I’ve been thinking about how there’s a big difference between facts and perceptions. For instance, the atheists like to think of themselves as the intellectual elite. They are the smart ones, the thinking ones. The religious people, they are stupid sheep who are too lazy to think for themselves, and if they did, they’d become atheists.

I used to debate many people on a Croatian religion usenet newsgroup, and I got quite a good sample of how various belief systems influence self-image, and it could get quite ridiculous at times. For instance, it was quite funny when I just finished an off-topic debate with a Catholic, where we talked about whether general relativity precludes a quantum mechanical interpretation of gravity. Oh, by the way he was a physics professor, he taught solid state physics at the FKIT faculty at the University of Zagreb. And so, he argued for interpretation of gravity as something that was transmitted by some boson, while I argued that if that were so, a black hole would preclude its own gravitational interaction with the rest of the Universe since bosons would follow the same spatial curvature as photons. Since we do detect black holes by their gravitational influence, that obviously isn’t the case. He then argued that Hawking radiation beyond the event-horizon could provide the mechanism for propagation of gravity, but I wasn’t convinced and found the explanation tenuous since the very spatial curvature that forms the event horizon must be explained by the gravity-interaction particle. And so, neither side being convinced we proceeded to other topics, at which point some atheist barged in and proclaimed that religious people are stupid non-thinking sheep because, like, science! We’re no longer in the dark ages where people believed that lightning was caused by God.

You could probably imagine the collective facepalm of the older participants at that point. You can just imagine the psychological profile of a highschool kid who had his spiritual awakening that religion, which made him feel guilty for masturbating, doesn’t really work, because physical phenomena are caused by, wait, physics! Of course, he can’t understand that there are people who don’t see religion as a pre-scientific placeholder for science, and he probably never had any reason to question the brilliance of his opinion, since the Catholic and I completely ignored his revelatory statement and proceeded to argue about whether the apparent theological incongruity between Vatican II and “Unam sanctam” refutes his position that the Church never really changed opinions on matters of theology (or something else along those lines).

Basically, the atheists are the most stupid and uneducated people I ever debated. Their main arguments are from poor understanding of the subject matter, ignoring the evidence that doesn’t suit their narrative and attacking the opposition ad hominem. Their high opinion of themselves and their arguments might actually be warranted when they debate the American Christians, who are usually the rock bottom of religious thought and the pinnacle of anti-intellectualism in religion, but you would think that when you barge into a discussion group where a Yogi and a Catholic debate quantum gravity, that religion as they understand it obviously has no problem with friction causing electricity without divine agency, but, apparently, the atheists consistently fail at that. Apparently, they think that science is the Kryptonite for religion, and it’s not really an opinion, it seems to be more of a dogma. They are also so incredibly predictable that I didn’t even bother to debate them for the last few years I spent on the usenet. The debate with them is always a very ugly ad-hominem hate-fest that goes somewhat like this:

Atheist: “You religious sheeple are fucking idiots who live in the dark ages and if you knew anything about science you’d all be atheists, but you are too fucking stupid.”
Me: “Actually, I have reasons to believe that the religious people here are much more fluent in science than you are, and your conceit is unwarranted. We take religion seriously not because we are unaware of science, but because science actually has no significant overlap with the sphere of religion, and where they do overlap there is actually good support for the religious position.”
Atheist: “Oh yeah? And what would that be? There is no evidence for God because God doesn’t exist.”
Me: “Actually, there’s quite a lot of evidence for God. There are saints and mystics who had a direct spiritual experience of God and the spiritual realms. There are NDE testimonies that confirm existence of consciousness that is not caused by brain because at the time the brain was not working, and they confirm existence of God and a spiritual realm. The reason why this is not considered scientific is not because it’s not true, it’s because it conflicts with the scientific paradigm of matter as the fundamental reality, that science simply doesn’t know what to do with it all and therefore either sweeps it under the rug or tries to explain it away with such blatant nonsense that you wonder how those people got their degrees. For instance, Carl Sagan offered an explanation of NDE as re-living of birth – you travel through a tunnel towards light and you encounter happy people who love you. Except you can’t see anything during birth because your eyes are pressed towards the vaginal wall, and when you do come out you don’t recognize shapes and the experience is hugely traumatic and uncomfortable. So basically those explanations are obviously nonsensical to anyone who actually bothered to think about them and their sole purpose is to serve as a spiritual pacifier for atheists.”
Atheist: “There can’t be any valid evidence for God because God doesn’t exist, and if someone says he has experience of God, he’s crazy.”
Me: “That’s like saying that Moon landings didn’t happen and since they didn’t everybody who witnessed them is a liar and a fraud.”
Atheist: “That’s not the same because nobody can deny Moon landings because you can just repeat them at any time and you can’t see God at any time. Oh wait… No, you are all crazy fucks who burned women at a stake because you’re sexually frustrated and you want to keep people in the dark ages.”
Me: “Yeah, that went well. Remind me of that the next time I decide to debate atheists”.

