“U suton” written originally in Croatian 2012.

“Into the sunset” translation sample, 2017.

The translation is not final. The English version may end up being significantly different from the Croatian original. For instance, the Croatian version uses a more colloquial free-form language, while the English version is more formal. Also, in some places I might write some things differently, so it’s not really a translation, it’s a rewrite.

Ego and authority

I’ve recently been thinking about what sheep people really are, how inclined they are to unquestioningly adopt ideas they do not understand, but which are presented to them as authoritative.

In this concrete case, I’m thinking about the concept of ego.

You all probably know what that is about: ego is supposed to be the great evil, from which possessiveness, selfishness, jealousy, hatred, violence, wars and similar horrible things originate. Ego is an evil, tiny gnome that stands between the soul and enlightenment, and if you’re freed from its grasp you will realize that All is One. This is usually followed by quotations from the authoritative oriental scripture which supposedly proves it, and it is something that is beyond question, and all “spiritual people” treat it as an unquestionable fact.

And what are the facts of the matter? Ego, as a concept, originates from 19^th century Europe, and was forcefully introduced into the oriental philosophies by means of translations and commentaries made in that period, at the time when the West was originally introduced to the subject matter, and translators and commentators were heavily introduced by the European zeitgeist and the contemporary European philosophies. Here I mean primarily the scientistic worldview, according to which something is either scientific or false, and the “science” of the day was heavily influenced by Freud and his psychoanalytic views. The concept of ego was therefore introduced into the oriental philosophy neither by Buddha nor Shankara, but by Freud and Jung.

You are likely to notice that the original oriental texts such as the Bhagavad-gita mention ego as something that stands in the way of realization, and that this something is called mamata and ahamkara. That is true, but those words don’t mean “ego”, but rather “selfishness” and “arrogance”. Mamata means the possessive attitude, where one claims ownership of things, in a sense of “this is mine, I acquired it, I have the right to claim it”, and ahamkara means literally “I am doing”, the attitude of “I am the master of my own fate, I did this, I decide what is to happen”. This, in short, is the attitude of an arrogant asshole with a big car, golden Rolex watch and a fat bank account, flaunting his wealth and status because he believes it’s all deserved and shows what a great person he is. Surely, everybody will agree that this attitude, which acknowledges neither luck, nor the fortunate circumstances, nor the hand of God, is incompatible with sophisticated spirituality, and this is exactly what the oriental texts are trying to tell us. It’s as clear as day, but it has nothing to do with “ego”.

Ego, as a Freudian concept, does not exist in the oriental philosophy at all, let alone as something that opposes spiritual efforts. On the contrary, the basic concepts relied upon by the Western concept of ego are fundamentally differently understood in the oriental thought, which makes translation of this kind of a concept, as well as the terms that are supposed to explain it, impossible.

“Ego” means literally “I” in Latin; this is the concept of “selfness”, or “self”. It is much closer to what Patañjali calls “asmita”, “the substance of selfness” that is seen in a living being (jivan). This concept has nothing whatsoever to do with the concepts of mamata and ahamkara, and is much closer to the concept of atman, which is seen by Shankaracarya as something that is to be sought exactly in the direction of the personal sense of self, or “ego”, by asking the question “who” am “I” really, or, rather, what “I” am not. He then proceeds to deal with a detailed analysis of the concepts of misidentification of Self with the imposed limitations and illusions, due to which Self is identified with the “vessel” in which it resides; the Upanishads often use a metaphor with the one Moon reflected in many bodies of water, or of milk diluted by water, which a knower (compared to a swan, which was thought to be able to separate milk from water with its beak – however, to digress, it sounds more like a phonetic trick for the initiated ones, because the word “hamsa” sounds like “so ham” (“I Am That”) when the syllables are flipped) can filter out, or discriminate between the reality of Self and the illusion of a limited and mortal being.

This is how Yoga and Vedanta see the concept of selfness. Buddhism, however, has seemingly opposed understanding of the subject matter – it perceives “self” as a non-entity, understanding it to be as fictional as phlogiston and impetus, where the very idea of an eternal and perfect component present within the human reality is fiction which actually causes bondage and delusion. Seemingly, Buddhism teaches that the human self, or ego, is but an emergent quality of the mind and its building blocks, like speed which is the emergent property of automotive parts, where “speed” doesn’t actually exist on the list of automotive parts, but occurs when those parts all perform their intended function. When I say “seemingly”, it means all is not as it appears, since the great teachers of Buddhism, such as Milarepa, expressly teach the knowledge of the true Self, which is in all things identical to the teachings of Vedanta and opposite to Buddhism as it is commonly understood. I thought about this for quite a long time and I came to a very interesting conclusion. You see, Buddha appears not to have taken even the slightest bit of interest in describing the goal of spiritual practice. He thought that anything thus described creates merely another image in the mind of the listener, which will necessarily be illusory and likely binding. He therefore devoted his efforts to explaining the path, and not the goal, explaining what needs to be done and what attitude one is to assume toward things. The point is therefore in the correct attitude which then has a consequence of spiritual transformation. When spiritual transformation takes place, the practitioner acquires realizations and experiences beyond the scope of a verbal explanation. The religious sphere abounds with dogmas and imagery used in order to imprint the minds of the followers, who then proceed to treat this imagery and dogma as realities and not make-believe in the order of magnitude of unicorns and hobbits, which exist as fairytale creatures, which can be imagined and worked with as if they were real, but still exist only within the mind. Where religion says “imagine fire”, Buddhism says “take a magnifying glass, focus sunlight on a piece of paper and observe the occurring phenomenon”. The result of the second approach is the actual fire, not the idea of fire.

