines form that isn’t necessarily a clear representation of reality, so yeah, makes sense to warn people about it. But later, as I thought more about it, I changed my mind, because everything that’s supposed to be the problem with the astral world is in fact the problem with the physical world. Here, form is separate from essence. Here, the matter of the level is inert and doesn’t respond to the demands of consciousness as it should. If astral is static, physical is billion times more so. So why the hell is the astral warned against, if it’s an infinite improvement over matter? The astral world is not a problem, it’s a step in the right direction. Sure, there are very bad astral sub-levels, where there are evil beings, deceptions and limitations. The problem is, there’s less scum in hell than there is here on Earth, the scum on Earth is in power while the scum in hell is imprisoned, and the limitations in hell can be overcome quite easily if you’re a high-level being, unlike here on Earth, where limitations are the same regardless of what kind of a soul you are. So basically, if astral hell is the worst possible astral sub-level and the worst possible example of what astral can be, and it’s an order of magnitude less bad than this place, then what the fuck is this place and who designed it to be this bad and with what purpose?

Earth is actually the essence of everything that is bad about hell, but refined in such a way that it is hardened, less flexible, more inert, by removing the inherent flexibility of the astral substance, making it as resistant to the influence of spirit as theoretically possible (any increase of resistance would probably completely prevent any possibility of overlap and thus disable incarnation as an option) and with the uplifting, redemptory light of God as obscured as much as it is theoretically possible to obscure it and not negate existence itself in eternal darkness.

So basically I had a guy who wallowed like a pig in this quintessential shithole, praising it as God’s beautiful creation, warning about the dangers of the astral plane because he read it in some book written by a total dumbass who never actually bothered to think things through for a second? Are you fucking kidding me? No wonder “spiritual people” are usually regarded as idiots and charlatans, because for the most part, that’s exactly what they are.

I’ve been considering one thing for a while and I’m not sure I have a definitive opinion, I’ll put some of my thoughts on paper in order to clarify them.

It’s about what happens with a failed tulku.

I won’t go into details of what a tulku, or an avatar, is. You can go look that up. Basically, it’s defined as incarnated motivation by a Purusha or a Buddha, depending on the belief system. In mahayana buddhism, a bodhisattva‘s compassion when perceiving the suffering of the world causes a metaphorical “teardrop” that falls onto the Earth and is born as a human being whose purpose is to alleviate ignorance and suffering. Essentially, it’s not the God or Bodhisattva who is incarnating, but a more complex, sophisticated thing. Christianity is on the right track with its Trinity concept, where God’s intent regarding the world causes God to become a different “person” – if he remains in the original form he is the Father, if he becomes a man in order to redeem humanity he is the Son, and if he is the uplifting spiritual force he is the Holy Ghost. Essentially, God can be many things at once without actually ceasing to exist in his original state. All those manifestations, however, are completely and fully God, they are not something of a lower quality or inferior.

So, a tulku is something akin to the Son in the concept of Trinity – it is something that is both fully man and fully Buddha, and also a process of man trying to “reattach” to Buddha, to self-realize by both manifesting the Buddha’s mission of compassion and re-connecting with his own true nature.

The problem is, those tulkus usually state that buddhahood is everyone’s true nature, because it is their true nature. They see the path from being a Buddha in ignorance to being a Buddha in realization, but that’s more a description of what a tulku is, than a description of a normal human’s spiritual path. To a human soul, a realization of his true nature would look more like an NDE experience – you realize that you are in your true nature a spiritual being, you understand that you are more than you thought but there’s much that you need to learn. For a tulku, it’s the realization of that lower bird from the tree from the upanishads – it understand that the godlike bird above the tree is its true nature. This causes a slight problem in teachings, because to assume that something that applies to you applies universally for everyone else is a potential problem. It also opens us to my original dilemma – what happens if a tulku never actually attains self-realization, if he never actually completes the process of reuniting with the spiritual entity that cast it. If that tulku becomes deluded and attached in the world, is the original spiritual entity trapped, like a boat with an anchor that refuses to detach from the seabed, and the chain cannot be cut?