The next debate:

Atheist: “You religious people are stupid. Didn’t you hear that the Earth isn’t flat and that it revolves around the Sun?”
Me: “Fuck off, retard.”
Atheist: “I knew the religious cunts are opposed to science and knowledge and will resist the truth.”

Basically, I have the same experience debating atheists as scientists have debating the flat-earthers and Moon landing deniers. If you present evidence, they will say it’s either fake or it doesn’t apply. They will say everything from NASA is fake and then they will cite the Van Allen belts, discovered by NASA, as proof you can’t leave the Earth. You can’t really have a debate with someone who only admits the kind of evidence that is supportive of his pre-conceived notions. It is doomed to failure and makes no sense, except to show the audience what kind of crazies those people are and why their arguments are only superficially rational.

Vedanta is one of the most dangerous mind-traps in the world. The entire New Age corpus consists mostly of its derivatives, and if there’s anything any idiot cultist “knows for sure”, it’s that “we are all one”, that enlightened people should not give a fuck about differences between things and people, that karma is some kind of spiritual trash that needs to be cleansed in order to become enlightened, and that one should attain “inner peace”. Together with the “red pill” of Matrix and accepting Jesus as your personal savior, it completes the collection of most overused and annoying quasi-spiritual platitudes.

So let’s clear things up a bit, in a way that will probably annoy some “vedanta experts” who think they figured it out.

First of all, the fact that brahman is the level 0 of reality, and that self-realization of brahman is always a first-person experience that is often accompanied with exclamations like “I am that brahman” and, leaving samadhi, “only He is”, and that the classical vedanta abounds with statements like “brahma sathyam jagan mithya” (brahman is the truth and the world is an illusion), that doesn’t mean that “we are all one”, because where there are “we” there is no “one”. Also, Shankaracharya was wrong thinking that switching into brahman-consciousness washes away personal karma, because it all goes away in the light of true knowledge. It does not. In fact, this belief is caused by an illusion, because in brahman, there are no limitations and ignorance and therefore no karma, but that didn’t just happen when you had this realization. That is always so and always has been so. Experience of brahman is transcendental to your karma and as such has no influence on it, except in a trivial way, that it’s a new experience that can change your attitude and behavior. Realization of brahman is not liberation, because brahman is forever free and unbound, and your realization of brahman, as impressive as it might feel, is merely a temporary window into this reality. So, since experience of brahman doesn’t significantly influence your personal karmic outcomes, and can actually introduce detrimental effects of bloating your ego because you’re so enlightened and you understand everything, I was always averse to guide people towards this experience. Sure, it’s impressive, but it can actually entrench you on square one of spiritual growth. Thinking you possess certain salvation is one of the main obstacles in spiritual life. Failure is always an option.

Second, vedanta is not some kind of a super-egalitarian hippie philosophy. The fact of brahman doesn’t erase the differences between relative worldly entities. You can say “everything is brahman” as much as you like, but before you though that “everything is matter” and it didn’t cause you to believe that a star is the same as a planet or that a fly is the same as an elephant because they are both matter. “Everything is x” statements aren’t worth shit, because they change absolutely nothing in the reality of things. In fact, rather than encouraging such nonsense, vedanta emphasizes the concept of viveka, or discrimination. It’s the ability to discern between the real and the illusory, between useful and harmful, pleasurable and useful, between that which liberates and that which ensnares. If “all is brahman” had any practical meaning, there would be no reason to encourage discrimination, would there? The moment you ask “where, in this vast ocean of things, should I look for brahman?”, you need viveka, and “everything is brahman” is the most useless thing you could possibly hear. What you do need to hear is Bhagavata-purana or the gospels, which were written with the exact purpose of showing people what God looks like in the world, in which direction they should look for Him and how can they know if they made any progress or not. Shankaracharya’s texts are excellent if you already had the experience of samadhi and you want to feel good about yourself, but they’re useless for anything else. If you don’t see the difference between a rock and a gold nugget, or between a tramp and a saint, you’re not enlightened. You’re too stupid to ever start doing anything spiritually useful. Figuring out the difference between a tramp and a saint is the most important ability you can have, because if you can’t tell the difference, how will you ever aspire to be more like the saint? Cultivating respect for the local manifestations of virtue and greatness in the world is one of the most effective ways of advancing spiritually. The ability to recognize the Ariadne’s thread in the maze is the most important thing to have. If you don’t have it, you’re someone’s food.

