Monthly Archives: June 2016

About testing gurus and used cars

Posted on by
11

I occasionally encounter the concept of testing a prospective guru before accepting his authority. It sounds a lot like the idea of testing a used car before buying it; basically, you need to know what you’re committing to, lest you get screwed. But the idea is so fucking ridiculous in this context, that even entertaining it is a disqualification. Let me tell you why.

First of all, the fake gurus have been reading the same manuals for recognizing the true gurus as you have. They are familiar with the criteria, and they are great actors. Whatever you can think of, they already rehearsed to perfection. Essentially, it’s like trying to figure out a conman. If a conman is easily recognizable as such, he’s not really much of a conman in the first place, because he sucks at his job. A good conman looks more like the real thing than the real thing. Every criterion you can test him by, he already tested himself to see if it’s perfect. So you can’t go by appearance, you need to go by substance, which requires you to know what you’re doing, essentially you need to be very qualified at the subject matter; essentially, in order to qualify as a Jedi apprentice you need to be a powerful Force-sensitive, and it’s not that you’re going to test a Jedi Master to see if he’s qualified, he’s going to test you to see if you’re qualified.

And that’s the crux of the matter. You’re not going to test shit. You’re going to be evolving a long time before you’re qualified, and when you are, a real guru will test you to see if you have any brains in your head. You’ll need to see through appearances and superficiality, you’ll need to be able to react to high spiritual energies favorably, and you need to be intellectually competent. Basically, the guru is in charge, not you, and he’s in charge simply due to the fact that he’s a spiritual superpower, so the entire concept of testing something… well, if you think you have to test someone to know whether he’s a guru, either you’re not qualified to be a student or he’s not qualified to be a guru, because in the real spiritual relationships of that kind the concept doesn’t even appear, it’s an automatic thing, a key/lock click.

Another issue with the concept is the expectation that enlightened people don’t have anything better to do than teach kindergarten here, basically that they want to accept students. I certainly don’t, and neither do any incarnated Gods that I know of. Their missions are usually related to other things. Also, the Hindu guru model is the vast minority of what actually takes place in real life. In real life, spiritual relationships more often follow a husband-wife model, or something along that line. The expectation that a guru will accept students who are significantly below his own spiritual status are unwarranted; basically, he’ll look for someone very similar to himself, and won’t really care for a great number of such people, and since such things are negotiated in advance, prior to incarnation, you can see why a husband-wife model is more attractive than the guru-student model. It simply solves all problems. Sure, the guru-disciple model isn’t really incompatible with that, but more often than not, if you want to find a guru’s most advanced student, look for his wife. According to the apocryphal gospels, “the disciple Jesus loved the most” was his wife, whose name was later replaced with a generic “John”. Ramakrishna’s most respected disciple was his wife. Lahiri Mahasaya’s wife was an enlightened saint, according to Yogananda. Mirabai’s husband was enlightened. Marpa’s wife was a very advanced saint. As I said, it’s not really a rule because there are many exceptions, but it’s more of a pattern than not. Just ask yourself, if you were some kind of a God who planned to incarnate here, and you wanted to teach one advanced student, what would be the best way to arrange that? Sure, as long as you’re here you might as well teach others, but it might be only an afterthought. Teaching might not really be anywhere near the real reason why you are here. The true reason might be closer along the lines of cosmic politics, as in the case of Krishna’s incarnation. Sure, he had advanced saints as wives, and sure, he had a demigod friend-disciple Arjuna, but the real reason why he was here was to deal with the problem of too many fucking idiots incarnated in the warrior caste, giving the world a hard time.

So, testing Krishna to see if he’s a worthy enough guru to teach your highness? He’d intentionally fail all your tests just for shits and giggles. If you have to test him, it means you are not qualified. The ones who are qualified instinctively and immediately recognize him as the Lord and organize their entire lives around him. So, you can see why I find the concept ridiculous.

