Let me tell you why I lost my patience with Vedanta some decades ago.
To Vedanta, the state of realization of essential unity of atman and brahman, the first-person realization of the true nature of Self as one with brahman, is the fundamental metric of emancipation and spiritual success.
This state is acknowledged as identical to the state described in Patanjali’s Yoga as samadhi, union of the observed, observer and the process of observation. Samadhi exists as savikalpa and nirvikalpa, which are usually described as partial and full attainment of Self-realization. When nothing remains outside the “I Am” realization, samadhi is nirvikalpa, without remainder.
The problem is how to differentiate between a hippy who entered samadhi on LSD and was drastically changed by the experience, and a yogi who entered a samadhi as a result of a process of spiritual transformation. If the end result is the same, it’s the same, right? Also, the problem is that the experience of samadhi doesn’t necessarily produce an enlightened personality. I’ve seen genuinely insane people who had an experience of samadhi. The experience itself was authentic. According to Shankaracharya, this is not supposed to happen. Such an experience is knowledge that erases ignorance. All seeds of past karma are roasted in the heat of knowledge. The clouds have been blown away and the sun shines in all its glory. This is the ultimate end-result of all spirituality, all there is, non plus ultra.
Except that it isn’t.
The various schools of yoga came up with an inflation of terms that are supposed to deal with the obvious perceived difference in spiritual attainment between people who have had a first-person experience of brahman. First it was savikalpa and nirvikalpa. Then it was nitya nirvikalpa, the authentic nirvikalpa samadhi, no fucking around there. Then it was kevala nirvikalpa samadhi. Then it was sahaja samadhi. No, really, this is the real thing, the stuff before was not really it, but this is, we’re not shitting you.
One interesting thing I figured out when I entered samadhi in 1994 was that staying in that state would not suffice to make my spiritual position closer to that of Babaji or some similar spiritual superpower. Something else needed to happen, some kind of transformation that doesn’t exist in the metric of Vedanta, and which I therefore couldn’t put into words. Not knowing what that was, I put my faith into higher guidance which led me thus far.
I had a significant breakthrough when I was reading Bhagavata-purana, the part where the Kumaras are visiting Vaikuntha loka in order to see Krishna. The Kumaras are constantly in the state of samadhi, they are basically the end-result of all aspirations of yoga and advaita-Vedanta. However, when they actually see Krishna, they are so overwhelmed by the immense spiritual differential that they start crying and understand that there is more than samadhi, more than atma-brahma-advaita, more than the “I Am That”. Similarly, you have Shiva, the all-powerful Lord of all yoga, embodiment of supreme transcendence, possessor of ultimate power over all Creation, the sole being who could swallow the poison of Maya without being harmed, as he walks with his wife Sati and encounters Vishnu, and tells her, “this is my Guru, he is way greater than me”.
How is that possible? On what metric, by what criteria?
It took me a while to chew on this. The result, however, is unexpected. The result is that Vedanta simply doesn’t provide a valid metric for spiritual progress or evolution, that it lacks proper understanding of human makeup, it lacks proper understanding of the world and it provides almost no guidance. The single most obvious claim to veracity that Vedanta possesses stems from the fact that various beings, yogis et al., enter the state of self-realization of brahman. If not for that, it would have absolutely no merit, because every other claim that it makes can be quite simply falsified by evidence. Karma doesn’t follow predictions of Vedanta. The gunas don’t exist in any way other than as useful high-level behavioral approximations; they are obviously an impromptu invention that was supposed to supplant the Buddhist theory of elements (which BTW is confirmed by observational evidence in the advanced practice of yoga). The structure of soul doesn’t follow Vedanta‘s predictions, because the difference between the less and more evolved beings is not that the less evolved beings have more bad karma; they have barely any karma, which is why they are unevolved. The more karma a soul has, the more evolved it is; exactly opposite to the claims of Vedanta, but exactly following the Buddhist theory of kalapas and elements. Essentially, Vedanta is wrong on so many essential counts, it is useless for all practical purposes.
