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Russia formally recognized Donbass “republics” and put them under Russia’s defensive “umbrella”. Predictably, the West introduced the sanctions they would have introduced anyways, so it’s a net zero loss for Russia. However, I think now would be a great time for the Ukrainian gas pipeline to be closed due to safety concerns. You know, questions about poor maintenance, war region, fascist “government” in power, that kind of a thing. Safety first.

However, since Ukraine is not a problem, but more akin to a disease-infested corpse posing as a country, the real enemy needs to be persuaded to fuck off by the only argument they understand: military force. It would be a great time for Syria to re-assert government control over the entirety of its territory, especially the parts where America is maintaining its illegal presence in order to harbour terrorists and steal oil. And if an American aircraft carrier comes to their aid and in turn ends up being sunk, that would be too bad.

In the mean time, I am making preparations of the kind you would expect if a war was imminent; I even bought a very good radiation dosimeter, in case this gets nasty and the exact nature of “nasty” isn’t reported in the news (or there is no news).

Cascade collapse

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People have been adopting leftist attitudes and allowing the leftists to assume control of governments and meta-governmental institutions for decades in the West, probably guided by the sentiment that the Soviet block collapsed, the cold war is over, communism is no longer a political threat, so what could go wrong, especially since the communists changed their appearance and started fighting for either the environment or women’s rights or gay rights or veganism or what not, instead of workers’ rights, so they stopped looking like the stereotypical communists.

I’ll tell you what can go wrong.

Communism is not just a political threat. It’s an ideological poison. It feeds off of narcissism that makes people think they are changing the world for the better, while they are just sabotaging a system that works, until it crashes, because there are too many artificially imposed obstacles to overcome. Introduce environmental laws that make companies change their processes, and say they will adapt. Ban or restrict certain products, and say the marketplace will adapt. Introduce artificial stimuli that helps defective products like the wind power turbines, and hinders superior products such as natural gas turbines and nuclear power plants, thus making something inherently defective into a dominant factor, and driving something inherently stable and efficient into extinction. Then introduce covid restrictions and lockdowns, and trade wars and sanctions to your main trade partners.

This world can now easily feed 8 billions of people, while it could barely feed more than a billion for most of its history. It could barely feed 3 billions in the 1970s. You know what’s the reason behind the difference? It’s the economy. Not science, not technology, not democracy and human rights, but economy. When the economy grows to a certain size, you create certain types of jobs that couldn’t otherwise exist. For instance, if you have a village of a hundred or so families, you can only have a few primary jobs – farmers, fishermen, a local merchant perhaps, and a blacksmith. Possibly a priest. You just don’t have enough interest for anything else, so no other business can have enough demand to stay profitable. Also, there’s not enough free time or energy anyone can devote to anything beyond survival, so even literacy is uncommon. However, if you grow the economy enough, like in the medieval Italy, you get people who build and maintain roads, people who maintain the rule of law, merchants and tradesmen of all kinds, and even artists and scientists, when there’s a sufficiently large wealthy ruling class that can afford to buy trinkets and keep a Leonardo or Michelangelo on hire, giving them enough time to work on unproductive things with no immediate benefit for survival. Extend this more, and you start developing precise mechanics, steam technology, then electricity and so on, and eventually you end up with everyone having a smartphone in their pocked, connected to a global information network, even if they are stupid enough to think the Earth is flat and use the device to argue this nonsense online.

The larger the economy, the larger percentage of jobs that deal with niches such as laptop repair, entertainment, or, in my case, making it possible for businesses to navigate various totalitarian restrictions imposed by the states upon the banking system in order to prevent anyone from being able to conduct business if some socialist busybody put their business type on some “high risk” list, and they don’t know how to navigate hundreds of forms in order to satisfy the anal needs of risk departments. There’s absolutely no way this could be a viable business model in anything other than a global dystopia, but it is because here we are.

So, if something breaks in an economy of this size, with so many jobs and business models that depend on exactly this level of intricacy and specialisation in order to be viable, and the environment changes enough so that they would have to re-qualify in order to do something else, you are basically playing a game of finding a critical threshold – if you mess up enough things, you no longer have a small percentage of people who need to adapt to the changing landscape; you have cascade failure, where you lose entire industrial branches, and thousands of businesses that satisfied various specialised needs on the market that no longer exist.