But of course, the vast majority of situations where you learn from some spiritually advanced person doesn’t follow the model of a life-long profound personal relationship. Most often, you can be spiritually influenced by several sources, each of them giving you a small nudge in the right direction. It can be music, someone’s photo, a sentence, a spiritual darshan. Reducing spiritual learning to the Hindu guru-chela model is too simplistic to reflect anything real, at least to the vast majority of people involved.

When in a hole…

Posted on by
8

I’ve heard people praising persistence in the face of difficulty and failure in so many places, from business lectures to spiritual advice, it’s making me sick, because my experience is quite different. In my experience, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. If something you have been doing has fucked you up, maybe, just maybe, doing more of it and harder isn’t the brightest idea. Instead, how about stopping to think and change your approach, maybe even revise your goals? Because if things are not working, you have several possibilities, and you can present them in simplified form as a 2×2 matrix, where the possibilities are that you are doing either a right thing or a wrong thing, and you are doing too much or not enough. So, the troublesome possibilities are that you’re either doing too much of a wrong thing, or not enough of a good thing. At the point of failure, assuming that you are doing the right thing, and only failing because you’re not doing enough of it is simply stupid.

Let’s put it this way. Life is a process of learning, from the point where you’re pissing into diapers to the point where you are reading articles such as this one. You had to go through certain steps in order to get where you are now. You didn’t get here by doing more of the things you did when you were 5. So, assuming that the first thing you will try will also be the last thing you will ever need is to assume you will die failing there. If not, you’ll outgrow it. You will either try it and see it’s not working, in which case you’ll find something more useful for attaining your goals, or you will try it, succeed and progress to the next level, of both understanding and methodology, and, quite possibly, of goals, because if your goals are still the same you had as when you were 5, you’re retarded. Your goals need to change with your growth in understanding.

The next issue is not that of right or wrong, but of approaching the problem adequately. If you don’t have a hammer at hand, it’s probably ok to hammer a nail or two with pilers, but if you didn’t get up to find a hammer after the second nail, you’re a lazy fuck. You need to change your approach as you do things; you need to adapt, learn, think. If your problem is something simple, such as unloading a truck full of cement bags, it is completely solvable by linearly scaling work. The more you work, the more gets done, and the more bodies you throw at the problem, it gets done faster. However, such problems are usually solved so quickly you can’t really call them “problems”. The stuff where you are likely to get stuck or fail is usually the stuff that requires a change in approach, basically you need to do things with your brain turned on and with your eyes open, observe what’s going on and focus on accomplishing your goals, and not necessarily on keeping your methods the same.

In spirituality, this is the most frequent reason for failure, and reason why failure is the norm and success is the exception. The way it works is that religions and cults assume their way is the right way, that more of it gives better results and all kinds of failure are due to not doing it enough or in the right way. Essentially, their basic assumption is that there’s nothing wrong with them.

Really?

Islam, for instance, thinks that solution to all problems is more islam. It doesn’t understand that the problem of islamic countries is that they are islamic. Ataturk understood that and worked on removing Islam from the position of Turkey’s solution-seeking paradigm. The result was that Turkey became the most advanced “islamic” country, but that’s a misnomer because it became advanced exactly because of not being islamic. Of course, there are always those who don’t understand that, and who think that the way to solve the remaining problems would be to introduce more islam, because that would make it better; of course it would, since there’s nothing wrong with it. Right. Also, in order to survive in the modern world, religions adapted by stating that you can take just the spiritual and ethical part of them, and for the rest you can have science and modern technology. However, if a religion fails at science and technology, if its approach is a dead-end there, what reason is there for you to think that its approach to God and ethics is any different? Most likely, its’s the same kind of failure, only more difficult to demonstrate because people were taught to accept bad assumptions as axioms.

Every stupid cult in the world thinks like that, and that’s why they are all dead ends. They are not solutions, they are problems. If you start from the premise that you already have all the important answers, you’re deluded. Spirituality is a process of transformation, and if you stick to all the ideas you initially brought with you, there’s no transformation, and doing more of that same shit will just waste more time.