And here goes my radical statement: what if Vedanta is also wrong about samadhi? What if it’s not what Vedanta claims? What if Vedanta only provided a close-enough explanation of the phenomenon that everyone parrots the same cliches, and the reality is in fact something entirely different?
Let me provide an alternative explanation for samadhi. In samadhi, the limiting effect of the physical brain stops being the primary filter of reality onto consciousness, and that role is taken by the astral substance, which is inherently self-aware, it is of the nature of asmita, self-ness. In the astral mahat-tattva, God-presence and God-awareness are inherent in every kalapa, and you have to really work in order to mess with that, it’s that obvious. Beyond the astral, there exist the increasingly higher substances, whose kalapas carry a more essential quality of God, not just joy, awareness, clarity, consciousness and bliss, but deep, hard reality that’s different from the astral plane in ways similar to those in which a black hole is different from water vapor. If you concentrate an enormous number of astral kalapas, condense their essence, the way you would condense hydrogen in order to produce a star, and then collapse the star into a point in order to produce singularity, well, that point of singularity is of the quality of vajra, and its spiritual gravity is immense, it’s the difference between soul-stuff and God-stuff. There are also kalapas of increasingly higher order, and they make the spiritual essence of the Gods. So yeah, there’s your explanation of the difference between a hippy on LSD and Vivekananda, and difference between Vivekananda and Ramakrishna, difference between a disciple who had an experience of samadhi and a guru who could grant those experiences to others. There’s the difference between the Kumaras and Krishna. It’s not about how deep an experience of samadhi one had, or how long did it last, or how much without remainder it was; those concepts are merely attempts to fix a rotten boat by applying increasingly bigger layers of duct tape to the increasingly larger holes. The problem isn’t fixed by inventing increasingly “better” kinds of samadhi; the problem is fixed by abandoning Vedanta and adopting a better explanation of spiritual realities.
I’m confused by this article. Do you mean to say that you reject Vivekananda et al. ? And yet he pretty much says what you are saying about kalapas etc. I don’t see too much difference between the buddhist philosophy and that of Vedanta once Vedanta is stripped out of it’s junk, like the Karma example you gave.
There are indeed different states and levels of Samahdi I have experienced this. LSD samahdi is at best false samahdi same as other such experiences induced by chemicals or external means.
You’re not confused by this article, you are confused by the fact that it contradicts the things you believe and you are unable to make it all fit together in a nice puzzle whose purpose is to keep your ego in an immensely comfortable position of thinking you have the ultimate secrets figured out.
That’s incredibly presumptuous and has little to do with the discussion at hand or my beliefs -of which you have absolutely no idea about or place to comment.
If anyone wants to talk about ego I would take a good hard look at oneself, your reply makes that quite clear.
Go fuck yourself, you arrogant piece of shit.
As soon as I wrote this posts to you about my lack of experiences, I got two experiences, which are probably among the most powerful I ever had. They were two dreams.
One was in Saturday to Sunday night and other was last night.
In the first I got message in my sleep from some voice to go look at one forum for specific thread and to read it through to find something very interesting.
In second I had long lucid dream that was really fun. From what I understand (I read) lucid dreams happen in some sort of a personal “bubble” Astral and not in original source Astral. And people are supposedly my creations, so that’s why they lack some real intelligence and they are like characters in games, which are driven by AI. I had real trouble convincing these “people” that they are in my dream. Also I did some movement and destruction of objects.
So, did you find anything interesting on that forum? 🙂
Yes, it was about work of Terence McKenna and his understandings of I Ching, a topic which I try to gather more information about as it seems that it is a complicated mathematical apparatus written thousands of years ago, yet it still works.
I have potentially dumb question for you. I am wondering these last days about my recent lack of spiritual experiences and even maybe smaller number of experiences in general since I started do go on a Path, with Path meaning spiritual development.
My question is there a way to know how my own soul is big, or of what grade are kalapas in it?
Reason I ask this is that I am starting to wonder, is my soul lacking in substance, as I am seeing around (both internet and real life) total godless idiots who start to have real experiences, as opposed to me, who actually takes time to do exercises correct (Vipassana for example) and with concentration.
