Some Thoughts on Karma, the Natural Journey of Ascension, and Why the Ancients/Benefactors were Kind of Wrong
I'd like to address the community-wide misconception that you can only gain karma through "shedding your urges" when both in game and within the text of the game, we see this isn't true! the whole "shedding urges in order to ascend" stuff was only really a thing before the void fluid revolution, as Moon states in the bright red farm arrays pearl. The discovery of void fluid entirely trivialized needing to completely shed your urges by providing a much more natural method of ascension, and we see this play out within Rain World's story and gameplay.
In-game, we gain karma by directly engaging with our urges, whether it be sustaining our hunger, holding treasured items close or just survival in itself. From the beginning we are deeply ensnared within the struggles of living, "caught in the net" as the ancients/benefactors say. However, over the course of our gameplay, (I'm using survivor as a baseline, since their campaign illustrates the core of this) as we learn and grow and become more knowledged, living becomes easier, the struggle is not as harsh as it was before, and surely but slowly we die less and less as time goes on.
Simultaneously, this is reflected in our karma, as by dying less, we now hold higher karma more frequently. This coincides with the natural gameplay loop of rain world; the more we explore and learn new things, the more we grow and learn about the world and our place within it, we tread further and further away from the struggles of life, and become closer to enlightenment.
Ascension is the natural culmination of this journey of enlightenment, the next step on the path beyond. It's not inherently the right or wrong choice to make, its a step into the unknown, in search of something greater, of answers to our own existence, true spiritual self-fulfillment. This is how the ancients/benefactors saw it, but you could say they still got parts of it pretty wrong...
This is treading more into personal headcanon territory now, so bear with me, but I believe the issue lies within the great problem that the ancients built the iterators to solve. They wanted to find a means of evicting all life, material, the entire world from the cycles entirely, eliminating the personal struggle tied to ascension, taking away the choice and the journey that are so unbelievably crucial to it. This is also why I personally believe that a solution to the great problem doesn't or can't exist, as it would go against the fabric of their universe, from which the cycles are built upon. (LTTM describes the group behind this ideology as "triangulators"; they believed a solution was dangerous and had to be inferred rather than solved)
Ironically, in their desire to become effortless, by creating the iterators to make living easier, and to detach themselves from the struggles of the cycles, (just as we do within our own journey to ascension as the slugcat) this could also only be achieved through massive effort, so they even weren't truly "effortless" in the end, as nothing can be. Of course though, the few echoes in-game demonstrate that same ideology slipping through. Those ancients/benefactors became echoes because they hadn't experienced the personal journey paramount to ascension, or maybe they just didn't want to leave, but regardless, they weren't able to let go of their place in the universe and move on, and thus, they stayed behind.
TLDR: The ancients/benefactors were wrong about ascension because as a society they didn't fully recognize how important personal struggle, journey, and choice is for ascension, and sought to remove that struggle entirely.
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