No, the way to get somewhere is to assume you are on the starting point and you don’t have all the answers. When you get stuck somewhere, you can’t just assume that you need persistence. What you need is to stop and think, to see if you’re doing something wrong and that’s causing the difficulties, or you are in fact doing everything right and it’s just hard.

Persistence, of course, is essential when you need to do something that is difficult, takes a lot of time and effort, and you can’t just stop every now and then and check if 2+2 is still 4. Sometimes you indeed do have to persist and just grind the problem away. However, to assume that all problems are like that, that’s going to put you in a world of fail.

Ideologies and group identities

Posted on by
22

I’ve seen an interesting way of thinking in the Western jurisprudence, a sort of an extreme individualism which sees every possible guilt only on a personal level, disregarding even the very concept of collectivism.

And yet we constantly see how people act in groups, with group bonds of belief and emotions, which create common thoughts and joint actions. When you have thousands of football fans breaking each other’s heads, your problem doesn’t exist on the individual level. It’s not individuals performing those actions, it’s the groups. Individuals are just instruments which the abstract group entity uses to assert its dominance, attitudes and beliefs. In that sense, nations really do exist as entities with emotions and willpower. Football clubs really do exist not only as administrative entities and players, but also as an idea that binds the fans into a group entity, connected on some very basic common denominator.

It’s very easy to get sucked into binding your personal identity with some group. When you do, it’s important to understand that you don’t become more than yourself, you become less. You don’t become something larger than yourself by identifying with a group, a group becomes something larger than it was by increasing its membership. You, yourself, simply ceded parts of your identity, and replaced your individual, personal thoughts with collective thoughts, collective emotions, beliefs and goals. It then becomes possible for you to attack people you don’t personally hate, but you hate them as part of your group identity.

For me personally, it’s interesting how I became capable of truly understanding some things about biological conditioning and inclusion of animalistic mechanisms in spirituality only after I chose to stop self-identifying as human. I literally stopped seeing my identity as part of that of human race, and started seeing myself as a separate species, that is still close enough to human to reproduce with humans, but no closer than a dog is to a wolf. I started seeing through social and reproductive strategies that were usually seen as spirituality, and my entire perspective on ethics changed. For instance, humans have no ability to tell good from evil if you separate it from what’s good and bad for humanity. For instance, if somehow some other species evolved on Earth which was far superior to humans, and the absolute karmic law would demand that humans go extinct like the Neanderthals before them, the humans would view that as evil. If an absolutely better species needed to go extinct in order for humanity to go on, humans would choose themselves. That made me think: what if all other ethical opinions commonly held by humans aren’t what God would want, but what the self-serving humanity wants? God would want sat-cit-ananda to manifest. Humanity wants there to be more humanity. That’s all there is to it.

As I said, it becomes interesting when you dissociate yourself from the group you implicitly belonged to since birth. You start noticing things, the same way you’d notice things if you dissociated yourself from some more obvious social identity, only with more profound, more liberating consequences. One of the most important things you notice is that people aren’t very interested in the truth, they are more interested at “being right”, being on the right side, and the right side is the winning side. It’s just an animalistic instinct of wanting to be on the winning side, because those on the losing side are traditionally either killed or sold into slavery. Also, if one side offers no advantages to you if you pick it, you pick the other side. Truth, reality, that doesn’t even show on your instinctive mind’s radar. Truth is what the winning side tells. Reality is that the winners live and consume resources. That’s what mankind is about, not God, not truth, not manifesting sat-cit-ananda. It’s about who gets to live, reproduce and have resources. God is what is invented to rationalize the winning side’s right to do what it does, and to allow it to keep what it had taken. If a real, true God existed who would question the order of things, he would not be acknowledged as their God. Essentially, if you had a-prefixed deities, where “a” stands for “absolute”, aGod and aSatan, and humans could choose which one is God and which one is Satan, what do you think, how would they do it? Using rational philosophy, metaphysics and transcendental ethics? Or by the criterion of being allowed to live, reproduce and consume resources?