Correlating spiritual rank with the number of experiences is… unreliable. I actually had the most impressive spiritual experiences in the beginning of my practice, probably because then I actually needed them. Later, I appear not to have spiritual experiences, but rather to be one to others. I guess that’s one rather reliable way of testing your spiritual status: if what you are and what you do is a source of spiritual experience to others, you must be doing something right.
As for the number and grade of kalapas in your spiritual body, if you’re able to have emotions and thoughts, at least astral. If you’re able to have sophisticated emotions, thoughts about kalapas and enlightenment, at least mental. If you’re incredibly spiritually powerful compared to normal humans and you have thoughtforms that taste of hard blue light, at least blue vajra. If you’re a God, you know what you’re made of so no point in talking about that. 🙂
So you have two coordinate axes here: quality and power. Quality comes from the depth of initiation, power comes from quantitative increase in the number of kalapas that precedes higher initiation.
What would you consider to be sophisticated emotion? By “thoughts about” kalapas and enlightenment, do you consider a special and big interest in them, a serious thinking about all these concepts?
I know how I do it, I’m not sure I can describe it to someone else in a way that would correctly convey the same thing. To me, there’s no concept of de gustibus non est disputandum. I literally perceive emotions the same way humans perceive light or sound, as energy of certain sophistication, texture, density, practically the way you perceive colored light. I guess you can call it a siddhi, but I was born being able to do this and it took me a while to figure out that others can’t do it. I feel spiritual states the way you can feel the difference in touch and sight between a cotton fluff, flowing water, rough rock or a smooth metal cube. I don’t have names for most of the things I perceive because the names would make sense only to communicate the experience with others who have similar abilities, and I don’t really know of anyone who can do it quite my way.
Someone talks to me and I feel the first impression, which can be a smooth wall of hidden intent, it can be deception, it can be what was going through his mind at the time of writing it, and under this superficial layer I usually feel the context of the person, what that person is, and that’s in most cases much more than this person knows about oneself. This perception causes one of the biggest difficulties that I have; I go to a supermarket and I’m literally poisoned by the inputs, because I feel too much and I can’t switch it off anymore than you could switch off sound or sight while walking the streets, and the problem is, people are usually ugly, they are stupid, unsophisticated animals. I fucking hate people, and I hate them because I see into their souls every fucking day for my entire life and I know what they are. There are perks, however. I got to see some super-sophisticated people, avatars of Gods, and I got to see some Gods directly, and this sense allowed me to perceive things of immense beauty and greatness.
So, what’s a sophisticated emotion. I can’t describe it directly because my names for it wouldn’t mean much to you, but a sophisticated emotion and thoughtform is what I could, for instance, get when Ratzinger was talking about theology. It has depth, power, substance, clarity, purity and sophistication. The gravity of it has almost a tactile form to me. An example of an unsophisticated emotion is what a dog is feeling when barking on a hedgehog. It feels like a chanisaw, rough, spiky, unsophisticated, not smooth, not clear, not pure, looks like dark irregular texture. Unfortunately, most people feel like dog barking at the hedgehog, not like Ratzinger talking about sacrifice of Christ.
I understand what you mean. I am pretty sure I am just of astral matter. When did you encounter avatars and do that people do something to influence change in others or they are just passive and avoid everyone?
You “feel” like a college student, which is my shorthand for heightened mental activity, coherent, rather calm and organized, homogenous.
The next level of mental organization is what I internally label as “PhD”, which is calmer, more self-confident, deeper, wider, more homogenous and more sophisticated, with very little “spiking” or inclusions.
This can have gradations in sophistication and size, with the highest gradation being borderline sainthood/vajra candidacy. Then in vajra initiates you have gradations from fresh initiate of blue vajra to high initiate close to godhood. Then you have Gods with their incredible variety and sophistication in both inner core and “attributes”, which themselves have godlike spiritual attributes and are jewels of some kind of vajra-stuff.
Thank you for clarification 🙂