So, what happens when you mess things up enough so that the business can either raise the prices in order to survive, or just outright die? They will raise the prices. Then people with low income will no longer be able to survive, and the state will have to either print money or raise taxes in order to finance subventions. These taxes will put additional pressure on the productive parts of society which will then again raise the prices to keep themselves afloat, and with every iteration of this cycle some of them will price themselves out of the market, and an increasing percentage will switch to grey or black economy – basically, they will continue doing business, but will no longer pay taxes, or register with the state in any way, which will keep the economy running but force the state to either accept the permanently reduced tax income, or crack down on the grey/black economy and thus make survival of the population harder, and increase criminality of the entire economy, because they will introduce evolutionary pressure that favours the absolutely criminal and unscrupulous types. So, with several iterations of this you end up with the kind of dysfunction we had in the collapse of Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, or in some shithole like Somalia.

At this point, the economy is no longer large enough to support anything sophisticated – no car industry, no airplane industry, no spaceflight, no merchant fleet, no microelectronics, no software industry, just piracy and armed robbery, smuggling, black market and subsistence farming. Such economy, extended globally, couldn’t support more than a billion people, which means that at least seven billion people would die. I say “at least” because this would create such a disastrous environment that the seven billion people doomed to die would first destroy and eat that one billion farmers who would otherwise have a chance, because the environment would initially favour the unscrupulous predatory types, who would be the last to survive, but who are also the least qualified to survive on their own once they destroy everybody else because they are inherently unproductive, so they would eventually die out.

That’s the future I see us progressing towards with every government regulation, with every restriction and lockdown, and when they say it’s all justified if it saves even one life, or reduces the CO2 output by one bit, I think to myself: “you damn fools, you will kill billions by trying to save thousands”. Economy is usually quite adaptive and reacts well to small changes and detriments, but when you break it enough, when you find that threshold of cascade collapse, there is no going back.

There’s all that talk about inflation, but what we’re seeing is not inflation, it’s contraction of the entire economy and the higher prices are the result of the reduced efficiency of the entire system, and my analysis says we are seeing the initial stages of the cascade collapse.

Geopolitical scenery

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America and the UK are quite hysterically trying to start a war with Russia, and not just any kind of war, but an indirect one where the Ukrainians will die, and they will sell weapons. I was thinking about reasons for that, and they seem to be multiple and layered.

The first is that a war would help their economies, which are beyond the brink of collapse, and are artificially made to look like they are functioning due to enormous amounts of money printing. Basically, the only companies that are actually functioning there are Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Tesla and similar tech giants. Amazon is making good money due to covid restrictions, because people are ordering things online, but this is at the expense of brick and mortar stores, and I would say that it is producing a net loss for the economy in general. Apple is profiting from Intel and AMD being stuck with inefficient x86 technology, and from their own investment in ARM instruction set SOC. Google is an advertisement-powered censorship engine, basically working on directing society into questionable directions and financing it by getting people to buy stuff. Netflix is a leftist propaganda platform that tries to mask their actual product as entertainment. Microsoft is selling mostly their hosting services that compete with Amazon AWS, and Tesla is transitioning from selling mostly bullshit to selling mostly cars, although with half a steering wheel (because they apparently don’t have winding mountain roads in America) and no gear shifter, because the car “knows better” whether you want to go forward or back at a parking lot. I couldn’t make this shit up. In any case, their stock market consists of those few big names, that sell mostly entertainment and ads, and an army of the walking dead. The entire thing is starting to unravel, and America desperately needs a distraction that will then be blamed for all the problems, like covid was released/exploited to wind down the overheated economy gradually and reduce the intensity of the inevitable crash.

Also, America wants to prevent Europe from becoming their competition by forming useful bilateral economic ties with China and Russia, and keep it in a position of a vassal entity that will be dependent on buying overpriced American garbage, such as the “freedom gas” and iPhones. Having the EU not use the available Nord Stream pipeline with Russia, convincing EU to “have the free market lower the gas prices” and “not sign long term gas supply contracts with Russia to keep Russia on its toes” had the result of keeping Europe starved for energy during winter, and increasing the gas prices due to market speculation and artificially restricted supply. Also, if the Ukrainian pipeline “just happened” to stop working due to war with Russia, that would be a real shame because then the EU would have no choice but to buy “freedom gas”. Of course, the Ukrainians would freeze and starve in that case, but they are seen as more trouble than they are worth anyway; the country itself was sucked dry already and both EU and America would have to actually start to invest resources in it to keep it viable, and will serve nicely as cannon fodder in a nice little war that will both hamper Russia’s economic development, kill Russians at both sides of the front line, and line pockets of American and UK companies with money.