What do you think what Allah or Jehovah are, in the absolute sense? aGod or aSatan? An entity that lets your tribe kill, plunder and rape, own sexual slaves and demands blood sacrifices, does that sound like the sat-cit-ananda Absolute that created the dual Universe in order to manifest His fullness as a multitude? From where I see it, from my non-human position, it’s either completely fabricated, made up as a sick fantasy of warlords and madmen, or it was inspired by Satan as a system of belief that will bind humans into groups that are most useful for his goals of keeping souls bound in ignorance and sin, and leading them to perform sinful deeds that will propagate their enslavement to this place.

I once heard an interpretation that a division between God and Satan is within religions and not between them; between individual ideas and concepts and not so much between whole ideologies. But I wonder. Some ideologies, as a system, seem to be consistently promoting beliefs that are conducive to ignorance, bondage and resistance to any change from that status, and people assume group identities based on those ideologies, aligning their destinies with the group vector.

So yeah, think about that the next time you cheer for your country on the football championship, when you identify with others based on what OS runs on your computer or a phone, when you identify with others based on your species, race, nation, religion or other stupid bullshit.

The only thing you actually are, is what you are when you stand naked before the spirit of God, in His light. Every other identity is a descent into some illusion or another, promoting and propagating bondage and suffering. And guess from which perspective your actions are going to be seen and evaluated when you die?

Live your life in such a way that you can stand before God, stripped of any kind of collective identity, and have God see your life as his own, something that was His manifestation in the relative world of duality. Because where you’re going, there are no football clubs, nations, races, genders or religions, and the only true judgment that is passed on any action is whether it is of God, who is sat-cit-ananda.

The flowchart of madness

Posted on by
Reply

I was thinking about hierarchy of belief and how it can cause apparently unrelated problems.

Let’s illustrate it with a flow chart which shows how a terrorist attack at a gay club becomes possible:

flowchart

Basically, you end up with very bizarre beliefs and behaviors that are a logical consequence of accepting previous, apparently logical and sensible steps. That’s how you get people who believe that Earth is flat, that dinosaurs were contemporary with humans and that Earth is some 6000 years old, but that’s also how you get people who get to believe that the Earth is over 4 billion years old. They just follow a different hierarchy of belief: for instance that the world is real, that its laws are constant, that it isn’t a simulation that’s running on some astral computer, that it all behaves linearly independent on existence of observers, etc.

If at least one accepted belief in the chain proves to be false, the final conclusion will be worthless. So when we see a terrorist who takes an AR-15, goes into a building and shoots people (whether they are gay, Jews, workers in an abortion clinic or audience at a heavy metal concert is irrelevant), we naturally think he’s fucked up in the head because his beliefs and actions are contrary to all reasonable and accepted behavior, but the thing is, you can’t just dismiss his internal flow chart. There is some decision-making process he went through and came up with those conclusions. It doesn’t happen at random. Also, people don’t just happen to join cults at random. There’s a flow chart: is there a God, are there people who know God and can lead others to God, is this guru one such person, how should one act when he meets such a person, and you end up shaving your head, wearing a saffron robe and chanting 16 rounds of Hare Krishna a day. The conclusion sounds ridiculous when you’re unfamiliar with the particular flow chart, but when you think of it, people are usually lead down the garden path of consistency with all previous steps taken, where one thing follows from another, until you get something that appears to be completely irrational.

That Muslim shooting 100 gays, he wasn’t irrational. He just accepted that there is one God, he’s called Allah, he sent a prophet called Mohamed who revealed the perfect and authoritative scripture called Qur’an, and there are also the Hadith about his life and sayings that clarify matters further, this is all authoritative and if one wants to be saved for eternal life he must adhere to those instructions.

That those internal flow charts exist is obvious; the true question is, what is yours, and what if it contains faulty premises that result in fatal errors?

Back in the cold war, or heading to a hot one?

Posted on by
13

There’s been lots of talk about whether we’re back in the cold war between NATO and Russia. Let’s clear this up a bit by defining what made the cold war so bad, what made it end, and then let’s see where we are now.

