Burning Karma part 1

8 things

Further exploration of my own path of burning through karma. 45 human-earth years!

I wouldn’t necessarily have said these things 5 years ago, definitely not ten or twenty years ago, so this is how burning karma (and aging) works. It changes your ideology and identity. If you aren’t willing to have those aspects of your human personality change, then don’t engage in nondual animism.

1. The circle jerk of social media (and now to a large extent the internet in general) is a waste of time and energy. The constant arguing about interpretations of language, concepts, meaning… is meaningless. Everyone clinging to how they personally can keep or grow their own “power”. But the premise itself — that there is a self or a soul, that it is real, abiding and immortal, that power is something that can be gained or lost — is an illusion. It’s a manufactured illness with a marketplace of “cures”. Neither the illness or the cures are tangibly “real” in any sense of those words. Again, the premises are delusional. And we live in and as those delusions and make them real and if others don’t validate their realness we wage wars.

2. No one else can burn your karma for you. But also there is no such thing as personal karma. It’s all collective, asymmetrically distributed karma. A karma bank or field. Not even death is what we commonly believe it is. It’s all a big “i dont know” burger. We have some level of creative agency within an experience of the present moment. There is no future or past that is truly fixed or real. The world, nature, time is essentially spontaneous and animalistic. It is (like) the play of wind and water.

3. Humanity is not an improvement on the dinosaurs, and 21st century humans are not improvements on say, for example, 10th century humans. There is no linear improvement. No linear progression fantasy. No ladder to heaven. No “leveling up”. Time/Nature is essentially a circle. Cycles within cycles within cycles with no absolute improvements. This also means that there’s no “big bang” that “starts” “the universe” and no “small opposite-of-bang” that “ends” “the universe”.

4. Luck, unvarnished, amoral, impersonal luck is the greatest determinant factor of your choices and opportunities in life. Not “free will”, not “merit”, not “hard work”… Luck. That’s it and it is a heartbreaking yet sobering realization. You can do everything “right” or “do the best you can” and still fail, still be destroyed completely. But in this society, only “winners” get rewarded and get to shape the cultural mythology narrative. This is called “survivorship bias”.

5. The only things you are guaranteed are Death, Pain, Fear and Hunger/Desire. They are not “problems” and they are not solvable no matter how much you hope or believe or build walls of privilege around you. All you have is your present moment relationality with these wisdom forces.

6. The overarching cause of most problems we see in society and individuals today is colonization and colonialism. This includes the tenants of colonialism which are materialism, dualism, theism and authoritarianism, which appear as things like racism, patriarchy, misogyny, capitalism etc. But those downstream forces are merely fronts for the cosmological ideology of colonialism. Anti-animism and dualism. These cause heart disease, cancers (yang and yin malignancies), excessive contagions, inflammatory diseases, mental illnesses such as mania, addiction, depression, narcissistic behaviors… the list goes on. But i say this to say the root cause of all “trauma” is colonization and colonialism. Saying anything else is propaganda or denial.

7. Given that the global economy has now been fully forced into a genocide/suicide pact based on the colonial war machine, what I see now are very few options for true sane communities. Community requires assets in the form of property and land ownership, and investments in the stock market, which all require complicity in the global slave trade, prison industrial complex, apartheid regimes etc. There is no real ethical anything under global capitalism, whether we call it technofeudalism or otherwise. To think so is a kind of ideological immaturity. But neither is being poor a kind of nobility. Opting out (as if that were truly possible) also makes you a strain on community, the social fabric, etc. It’s extremely hard if not impossible to maintain sanity and clear minded behaviors when one cannot afford to eat clean protein or bathe regularly for example, or if one’s sleeping situation is fraught with violence, insecurity and threat. So I state again, there is no ethical option. If one is to be of any use to others, then one is forced to absorb the karma generated by becoming an owner rather than an employee of capitalism’s double bind. I learned this far too late, and there is probably no real win-state for me in economic terms, with no generational wealth of any kind, no assets etc. To all people listening: get into real estate and investing (triple compounding). This would be the only way to foment real mutual aid. Yes you will generate karma and be complicit in the war machine, but you will also be able to better help create revolutionary communities.

8. Sex & drugs. If I had to choose between them, or rather, choose which set of experiences to do over, I would choose to erase the choices I made sexually. Between sex & drugs, the former by far has the most detrimental psychological impacts. Drugs basically damage your liver and may cause some mental breakdowns, but this pales in comparison to the effects of making poor sexual choices based on attachment trauma, idealism, romanticism etc. I’m not saying everyone should do drugs either (as I’ve written elsewhere, not everyone has the inherent drive towards nonduality for drugs to catalyze and amplify it), I’m just saying, of the two, which one has proven to be more damaging.