This wonderful plan is not really working because Russia is somehow too stupid to fall into this trap despite all the wonderful things it has to gain from it, such as millions of impoverished dependent people to suck its resources dry, neglected and devastated infrastructure that would have to be rebuilt, and population whose significant portion is indoctrinated to hate them. Instead, the stupid Russians, who failed to get the hint that they are supposed to be invading Ukraine, are turning to China to sign economic, political and military deals, and made a joint statement which can be summed up to a joint Russian-Chinese middle finger to the collective West – “screw you, we are carving our own path together and leaving you behind, because we’re done with your shit”.

The funniest thing is that America and the UK recently demonstrated complete inability to think strategically, by screwing France over with that AUKUS submarine deal with Australia, and thought they could just assume complete NATO unity over Russia a month later; France decided it’s payback time, so Macron went to Russia, and made a joint statement with Putin which basically completely backs Russian position regarding Ukraine – it can’t join NATO because it has a state policy of “returning” Crimea by military means and tries to get NATO to be their little bitch and fight their war for them, so France basically said “no submarine deal, no war with Russia, because we’re done being abused and exploited by America and their dickless lap dog”. I wonder how the CIA-controlled Western media are going to spin this, but it might be insane enough to be entertaining. I somehow doubt it; it’s usually just depressing.

Most other EU countries aren’t that interested in fighting Russia for the sake of the incredibly corrupt and nasty Ukrainians, either, despite American pressure, so all the talk about NATO unity basically serves to hide the fact that there isn’t any. Most Eastern European countries joined NATO because they saw it as a way of “making progress” by going in a generally westward direction, at the point where Russia didn’t look like any kind of a strategic enemy anymore, so the idea of a new cold war (that actually looks like it’s about to turn hot) is very far from what they think they subscribed to.

Furthermore, Russia not only refused to play a role in the American script, but turned the table and issued a “non-ultimatum” which basically tells the Americans to remove their shit from the Russian borders and back to the pre-1997 positions, or things will take a non-diplomatic turn, which is so far from America’s ability to comprehend that they kept talking about Ukraine as if anybody in Russia gives a damn. The Russians actually made it quite clear that it’s America they have a problem with, not their vassal states and “alliances”, and now that the Americans rejected this “non-ultimatum”, it remains to be seen what Russia will do. One thing is certain: France will sit this one out, and judging by the wide-eyed terror displayed by most of NATO countries, America and the UK will be on their own against Russia and China, and absolutely nobody will be there to help them, while France will make lucrative military and economic deals with the Russia-China alliance, soon to be joined by other major world countries.

Forgiveness

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Here’s another exchange, this time from the blog comment section, that is so good it would be a shame not to make it an article:

Katarina wrote:

What about forgiveness? I find that a little bit confusing in a practical way. I am able to forgive almost everyone, and find that quite liberating. But there is one person which has done me great harm and I am not sure about forgiveness. I feel that I still have links to that person, and a lot of bad emotions, particularly anger. I can´t leave that in the past.
But also remember you said forgiveness can be fatal thing.

