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.