Third, vedanta speaks of karma in an inaccurate way that is actively harmful. It portrays it as layers of impurities that create illusions and obscure the reality of Brahman. As a result, most followers of vedanta think that if you remove karma you’ll end up enlightened, in a state of pure atman/brahman. That is not so. Vedanta misunderstood the entire concept and Buddhism got it right. The difference between you and a bacterium isn’t that a bacterium has more karma to work out. The difference is that it has almost no karma to speak of. All the sophisticated spiritual substance that allows you to form complex ideas and inhabit a human body is absent in a bacterium, and its “soul” is so insignificant it can only create a slight energetic shadow around a single-cell organism. Compared to that, you are almost god-like in size and sophistication of karma. Karma is, essentially, the spiritual energy that makes up your spiritual body and defines who you are as a person, it defines your relationship with reality as a whole, and, primarily, your relationship with God. What you actually want to do is not remove karma, because that would mean spiritual suicide, not enlightenment. You need to purify your soul and increase its specific energy, because the similar stuff applies to spirituality and physics. You can have something that’s essentially carbon, but in forms of graphite and diamond. You can have good stuff with poor structure, and you can have inclusions of weak substance that would make an otherwise strong crystal fragile under pressure or impact. You can have ordinary gas, and you can have a fluorescent lamp. Your soul-stuff will behave differently if exposed to different influences, and it will change structure and nature if you make choices of different quality. If you choose to be an asshole it will degrade, and if you choose to be kind and supportive to things that are good and beautiful, it will improve. If you’re confident a shield will develop around your spiritual body that will protect you from harmful influences, and if you’re insecure your spiritual body will be vulnerable to various intrusions. Essentially, your attitude, choices and character have enormous influence on your spiritual nature and destiny. You don’t get enlightened when you have no karma, you get enlightened when your karma is an unbreakable clear diamond through which the light of God is clearly seen. You’re enlightened when your spiritual body is the perfect vessel that is filled with the light that is God. The Buddhists call this “the jewel in the lotus”, mani padme. They got it right and vedanta got it wrong.

Fourth, and probably the most annoying thing, is the “inner peace” that is supposed to be attained with spiritual progress. The origin of this nonsense is a misunderstanding of a verse from Yoga Sutra, that yoga is citta vrtti nirodha, which really means “cessation of fluctuations in mind-stuff” and is mistranslated as “calming of the mind”. It has nothing to do with either calming or peace of any kind. What it wants to say is that you need to transform your mind from being a lightbulb into being a laser, collimated and coherent. Collimated means that all photon-paths are parallel, and coherent means that they are all of the same wavelength. It doesn’t mean that you become a hippy. It means you become a weapon for destroying bullshit.

So, what is the point and the goal of yoga? Let’s put it this way. Brahman is indeed the highest reality. This world is an n^th order metasimulation (simulation within a simulation within…). What you need to remember is that if you have a computer and it runs the operating system within which you run a virtual machine within which you run another operating system and so on recursively, it all runs on hardware. It is all executed by the CPU and stored in memory. That’s what vedanta wants to say when it claims that all is brahman, it says that all software, no matter how many levels of simulation removed, is actually hardware. There is no software, there is only hardware in all its power and richness of innate ability. Brahman didn’t go anywhere just because there’s maya, and within it the causal reality, and within it the astral reality, and within it the physical reality. It’s like my computer that’s running Windows, and within it Virtualbox, and within it Linux, and within it the word processor. It looks like it’s so far removed from the computer, but the instructions are running on the same hardware. It’s still the same computer. Brahman isn’t a billion lightyears away, it’s here, now. It’s not removed in space or time, it’s removed in several reality-levels. When you’re thinking about how you don’t get it, your thoughts are made of Him. When you’re angry because you’re separated from Him, He is your anger. Yoga is about figuring that out, about aligning and restructuring the energies and reality-abstractions in a useful way. If it looks complicated, that’s because it is. It’s not for stupid people, and that’s why when stupid people try to attain enlightenment, they get fucked up in some cult. Even being smart doesn’t make you immune to fucking up, but being stupid assures it. This whole theoretical framework isn’t something you should memorize; it’s actually not very useful. I didn’t memorize it, I simply pulled it out of my sleeve just like that, like you’d pull a description of a smartphone from your sleeve if someone asked you; you’d probably take it out of your pocket, take a look at it and describe what you see. How did I get there? I followed Ariadne’s thread, one corner of the maze at a time. That’s all it takes.