Forgiveness is a very difficult topic to talk about, because of Christianity. They made it basically a given that not only are we under pressure to forgive – because there’s an implicit threat that if we don’t, we’ll be treated mercilessly – but also that God isn’t really God unless He forgives. In all of that, the concept of justice is not only sidelined, but is practically made a “bad word”.
I would introduce some common sense into the whole thing, and first of all define the basic concepts we’re dealing with, so that we can think clearly about them.
First of all, God’s nature is good, and this nature is the basis of all righteousness and, for lack of a better word, ethics. You can’t have God in your consciousness and be evil; evil by definition severs connection with God. Things that are good are such because they contain some aspect of harmony and alignment with God, which is the fundamental spiritual opulence and wealth behind all wellbeing, happiness, truth, reality, knowledge etc.
Evil is, by definition, any orientation of consciousness away from God, and, consequently, actions that are performed in such a state of spiritual darkness. Also, there is a special category of evil that goes even beyond mere acts in a state of spiritual darkness, where darkness is embraced, where one feels it fully as one’s own, and acts in specific hatred and opposition to the light of God. This is what I would call “sin”, and this is where I seriously differ from the Christians, who use this word too lightly, in my opinion. To them, even masturbation is a sin. To me, it’s not necessarily a sin even to be in a state of spiritual darkness, because one can say that darkness has “will” of its own, and defines what you can experience, what you can feel, and how you can act, to a very large extent which basically excuses a blind man for not seeing and admiring the light. For the most part, being in darkness is the property of this world, and we can’t really help it. However, to embrace and justify darkness, to say there is nothing more, to attack the light and those who embrace it – this choice to embrace evil and be its instrument, this is truly sin against God. To be an instrument of ignorance and suffering, to be that thing that is terrible about this world, to be hell to others, that is sin.
So, what about forgiveness? It’s my opinion that when we define things properly, the question doesn’t truly arise. You see, if one is in spiritual darkness and acts blindly and deprived of the light of God, he is more in the order of a hapless victim of the world, and more in the order of someone we should feel sorry for, than someone that ought to be condemned and punished for his actions. Such souls are weak, because the strong ones bring their own light into the world, and they fight against darkness even despite overwhelming ignorance and darkness, but the weak ones are suppressed and extinguished by the world, and their existence is seldom more than meaningless victimization and suffering. Should we hate them? No. Should we feel particular sympathy for them? Also, I would say, no; I would reserve sympathy for those who remember the light of God and who fight darkness of the world with all their might, but who make mistakes, stumble and fall under a great load. For those who just blend into the background noise of a world of darkness I feel nothing. I wouldn’t condemn them, but I wouldn’t lift a finger to save them, either.
What about those who joined the enemy, who chose to become his soldiers and minions, who embrace the darkness and become its apostles and prophets? What about those, true sinners in a philosophical meaning of the word, where sin is an act of opposition to God? Literal opposition – those are the beings who would try to seduce others away from faith, who would torment the saints, who would try to hide the truth from others? To forgive them, I think, is to embrace darkness yourself. I think they should be rejected and condemned, but ultimate judgment and vengeance should be surrendered to God, and not pursued personally. To quote the Bible: “Vengeance is Mine; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; for their day of disaster is near, and their doom is coming quickly.”
I understand the concept of forgiveness in the sense of surrendering ultimate judgment to God, because while we are here we don’t know all the facts, and can thus judge wrongly. We are also not as just as the Lord, and this might mean that we would either punish too harshly, or too leniently, out of fear of error. It is much better to cede judgment to the one whose ultimate job it is, because the perfect light of God is the ultimate judge of all darkness, and no stain can survive in His presence. The Earth can turn on its own without need for us to get out and push; if that is so, how much more can God, who is the ultimate Good, take care of justice? Our job, however, is to stay true to God, and to remain in His holy presence, so that we could do good. This means making choices – what to embrace, and what to condemn and reject; and, often, choosing not to reject certain things or beings is to reject God himself. If you’re in love with God, truly and strongly, contempt and hatred for all that is His opposite will be in your nature, and you won’t even have to think about it. Forgiveness, I fear, is one of those things we are forced to think about too much, because they are spiritually unpalatable, and yet they try to convince us that it is essential for our spiritual wellbeing. However, once we clarify things by thinking about them in clear and unequivocal terms, it becomes much less of a dilemma.

