From the forum:

Bhagavad-gita isn’t really the most accurate text if you want to understand karma, because Hinduism in general and Gita in particular don’t really get it, and at the time of writing the commentary I didn’t feel like getting into it in so much detail. I put much more thought into it in the later books. The Hindu concept, according to which one is born because of some karmic impurity, and no longer needs to return after this impurity is removed, is riddled with inaccuracies to the point where it’s actually the opposite of useful. There are better ways of looking at it: karma is not an extrinsic element, it’s the stuff your spiritual body is made of, and it’s not “removed” with the process of cleaning, it’s restructured. Excess “thermodynamic energy” of stress, desires, fears or misapprehensions is “excreted” like excess heat from a thermodynamic system, and as a result you get a more calm, “compressed” substance, liquid instead of gas, or solid instead of liquid. Yoga Sutra deals with this excess of energy and its removal from the spirit-structure. The other problem are the attachments and desires, basically, investments of energy into all kinds of stuff. In your cases, it would be investment of energy into ideas, and desire to have those ideas work in order for them to justify the investment. 🙂 It’s not necessarily stuff like houses, cars or family, the way it is for most people; for some, almost all projections of energy go into their religious worldview, or authority of scriptures or holy persons. This also poses another problem: it mimics the vertical connection, to the point where it would be difficult to describe to some people why their religious ideas are a horizontal structure and not a vertical connection to God, but nevertheless, that’s what they are, and once you are in the state of darshan, samadhi or something similar, it becomes quite apparent. For instance, in the process of initiation into Vajra those things are quite obvious.

From the forum:

Sometime between 1993 and 1997, I was dealing with incredibly hard issues and I was thinking something along the lines of “[insert some famous yogi here] had it easy, he was born within a Hindu tradition, had an enlightened guru, someone taught him yoga and the theory, and I’m rowing against the currents of shit creek without paddles”, at which moment something became clear to me: “at some time in the future, others will look at me and say, it’s easy for you, you were born enlightened and awesome, but we are having it so hard”. At which I thought “if anyone was stupid enough to think I was born enlightened, they should see me now, and they would be instantly cured of that misconception”, and the response, “they would never believe it; people instinctively don’t believe change is possible, that someone fucked up can become great, that you don’t get to be born enlightened regardless of what your soul looks like, that everybody has to carve paths into neurology in order to build the body-spirit connection; they believe every enlightened person to have been born enlightened and perfect, and every fucked up person to be doomed forever; they don’t believe that yoga is actually possible and that it works, and that’s one of the greatest obstacles everybody has to overcome; look at how hard I find it to accept that others had to go through a process, how I find it easy to debase myself because I actually know all the nasty parts of the process I had to go through, and find it almost impossible to accept that known enlightened people would have had to go through that”.

I must apologize for not writing anything significant here lately; I’ve been otherwise preoccupied, what with maintaining my level of physical fitness, what with transcribing the forum to another software, and answering questions there. Not to leave you completely empty-handed, I’ll re-post some of the forum content here:

One thing crossed my mind and I think it’s rather important.

It’s not just about samadhi and how your position changes then. it’s also applicable to how things are now, in the relative and limited mindset. Because, you see, that’s one of the first things I was taught from above, when I was thinking in terms of “all I need is to be in samadhi more, that will purify all that needs to be purified and solve everything that needs to be solved”, but that’s not how it works. The relative sphere of karma remains untouched by samadhi, because they don’t exist on the same reality level. It’s like hardware upgrade not automatically producing better software. What you need is write better software, and realization that it’s all run on hardware and is thus only a state of hardware isn’t really helpful. Software is a way of pulling hardware into manifestation. Let’s put it this way: a kalapa is the smallest possible manifestation of brahman in the relative. It’s a tiny spark of spiritual light. By itself, it doesn’t do much, but it’s a start. A tiny wisp of astral “smoke” is an aggregation of many kalapas, and it forms some consciousness, awareness, intelligence, desires, it manifests something more than the sum of its parts. A tiny “jewel” is an order of magnitude more, it’s a huge astral soul “condensed” into greater power, virtue, wisdom, will, spiritual music, bliss or whatever specifically, because they can be very different. Here, we already have something that is very clearly a local relative manifestation of sat-cit-ananda, and in the spiritual body of a God this progresses exponentially, and it becomes clear and obvious that you are dealing with a “relative absolute”, a presence in the relative sphere that is basically so much brahman that all beings that actually see it (have its darshan, in sanskrit) have an experience of self-realization, of atma-brahma-jñana, or samadhi. That’s what is described in the bhagavata-purana, that spiritual beings experiencing Krishna have self-realization moments, points where they understand their own true nature, position and purpose.

But the important thing to realize, the thing I’m trying to say, is that it doesn’t begin with Krishna. It begins with that one little kalapa, which is the spark of asmita, of sat-cit-ananda, in the relative. You are all made of those little sparks that radiate Absolute into the relative. You need to draw power, virtue, knowledge, courage, awareness, love, respect, devotion, and yes, also the things like self-sacrifice and acceptance of pain and hardship if it is necessary, and if it is the cost of greatness. Drawing power of that kind now, drawing it through the center of self, through asmita, your “own nature”, makes those tiny sparks of light glow and coalesce together to form a greater power, they aggregate, they excrete disturbance through the process of suffering and they eventually crystallize, and the virtuous self-center progresses in God-manifestation to the point where nobody can tell a difference, and you give God a new name.

God is something you draw from, now. God is both a distant goal, and a present reality. As a present reality, it might be something latent, of low visibility, low manifestation, and that might be your state now. But you are the one who decides what happens there. You can crawl like a maggot on the ground, or you can rise up, as Mario said. Your call.