The thing with the spiritual practice of yoga is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but in the theoretical landscape of vedanta. And what vedanta tells us is that everything that we are and everything we perceive in any way, takes place within the mind of God, who is the only reality, the Absolute, level 0 reality.

When you realize that from a first-person experience and decide to tell others, you are a guru. When you hear about it, believe it is so and start doing something about it, you are a yogi. That’s the yogi approach to things: change yourself in order to stop being deluded by things that are not the highest reality. The reason why you don’t see God isn’t because God doesn’t exist. If you look through a microscope and don’t see the stars, it’s not because there are no stars, it’s because you’re stupid.

When I say that this world is software and not hardware, that it is an illusion and not the actual reality, what do I actually mean by that?

The concept of world as an illusion is not new. In vedanta, it is known as maya, the dreamlike world-illusion that obscures the reality of brahman. The problem is, people take this too literally and then they fail to take this world seriously enough, which is a very dangerous mistake, because this world is not an illusion on the same level of understanding on which your dreams are illusions, or where hallucinations are illusions. In order to understand this properly, we need to introduce the concept of “reality levels”. Reality level 0 is the absolute reality, which is not defined in anything other than itself, and in which every other, lesser reality is defined. What vedanta actually says, is that brahman is reality level 0, and reality level of this world is > 0.

As an example, let’s say that reality level of this world is 1. My physical body, chair, desk and computer are defined on that level; they are all objects on reality level 1. However, reality level of Geralt and Yennefer characters in the Witcher game is 2. I we extend the level of abstraction more and make it possible for the virtual character to be conscious and to have dreams, his dream’s level of reality would be 3. So basically as we spawn illusions within illusions, we increase the reality level, or, more accurately, illusion level.

Many “battles” were fought over this within various schools of vedanta, because they didn’t define things properly, and I remember a funny story about one of the gurus of the Gaudiya-vaishnava sect (known in the West as the Hare Krishnas) who used to beat the advocates of advaita vedanta on the head with his shoe until they admitted that the shoe is real and not an illusion. What the vaishnava guru didn’t understand is that for the shoe to hurt the head, the shoe being real isn’t really a prerequisite. It only needs to exist on the same level of reality as the head. For instance, in the Witcher game the wolves don’t need to be real in order to hurt the main character. They only need to exist on level 2 reality. If they exist on level 2, they can hurt Geralt, and if they exist on level 1 they can hurt the player, but not Geralt. If they exist on level 3, basically within Geralt’s dream, the worst they can do is wake him up.

So, what advaita vedanta actually says, and what Hare Krishnas fail to understand, is that atman/brahman is level 0, the whole maya concept is level 1, mahat-tattvas are level 2, universes with mahat-tattva specific laws are level 3, and so this Universe we live in is a specific case of a level 3 reality universe, and within that all material entities are level 3 real. This means that shoe and head are both level 3, and that they interact on the same level of reality, but that the entire thing is an illusion 3 levels removed from the actual reality, which is atman/brahman.

I introduced the term “mahat tattva”, which is usually explained in very obscure ways but it’s actually very simple. It’s the basic set of laws that makes a Universe. You can have a law-set that spawns astral universes, a law-set that spawns causal universes, and a law-set that spawns material universes. In programming, you’d say that a mahat-tattva is a class, and a universe is an object. An object always belongs to a certain class. I might have slightly modified the original teaching of Vedanta here, but this modification is an improvement for the sake of clarity.

The next thing that seems to be poorly defined in Hinduism is that mahat-tattvas are not parallel, but nested. This means that within maya you have causal mahat-tattva as the “root directory”, and within it you have instances of causal universes, within which you can have causal entities of all kinds, among which one is the astral mahat-tattva, as a subdirectory within which you have multiple instances of astral universes, and within each astral universe you have many astral structures, worlds and entities, one of which is the material mahat-tattva, as a subdirectory within which you have multiple instances of material universes. Since astral entities and structures have ownership structures, the being who thought of making a material mahat-tattva actually owns it, and if any astral or higher being wants to experience this sub-directory of the astral universe, he can do so only with permissions that are less than those of the owner.

It sounds complicated, but this is actually the most organized and simplified explanation I could think of, and the original explanations of vedanta are much more chaotic, laced with mythology and more difficult to grasp.