I think the concept of forgiveness is additionally blurred by those who have an actual experience of God, and perceive it as “acceptance” and “forgiveness”, and I would say that those come from misunderstanding of what happens when darkness of the world is removed from you and you find yourself in the presence of God. All the limitations fall off, because they are of the world. All the ignorance, judgments, misapprehensions, wrong beliefs – they are of the world, of the body, and just fall off in the holy presence. One interpretation is that God is acceptance and forgiveness, but I say that a better one is that God is such harsh judgment of all darkness, that none of it can survive in His presence, and so it all falls away, provided that you are spiritually detached from it all, and can allow it. If you can’t separate yourself from darkness, you will feel all the pain darkness feels in the presence of the scorching light that suffers no competition. So, God is very forgiving of sin and evil if you don’t hold on to them, and if you let go of all the darkness as soon as you are given the option. However, those who would hold on to evil and darkness, they would discover why Shiva is seen as the Destroyer, of all evil and darkness.
Of course, to hold onto sin of others in the presence of God, that would make no more sense than to hold on to one’s own, so that’s another way to understand forgiveness; you can state your complaints about the way you were treated by others, when you are in the presence of God, but then you will receive healing through knowledge that there indeed is the Light that makes all darkness and evil insignificant, and knowledge of how much God is the opposite of all that is wrong; it becomes obvious that God is the ultimate judgment upon all evil, and you can immediately surrender all fears that somehow all the terrible things that took place in this world will be somehow swept under the carpet, forgotten and forgiven. If that fear is the reason why one is reluctant to forgive, then the presence of God, and insight into His true nature, are sufficient to rid one of that misapprehension instantly.

I might be missing the intended scope of the idea, though.
It now crossed my mind that the worst sinners that I know of live in a perpetual state of complaint and whining, directed at all kinds of imaginary slights by others, and justify all their evil by their imaginary victimhood.
The “take the beam out of your own eye first, and then we can talk about the speck in your brother’s eye” might be intended for them, and it would be perfectly appropriate. A perpetual self-justification loop that uses others’ real or imaginary slights or faults is a very real phenomenon, and it is the exact opposite of vipassana, which is detachment from one’s patterns and willingness to let go.
I have seen into the mind of sinners, and all seem to be “rehearsing” the defense of their evil lives, and they expect to play their act before a compassionate God, who will forgive them, and punish harshly all who transgressed against them. This seems to be the rule, rather than an exception, so it could be said that true spirituality starts once you voluntarily stop that, let go of all self-justification, of seeking punishment for those who made you aware of something bad that you were doing, and so on. If we see the instruction to forgive others and turn attention to your own faults as something that is directed at this profile of people, then I can find nothing objectionable about it; however, I usually deal with inquiries from the opposite spectrum, from people who were actually harmed and who think they are required to just suck it up and not complain, while the evil doers will get some universal blanket pardon, which makes them feel injustice of the whole idea. Basically, the answer is that God is so inherently opposite to and intolerant of all kinds of evil and darkness, that there is no fear of Him just forgiving it; cleansing bad karma is a very unpleasant and painful process, and I guarantee that all evil-doers will either have to go through that process, or die. There will be no forgiveness, not in that sense.
However, I saw evil people with their lists of complaints directed at good people who “sinned against them”, and if those think that God is going to play along with that tune, they have a surprise coming.

There’s also one thing that needs to be clearly stated: there is a big difference between being contaminated by darkness because you endured suffering inflicted by others, and being contaminated by darkness because you inflicted suffering upon others, and you chose to be and do evil. The first form of contamination can be trivially removed simply by seeing the light and letting go of darkness – to forgive, if you really wish to state it that way. That is so because the darkness doesn’t really have a hold on you; you just got used to it because of the lack of light, and you are the one who can simply let go.
However, in the second case you are integrated with darkness on the level of your spiritual structure, formed by your choices, and no matter how much someone would want to forgive you, it just doesn’t work that way. As I said, dealing with this form of karmic contamination requires a great deal of suffering, and it’s a very nasty process. This is why I’m having problems with forgiveness – you can’t really forgive an unrepented sinner without actually accepting his sin, because there really isn’t a difference between the two; the choice hasn’t yet been made and paid for. Rather, one should surrender all judgment to God, and simply distance oneself from souls who are entangled in darkness as a result of their own evil choices, and let things be resolved in one way or another.
Of course, it is quite difficult to know whether one is dark because of external contamination, or because of a choice for darkness. While we are in this place, it’s easy to misjudge those things, because they can appear similar, which is one reason why it is not wise to be hasty with judgment of others, and it’s also the reason why I appear to be so easy to deceive by the evil ones: I prefer to be deceived, because that is the sin of others, but if I judge someone wrongly, that would be a sin of my own.