The cold war was defined as a non-friendly but not openly hostile political situation, aggravated by the possession of nuclear arsenal by both sides, and further aggravated by the advances in rocket technology which reduced times from launch to mutual destruction to cca. 35 minutes.

What made this especially dangerous was aggressive political posturing which made a nuclear attack possible, forcing both sides to implement a hairline trigger on the nuclear arsenal, with short reaction times making the system dangerously sensitive to false positives. Essentially, it’s like the situation where you are constantly harassed by burglars and thugs to the point where you respond by arming yourself to the teeth and responding to every suspicious noise during the night with gunfire, which eventually results in killing a family member who forgot to turn on the light.

The cold war stopped being a credible threat when Americans stopped their political posturing, Reagan agreed to meet with Gorbachev and they signaled to the Russians, in no unclear terms, that they don’t intend to nuke them. Once the political hostilities stopped, the nuclear war stopped being a credible threat, regardless of the fact that both nuclear arsenals were barely reduced; as with handguns, the weapon itself is not a danger, but the mindset of the owner.

When the cold war ended, the Soviets decided that since the outside threat has ended, it’s now time to deal with their economy because standing in lines for bread and everything else during peacetime makes no sense whatsoever, and in their hasty and poorly devised reform attempt they wrecked their own country. Americans then decided to interpret this as their victory in the cold war, although the cold war itself ended several years earlier.

This resulted in a very dangerous change in American mindset, where they stopped viewing the Russians as an equal power, and instead started seeing them as some sort of a failed country of a defeated people, with decaying military that is a threat only to the local ecology. This was actually true for an entire decade, but since Vladimir Putin came to power, he implemented powerful and effective measures which stabilized the country, repaired the economy to the level that is far better now than it ever was, even during the best of times. He also worked on reconstructing the industry and the military functionality. As a result, the Russian army is now not as massive as it was in the Soviet times, but is much more effective. The nuclear functionality was rebuilt, and nuclear deterrent is now completely functional on a level superior to that of the Soviet Union. Very accurate tactical and aerospace-defense rockets were also developed in the meantime.

So basically, the reason why the cold war was bad was because Americans were actively performing hostile propaganda against the Soviet Union, which was armed with strategic nuclear weapons, and political hostilities made it a conceivable supposition that the purpose of the political propaganda was to justify a nuclear first strike against the demonized enemy.

The situation we have today is that the Russians have fully functional strategic nuclear weapons and the Americans are in the middle of an unprecedented military-political campaign of putting thousands of troops on the Russian border under the guise of “military exercises”, they apparently attempt to weaken the Russian nuclear deterrent by activating an Aegis Ashore station in Romania, building another one in Poland and placing Aegis warships in the Baltic sea, they already politically destabilized Ukraine and are trying to provoke Russia into responding militarily, and they are actively and consistently implementing a propaganda campaign against Russia, ever since the Sochi Olympics. The Russian president, who is an extremely calm, moderate and competent politician, is portrayed as a Hitler-like psychopathic dictator who needs to be stopped, which looks very much like all American recent justifications for war, where the attacked country is first exposed to strong propaganda which portrays it as a prison-country that is held hostage by some Hitler-Satan hybrid of a dictator and his ridiculous henchmen, and needs to be invaded in order to free the people, who will then magically proceed to follow a natural human tendency to form an America-like democratic paradise, where you don’t have just one party to vote for, but two, and it’s not like you have to go through a complicated vetting process where the elites check out or even propose the credible presidential candidates, and where you have free economy, not like other countries where the government regulates the economy by bailing out failing banks and businesses. Oh wait…

But I digress.

We actually passed the point of being back in cold war and we are on the very brink of hot war. NATO tanks are on the Russian borders, which was never the case before. American anti-ballistic defenses, which were the crux of the “Star wars” crisis of the Reagan administration, which provoked the Soviets almost to the point of losing their cool and starting to take out the Pershing II intermediary-range silos in West Germany, are surrounding Russia. Russian fighter-bombers are performing close warning runs above American Aegis ships in the Baltic and Black Sea. Also, America is provoking China in the China Sea. Turkey, a NATO member, actually shot down a Russian fighter-bomber in Syria, where the Turks had no right to be. This is all almost identical to the war games from the 1980s, where a realistic political and military escalation leading to a nuclear exchange was modeled. The only reason why this didn’t escalate further is that Russian president is one very cool and calculated person.

