Spiritual evolution is not a ladder. It’s also not a singular Path that leads to a singular Goal.

This is an important thing to know, because all kinds of spiritual and quasi-spiritual teachers and movements since Vivekananda have been convincing us otherwise. They have been convincing us that all religions and paths are like a web of rivers that all flow into the One Ocean which is God, and also, that they all originate from God, in one way or another, so it’s basically a dead loop that connects A to A by going through all kinds of places that have neither meaning nor true importance.

This is all false. It’s all a grave misunderstanding, in a sense that this is not at all what’s going on, or how things work. Also, playing the Relative/Absolute games of Vedanta doesn’t actually provide us with any useful answers, so I’m going to just ignore those trivial answers of the “everything is God” kind, because they are like some kind of a drug that makes you feel smart, but you’re really not.

You now probably expect me to give you an alternative simple answer that will make you feel like you know everything. I’m not going to do that. The actual answer is simple enough, but also complex enough that it’s not useful for ego tripping of that kind. Kalapas aggregate, and most aggregations don’t amount to much, really. You can call them souls, or you can call them potatoes for all it matters. However, with enough iterations some of those aggregations stumble upon something that actually works, and then we start getting something that can be called a soul, or you can call it a manifestation of Brahman in the Relative. However, the successful outcomes are so diverse, that it’s nowhere near being a singular pattern of evolution, that produces a singular good outcome. It’s more like a farmer’s market, where you have all kinds of fruits and vegetables, and they are all good, but a good tomato is vastly different from a good watermelon. And so, you have beings that manifest beauty, beings that manifest knowledge, and all kinds of other good things, and you can say that beauty is powerful, and music is powerful, and a nuclear explosion is powerful, but power is not measured on a singular dimension, and it’s not a scalar. Rather, it’s a n-dimensional tensor. If you try to reduce it to a scalar, you are completely missing the point. In fact, a good way of explaining this is human sexual dimorphism. Essentially, there is no such thing as “human”; there are men and women, and metrics of “good”, “successful” and “powerful” are completely different between them; male and female are completely parallel paths, and if you’re trying to merge them, you get less instead of more. This is why Hinduism represents peak spiritual states as a married couple of male and female deities, and it’s more than a metaphor; rather, it’s a way of explaining that there is no one correct answer to the question “what does God look like”. Also, the fact that there is a plurality of God-couples gives another dimension to this, because not only are Vishnu and Lakshmi equal but different answers to the question, but also the Shiva and Shakti couple give another, equally good answer, basically saying that human mind is so limited by the sexual dimorphism of the species, that God equation has male and female solutions, and not only that, but God-couple has multiple valid solutions, because God-outcomes of evolutions have different characters, flavours or however you want to phrase it.

This means that the conventional human way of conceiving the evolution-vector, originating probably in ancient Greece, is wrong. Simplified, this vector-concept states that if there is a relation of better-worse, on the “worse” endpoint you necessarily get the absolute evil that is so bad that it can’t possibly get worse by any modification, and anything you change on it can only make it less bad, and on the other side you get the absolute good that can’t possibly be modified in any way that would not make it worse. That’s not how it works in reality. In reality, there is a tree of options with multiple endpoints, some of which are various flavours of terrible, while some are various flavours of God, and each of those flavours has a male and female version.

The better-worse vector is a hard thing to get out of people’s heads, because it’s so ingrained in the Western theology that I don’t know where to even begin explaining it. However, let me illustrate the problem by citing something I’ve been dealing with recently: computers. Basically, you would expect that more powerful, newer computers are better than old, less powerful ones, but that’s not exactly how it works. A desktop and a laptop are different solutions to the “computer” equation, and the same generation has a laptop-solution, and a desktop-solution; those are comparable to “male” and “female” in our theology, where a good male outcome and a good female outcome are completely different, but they are both good, each with a multidimensional tensor of strengths and weaknesses, and if you try to combine the two, you get the worst of both: a heavy, big laptop that overheats like crazy, or a small, luggable desktop that’s also crap. However, if you allow good outcomes to be different, you get a MacBook Air as one solution, and a gaming/workstation desktop with a huge display, a mechanical keyboard, and tons of power and cooling, as the other solution. Both are the outcomes of the same technological generation and are equally modern, but “good” is not something that has a singular answer, which is why I have many computers. A “good” home server is a different thing than a “good” laptop, or a “good” desktop workstation, and then there are “good” Windows systems and “good” Mac systems, of both laptop and desktop flavours. Also, there’s a reason why I have an older ThinkPad – by almost every metric it’s worse than my M4 MacBook Air, but as something to carry to the beach and write an article there, under the pines, where pine resin occasionally drips down and makes a mess, or there is salt water spray from the waves that can get into the electronics, something that’s easy and cheap to repair, and puts a low price on total loss in case it gets outright destroyed, is “better” for the task. For instance, I wrote yesterday’s second article that way, and I wouldn’t have done it if I had to carry the new, expensive machine to a hazardous environment. The better, more expensive computer is suddenly “worse” if you need something rugged, cheap and potentially expendable, but good enough for performing all the necessary tasks. The one reason for all sorts of arguments is that people expect there to be a singular answer to “good”, but that’s not how things work. Complexity exists for a reason, and reductionism is usually a lossy process – in both material and spiritual spheres. That’s why I have a problem with Vedanta; it makes you feel smart, as if you have all the answers, but that’s the problem – historically, idiots always had all the answers. They “knew” that the lights on the night sky were a path of spilled milk, which is why it’s called the Milky Way. They “knew” there’s a rabbit on the Moon. They “knew” that Poseidon causes the earthquakes by banging his trident in fury. So, maybe it’s not about knowing answers to all questions, but about changing your way of thinking in ways that allow you to survive the understanding that reality is sometimes irreducible to your human limitations, and the best you can do is live with metaphors that each explain a small part, and give up on having all-encompassing simple answers.