Practical vipassana

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(Continuation of the conversation with Robin)

Robin wrote:

Danijel wrote:

However, I managed to actually test this hypothesis personally, several times, when I was in a completely pure and detached state, after having finished writing a book; I was feeling an active external world-based force trying to very aggressively cause desires for something worldly (which felt quite silly because it was iteratively testing things on me), and if it wasn’t working it would try harder and act quite hysterically. After the second or third time it happened, I mapped it quite precisely and I now have no doubts about the way it works and the motivations behind its actions. Now, I’m not even taking desires seriously; I see them as something trivial that will always happen while I’m here, but I can let it all go instantly once the guys up there have mercy on me and let me out. 🙂

This is really interesting. I had a related experience recently after working on the desire thing for a while of arriving home one evening and walking through the front door feeling a state of complete indifference to the world. Everything in the world felt dull and uninteresting and I didn’t feel any attraction or desire towards it what so ever. The meditation I was focusing on was drawing my full attention and everything else felt completely irrelevant. Then I woke up the next morning and found myself checking current house prices since the people I was with were talking about it the day before and by the end of it, some slight desire crept in, my state of detachment was less, my meditation focus was less and I started to feel contaminated again. Then I was like: “where is this shit coming from, just yesterday I was completely indifferent to this shit, wtf am I doing here?”.

There are two interpretations as to why we are susceptible to this. First is the obvious one – there is some latent desire within, in “seed-form”, and this seed is “watered” by external influences and made to grow. The second interpretation is that this world creates its own problems, and by the necessity of being incarnated here, we are “persuasible” – we keep trying to find solutions to extant and obvious problems, such as food, shelter, transport, protection from harm etc., and I think this is the correct interpretation for your example. It’s not that you have a latent desire for owning a house, that would survive the death of your physical body and cause rebirth, as those things are explained in classical literature; you just have a realistic issue at this point of your incarnate existence, and you can be “persuaded” by the world-based forces to try to find workable solutions to the problem while you are here. It’s in the same order as knowing you’ll have to eat in the future so you need to plan ahead and buy groceries to make lunch.
I think the most important thing about it is to be constantly aware and vigilant. We need to do things while here, yes, but there is a difference between doing and overdoing, which is something I’ve been made aware of recently. 🙂 Also, we need to be able to let go instantly when the duties and services we perform here are no longer required, and that’s basically not always easy; when I test myself for this, by creating a hypothetical scenario of having to leave this world today, it’s not attachment to things that would bother me in the slightest, it’s the duty and responsibility to people. How would they pay the bills, how would they manage logistics, did I leave them with sufficient knowledge and abilities to make due without me? Am I leaving them in a death-trap, or in a workable situation? If I am told from above that it’s my time to go, so it’s not a matter of choice, would I still feel bound by responsibility?
It’s not an easy thing to quit “cold turkey” something you’ve been doing for the better part of your life, and this, I think, is the problem with attachment. Not the silly things the scriptures warn us about, the stereotypical nonsense about people worrying about their business, money, property and so on. It’s the real issues that are the problem, not the obviously illusory ones; and if there’s anything real here, it’s the souls that are incarnate, especially if it’s your specific duty to care for them, and it’s not easy to just stop doing that when you’re told it’s no longer up to you, because your time here is up. I’m not sure I have the right answers here, at least not the universally applicable ones, because the entire situation might feel like a non-issue from a different standpoint that includes a wider perspective, such as viewing the totality of karmic intersections and branches of all involved, and understanding that there are no good solutions and stable states in this world; it’s by definition a quagmire of quicksand and landmines and not a place to build your lasting home, and that is as true for me as it is for everybody else, so if I am completely accepting this fact about my own life, why am I still insistent on trying to fix everybody else’s situation, as if that were possible here? It’s obviously something I’m struggling with, the over-exertion of responsibility for others into the realm of unhealthy, where by “unhealthy” I mean behaviour that doesn’t accept that things are inherently unfixable here, and no amount of investment of effort will change the fundamentals.
I think the real answer would be that the struggle against the nature of the world is the right approach while we are here, because that’s the only way to maintain your spiritual sanity and have a working soul-presence in the world; however, it needs to be understood that it’s not a battle against the world, but the battle for presence of God in one’s life, and once you’re out, you’re out, and we need to preserve sufficient awareness as to cut all energy investments and expenditures instantly, when it is no longer required for the actual goal, not the fictitious ones that constantly spawn in this mirage of a place.