The problem is, the Russians are pissed off right now, and I mean the entire people, not the government. They didn’t like being insulted, they didn’t like being lied to, they didn’t like their allies being taken out systematically, they didn’t like the former Soviet republics and Warsaw contract countries being recruited into NATO, they didn’t like the surrounding countries being infiltrated by CIA and their minions under the guise of “promoting democracy”, and they certainly didn’t like the greatest president they had since Peter the Great being portrayed as some Hitler-like maniac. They also didn’t like America sponsoring the Nazis in Ukraine, they didn’t like the fact that openly anti-Russian governments are installed in the former Soviet bloc despite great popular support for Russia in those countries, they don’t like the fact that all the journalist in Europe work for CIA, that the Russian opposition is briefed by the American embassy and paid either from the State Department budget or by CIA-sponsored “NGOs”. They don’t like America artificially reducing the price of oil on the world market and introducing sanctions against Russia in order to weaken its economy, and they are basically completely disappointed in America, after initially having embraced the American values in the 1990s. Americans think that their “democratic” pro-western puppets are the opposition to Putin. No, they have zero popular support in Russia and if not for the State Department financing they would already have starved. The true opposition to Putin is the Communist Party, and compared to them, Putin is incredibly calm and moderate. The problem is, if the Communist Party wins the parliamentary elections, this will reduce Putin’s ability to respond calmly and rationally to further American provocations, and if he is forced to respond in a way that will be demanded by the people and the parliament, he will be forced to take down the threatening American assets, and take further initiative to secure their immediate borders. From there, it’s nuclear exchange in several predictable moves, and no credible alternative.

The situation could be immediately resolved by removing idiots from power in America, and disbanding NATO, for whose continued existence there is no valid reason anyway, and it’s merely a bureaucracy that tries to create problems for which its continued existence would be the solution, at the cost of degrading the actual security of the world to the lowest point ever outside of open world wars. Also, America would have to remove their military installations from the former Soviet bloc, and you’d be surprised to know how many of those there actually are, including concentration camps for extrajudicial detention and torture of “undesirables”.

The problem is, I just don’t see America stopping the thing it’s doing, because it thinks it’s winning, which is the most dangerous state of things because that’s how the wars start. The even bigger problem is, I don’t see how America can be shown it’s not winning in ways that don’t include hundreds of nuclear mushrooms sprouting over American cities. So yeah, how dangerous is it? Very. It’s as dangerous as handling a deadly poisonous snake without being aware that it is poisonous. If you know it can kill you, you’ll be careful. It’s the absence of this awareness that makes this current crisis so much different than the ones before. Before, the Americans were aware of the fact that the Russians had the amount of nuclear weapons that is enough to turn Earth into Mars. Today, they seem to think that those nukes for some reason don’t count, as if they’re props made of plastic, and you can play with tanks and planes and it will somehow magically stop there because you brainfucked yourself into believing that nobody will ever use nukes, even when his existential interests are threatened. It reminds me of the bullies who get shot because when faced with an armed person, they act as if the gun doesn’t exist and actually continue bullying the person until he pulls the trigger, and then they act surprised as if nobody could see that coming. One such fucktard actually won the Darwin award by daring his 10 year old son to stab him with a knife, repeatedly, until the distraught kid actually stabbed him in the chest, to which the fucktard responded with “I can’t believe the kid actually did it” and died.

I can see the nuclear war coming for over a year, and so do the American experts on Russia. The Russians were refurbishing the fallout shelters in Moscow year ago. Anyone who doesn’t see what’s going on is either blind or delusional.

The only real question is, are the Americans doing this on purpose or are they just incredibly stupid?