I’m posting parts of my private conversation with Robin, which, I think, would be a welcome change from all the politics and economy. 🙂

Robin wrote:

This is where both Hinduism and Buddhism got it wrong, and I think I know why.
They correctly perceived that attachment is the problem, but they thought that the soul itself generates it; somehow, it likes the world and what it’s offering, due to ignorance or immaturity, and as it matures, it learns to let go of attachment and, ultimately, attain liberation/enlightenment.
This is not completely false (the souls actually do react to the world), but it’s actually the opposite of what seems to be going on; it’s like saying that you are caught in a massive object’s gravitational field because you feel attachment. Well, you feel attachment alright, but it’s being generated by the object, not yourself. The mass curves the spacetime and unless you achieve escape velocity, you’re caught in a trap. My guess as to why nobody got this is that it’s both a very difficult hypothesis to test (you would need to be in a state of complete purity and detachment in order to perceive the forces neutrally and objectively), and the corollaries are highly unpleasant, because you have to get rid of the assumption that the world is inherently good because it has been created by a good God, and everything that’s wrong is essentially your fault, which empowers you to solve problems. If the world is a sophisticated mouse trap, it’s a highly unpleasant and depressing thing to consider, because the possibility that you’re fucked is much greater than the possibility that you’ll make it out safe, which would be likely if it were indeed a test or a school or something else created by a benevolent being for a constructive purpose. 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. 🙂
It’s not completely true, though; I did have, and probably still do to some extent, something I might not be willing to let go of quite easily, and that’s basically responsibility for my family, because I would not feel good if I had to just leave them here in some desperately bad situation, so I’m perhaps trying to take care of them too hard. That’s why I got a warning, or you can call it a slap on the wrist recently, when I got sick – I was trying to micro-manage everything and give them both resources and knowledge in order to keep them from making mistakes, and it was only when I was incapacitated by the flu and I literally couldn’t do it anymore that I perceived the pattern, and I understood that I should let them go make their own mistakes and learn.

I can’t say attachment can be unequivocally reduced to desire; in my case, for instance, it translates better as “duty” or “responsibility”. I would need to know that I’m not leaving other souls in a mess, or at least that I’m not expected to fix the mess, and it’s here for a good reason and will ultimately serve a good purpose. However, there’s a trap in it, of course. 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., 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.

First of all, I wouldn’t call the difference in purity a different vector. Rather, I would call it a difference in “karmic temperature”, like the difference between gaseous and liquified form of propane. The gaseous form has kinetic energies of molecules all over the place, going in all kinds of directions and causing collisions, and the liquified form basically had all that kinetic energy extracted in form of heat, and if you go a step further, you can remove even more heat from the liquid and produce a solid, where the molecules are essentially stationary, at least in comparison, although you’d have to cool it all the way to 0K to achieve a complete thermodynamic standstill. But the analogy is quite useful and it answers your dilemma: if complete purity is a supercooled solid, where all the “citta vrtti“, or kinetic energy of the particles of a spiritual system that usually creates mental whirlpools, has been removed, if you add unsophisticated karmic mass to the system, where all kinds of particles are bouncing around at high energy, perceived as highly energetic emotions, passions, attachments etc., the resultant mass would behave exactly as you would expect from a thermodynamic system; depending on how much mass you are starting with and at what temperature, and how much mass you’re adding and at what temperature, entropy would assure that the two mix and produce a larger total mass at mass/volume/temperature average, and you’ll have to apply the same method you originally used to get the original spiritual mass to lower temperature – you need to apply pressure, meaning spiritual control and detachment, in order to remove heat from the system, meaning release the energetic emotional states through kriya, suffering and what not. Basically, suffering/remorse is the way you release excess heat from the system, and if you keep applying the spiritual equivalent of pressure, you again end up with a low-temperature system but of higher mass.

The thermodynamic corollaries are all valid – there is obviously “too much” karmic addition, where you get a very bad result; if you absorb too much karmic mass for the size of your soul, you end up with total mass of too high temperature to be manageable, essentially degrading your spiritual state to the point where you can no longer apply spiritual pressure and remove excess heat, because you lost all control, detachment and ability to see the need for yoga whatsoever. This would be a very undesirable outcome. An analogy with superconductors is valid – there is a range of temperatures in which a material retains superconductivity, where superconductivity is the ability to apply sophisticated high-energy yoga which is able to transform karmic substance and retain control, despite suffering. However, if you absorb too much of the hot stuff, you lose superconductivity of your spiritual mass and it’s all over; the food ate you instead of the other way around.

Actually, what you’re talking about isn’t purity so much as a lack of experience, and if you lack experience, that means deficiency in spiritual magnitude and it’s not a good thing, because it’s experience that allows you to have detachment, because you have already seen a phenomenon, you know what it is, and you are not deceived. If you see something for the first time, it’s almost a given that you’ll fall for it, unless there’s a sufficiently large similarity with something else that you’ve seen already, but then we’re again talking about experience as a safeguard against attachment and error. Basically, a pure but inexperienced soul is like a child, that has no inherent evils of its own, but can easily be seduced into all of them due to a lack of experience. What you want to be is a wise old man who has seen everything, has a vast experiential basis for judging the quality of things, and his purity isn’t the result of no experience with contaminants, but of vast experience that rejects contaminants because of a strong will to maintain his chosen good path, and the contaminants are properly seen as distractions and detriments.

If you see it thermodynamically, it’s mass times temperature, and you can easily determine outcomes. Once the mass is absorbed, the concept of purity is irrelevant; the thing you’re talking about, the boundaries and empathy, play a role in a phase prior to that, where you decide whether to absorb something or to keep away from it. Once you absorb it, the mass times temperature equation determines the outcome, and if the outcome raises your “temperature” above the point where you “lose superconductivity”, essentially where you lose the ability to think clearly in a yogic fashion and apply spiritual pressure in order to remove excess “heat” as suffering, thus lowering your “temperature” back to the thermodynamic zero, well, it’s a case of “don’t try to eat something that’s bigger than you”. 🙂
Obviously, “purity” is not a useful way of thinking about it, because what is perceived as “impurity” is basically kinetic energy of the particles, or, in other words, “heat”. At least if we stay within the Patañjali-friendly metaphor.