Robin wrote:

Danijel wrote:

If I don’t care about getting a better car for myself, I can be persuaded to get one for my son, and I spend the better part of the last year thinking about it on some level, checking the options, budgeting for it etc.

I did spend a lot of last year obsessing about something similar I’m ashamed to admit, but in my case it was for me and not someone else 🙂 .

Oh, I’m certainly not above such things myself; I would just have to be in a realistic position where I actually needed a new car. 🙂 But barring that, I can be persuaded to pursue desires by proxy, and since those have the false legitimacy of being “selfless”, they are easier to fall for. Sure, there’s a core of legitimate responsibility in getting your kid a car, but what I ended up buying him is shooting past this legitimate core and into the realm of wild overachievement by a huge margin; I got him a fancier car than I’m driving. 🙂

Robin wrote:

Danijel wrote:

so it’s obviously some form of desire by proxy attached to me through the concepts of duty and responsibility for others. I don’t think it would be healthy to cut those things off completely because there are actual realities that can’t be ignored, such as there being an actual family I’m taking care of, and neglecting duties would have severe consequences, all of them bad. However, it is possible to “overachieve”, to go beyond the necessary and even reasonable, into the area of unhealthy obsession, which I was caught doing, so one obviously has to be very careful about it. Excess of a normally good thing is a bad thing.

I think if the desire relates to duty or responsibility for the sake of others it would have a different quality and be less of a problem. It that case, its more of a selfless desire for the sake of others.

I don’t know about that; it might actually be more of a problem, because it’s masked by virtue and therefore reduces your ability to control it. That’s what women usually tend to fall for; they project their desires into their children, and since that is falsely perceived as “altruistic” by the society, they get so wildly crazy about it, that it is possible for them to completely lose their spiritual detachment and identity in it. Basically, how is women projecting desires into their reproductive vector any different from men trying to inseminate as many women as possible, which is perceived by society as sinful? I don’t see a real difference; both are pure biology, animal behaviour, but one of the two managed to successfully cloak itself in the appearance of virtue.

Robin wrote:

Just as a follow up question, when you absorb something and it causes you disturbance, what is felt by you internally? For example, what is your emotional response when you experience the low emotional states as a result of the unsophisticated karmic mass? Do you experience all sorts of crazy thoughts, emotional states and desires which constitute the substance, actually identify with the substance and consequently feel that you have sinned, experience the resulting spiritual pain and feel remorse as defined as sincere regret over your own mistake or do you simply observe the suffering from a detached point of awareness with your sense of self extracted from it, equanimously without aversion or attraction until the suffering is spent? Since the karmic mass originates outside yourself is it appropriate to still own it and experience remorse? I would be really interested to hear anything further you could share about what you personally experience on the level of mind and emotions when taking on something and the steps you go through.

You absolutely feel everything because, once you absorbed the additional karmic mass, it *is* you. It became integrated into your soul-core and you feel all the emotions, trauma, stress, pain, attachment and other wildly energetic emotions that came with it; that’s the “increase in temperature” I so abstractly talked about, but it doesn’t feel abstract, and the “kinetic energy of the particles” feels like spiritual whirlpools, savagely violent; sin and justification for it, and when sufficiently detached, remorse and pain, violent pain you live through, and it’s no longer someone else’s, it’s yours because you integrated it within yourself. You need to “learn” the lessons again, because in this new state you “forget”, because you’re at the “higher temperature” now, and none of it feels like somebody else’s problem, because you are swallowed whole, and it often takes some time before you even understand what’s going on, why you are feeling all those things and why you are disturbed and in pain, or full of desires pointing in strange directions, and when you understand what’s going on, it means you achieved the first degree of control, that you attained detachment sufficient to understand that it’s energy vectors and not “yourself”, and as you increase in detachment and re-acquire the ability to observe the process with detachment and let the wild emotions unwind without you whipping them back up, you gradually remove “heat” from your system, which is the “secret” of vipassana, of just observing the emotions and thoughts and fears/desires, which divests energy from them and creates the conditions necessary for the gradual cooling of the system, and this process of cooling can be called either “suffering” or “remorse”; it feels like both, with a slight difference that makes “remorse” a better word, because it implies detachment; you can “suffer” while holding on to the “sinful” structure, and the pain of suffering can be selfish and arrogant, but “remorse” means the distinction of letting go.