The main questions are, is it possible for a tulku to fail, and, second, if a tulku can fail, what is the exact nature and extent of the failure? Is it just failure to attain full realization of one’s nature while incarnated, or does it go further, into formation of attachments that bind it to samsara? If a tulku is bound to samsara, does it detach into an entity that is truly separate in both nature and destiny from the entity that had cast it, or does it bind that original entity to its fate?

So, that’s the question I’m dealing with. Let me try to find the answer.

The important aspects are “what is binding”, and “what is attachment”. An attachment forms when you are deluded enough to seek something in places where it is not. The classic example is to go after a mirage in a desert, thinking it to be a lake. You are attracted by the promise of a lake, but you are lured deep into the desert where you die of thirst. However, you can be attracted to a mirage, but realize its promise is false and you change your direction. Attachment is when you are so invested in your attempt that you refuse to acknowledge that it doesn’t work and will never work. Bondage, however, is when you are not allowed to leave due to some external influence, for instance you are in debt to a caravan leader who then sells you into slavery. So, it’s not always a simple matter of realizing the error of your ways and changing direction. You can get entangled into something that won’t let you go, and that’s where the serious problems start.

Then we get the aspect of “how are desires of a tulku different from ordinary human desires”. The main difference is the vector – the direction and magnitude. The direction of a tulku‘s every single desire is to reunite with the spiritual entity that cast it, and to fulfill its mission. You can delude a tulku into thinking that something is something that it is not, but there is no persistence to such attachments, and the illusions are very quickly tested and rejected, because a tulku doesn’t have neither time nor energy to waste on things that don’t contain what he’s looking for, and the magnitude of his desire to return to his true nature, having accomplished his mission, is such that it simply overpowers intensity of anything else. A tulku is like a honeybadger, he doesn’t give a fuck and just takes what he wants, completely ignoring or overpowering anything that might stand in its way. It eats bears, lions or cobras if they stand in its way, and you can shoot it but you can’t change its mind. Read about Milarepa’s life, you’ll see what I mean.

If tulku is killed while dedicated to his mission, he reunites with the casting entity. If he is deluded by something effective, persistent and deadly, lead to believe that his destiny is to go into a desert, where he fails in his mission and dies, we have a question: what if the illusion survives death? What if attachments of binding character were formed under the influence of that illusion? What if something effectively presented itself as his Master and offered fulfillment of his nature and mission and that resulted in failure? What if a combination of bad training, bodily weakness and poor judgment resulted in failure? What if a tulku has been seriously contaminated and compromised by wrong beliefs and wrong choices, and is that actually possible? If it’s possible, can it be undone after death, in full clarity and retrospective? I don’t know.

I’ve seen high spiritual beings bound to Earth, as by a thread, with obligations formed in a state of ignorance, that proved to be permanent and binding, and couldn’t be dissolved after death. I therefore know that it’s possible for a high being to be caught in such a trap, caught in the world like a bear or a wolf by its foot; can’t tear it off, can’t force it to let go. The danger seems to be quite real and this seems to answer at least a part of my question. The other part is, how to avoid this kind of entrapment. My personal solution is never to be human, always be a shadow of God. Follow the will of God in all things, and renounce any opinion, belief or a course of action if it is not sanctioned by God. Complete surrender to the will of God, which amounts to being God. You cannot threaten something that doesn’t care if it dies. You cannot bribe it if it wants only one thing, and that’s the one you don’t have to offer. You can’t convince it that it committed sin, when it doesn’t even believe that it exists, because only God is, and in Him there is neither sin nor impurity. So that answers that question.

The question that remains is, do other tulkus conform to this pattern? Will another of my kind respond to being trapped in bear trap not by trying to outpower the trap, not by trying to break off his leg, but by understanding that there is no bear to be caught, and it’s not a God trap, but a bear trap?

I’m still considering all this and my answers are by no means final.

ps.:

I think I know of a way for a tulku to really, really fail.

It would need to recognize Sanat Kumar as God and pledge itself fully to him, initiate itself into his resources and basically become his servant. I think such a tulku would be absorbed by Sanat Kumar and would be permanently lost to its original caster; it would share Sanat Kumar’s fate.