In case of fire, we are dealing with a commonly known phenomenon which is in everyone’s personal experience, and so the word “fire” invokes the memory and imagery of actual fire, but imagine what would happen if one didn’t have any pre-existing experience of fire, nor the slightest preconception thereof. For instance, imagine trying to convey the meaning of fire to an intelligent dolphin. You cannot rely upon the word “fire”, nor use comparisons or analogy, because he lacks experiences and memories that are necessary in order to make the connection between a verbal term and a thing, having spent his entire life in water, in the environment where fire cannot exist. The only thing you can do is invite him outside of water, and there you can light a fire and tell him, “here, look, this is fire”.

Buddhism therefore starts with the understanding that it is useless to speak of transcendence, and that the only sensible approach is to provide instructions for its attainment. To speak of transcendence is pointless in any case, since words create meaning by pointing to some preexisting imagery or understanding within the mind, and those can veritably point towards transcendence only if a person has it in personal experience, but to assume pre-existent transcendental experience, in an audience which seeks instructions on attaining transcendence, is not useful.

Buddhism, therefore, sidesteps the problem: it basically tells you that everything in your experience is a huge mess, made of illusory perceptions, projections of the eternal and meaningful upon transitory and meaningless, and attachments that follow from attempts to catch one of those mirages and own it, which returns us to the concepts of possession and the illusion of control over one’s destiny, the mamata and ahamkara. What Buddhism advises here is not to “fight against ego”, but rather to cool down and create a distance between self and all the perceived and desired things, in order to detach oneself from them and understand that we are never actually dealing with the things themselves, but rather their meaning to our psyche, with images, prints in our mind that were left by the things. Buddhism advises us to divest ourselves, or rather to cease investing ourselves, as well as our happiness and fulfillment, into things that we perceive. What will happen when we release all such things and utterly remove investments of self and projections of ownership, that is something that cannot be explained, because it is a transformational experience, a change of the mode of being, which cannot be explained in any way that would produce a useful and constructive effect in the mind of the listener, but it is possible to go through the process of transformation and feel its effects, thus getting a very realistic understanding. If this sounds too complicated, just remember that you have things in your experience that you would not be able to understand from a mere description, but once experienced, they change your reality. One such experience is an orgasm – no amount of explanatory imagery can really convey the experience, and can in fact create a misapprehension. Similarly, it is impossible to explain an experience created by a sense one was born without.

In short, the entire thing is much more complicated than people usually think, and everything you ever heard about spirituality is likely simplified to the point of utter inaccuracy and uselessness. Despite that, the various “spiritual teachers” treat you like children with their “spiritual lectures” where they attempt to explain the “basic concepts” such as the need to fight the evil ego which stands in the way of the realization of “true Self”, with the only result of promoting ungrounded imagery, self-deception, sectarianism and imagined, false spirituality which stands in the way of true understanding of reality of any kind.

Ego is not a hindrance. On the contrary, Shankaracharya teaches that ego is a necessary starting point of a journey towards the realization of atman, which is synonymous with brahman. Without ego, you would be an anatmic (self-less) being, akin to a computer, to whom realization of brahman is not possible. Only through the ego, which is in fact a breakthrough point of atman into the body and mind, in form of self-awareness and self-consciousness, is it possible to isolate the phenomenon of Self and look for its source and true nature.

Buddhism seemingly teaches the opposite, but ask yourselves: what is the empty canvas of spirit which the Buddhist practice strives to attain? Who is the detached observer who witnesses withdrawal from the world, from the senses, from the mental imagery, as well as the projections and desires? Who is he who observes dissolution of all those things? If nirvana is the greatest bliss, this bliss must exist as a state of being, which is the point where you ask “what being?” It is therefore obvious that we are dealing with some sort of a positive, suprahuman form of existence, devoid of limitations and attachments, but one that is to such an extent inhuman and incompatible with human daily experience, that Buddha intentionally brushed off any possibility of identification of this state with anything from the sphere of humanly known, in order to stymie fantasy and imagination as substitutes for the actual experience.

Things are, apparently, much more complicated than the various “authorities” would like you to believe.

Perhaps that is the case because there are no “authorities”, at least not in the sense in which this is commonly meant? The only spiritual authority that remains truly valid, is direct experience and transformation of one’s own psyche, existence and reality. Everything else, as Buddha would say, is devoid of significance.

Years ago, I encountered unspoken, and yet very obvious assumptions that money is spiritually corruptive. Personally, I never could accept the implicit logic behind it: essentially, if someone removes your financial limitations, and you start behaving like a madman, it’s more logical to assume that you were corrupt to begin with, and limitations prevented it from manifesting itself. Essentially, you can’t know what someone is made of if he never has the means to do what he really wants. But when that happens, is it really the lack of limitations that corrupted him, or did it only show what he truly was?

We have examples of all those Eastern gurus who come to the West and, exposed to the possibilities of power, sex and money, they go completely insane with their lifestyle. Were they corrupted? I say, it’s just that it’s easy to be a sannyasin when nobody has money, including you. However, try being one when surrounded with almost endless resources, with limitations removed from you, and when complete detachment is simply not an option, because you have to manage an organization with lots of people and with a significant budget. I find it interesting how I managed to figure this out the first time I ever thought of it, and most people just rehash the dogmatic phrases about the corruptive power of money. I realized that inner balance and spiritual foundations are the essence of what is popularly known as detachment or renunciation; it’s not about not having money, it’s about not projecting your fulfillment into the world, where money represents the lack of limitations on what you can do.

So, what does money do for me? First of all, I feel that it is good to have it, because the state of no limitations more closely resembles what I consider to be normal for me – not being limited, and being able to do whatever I want. Being confronted by things you cannot do on every turn is something I find spiritually damaging, because it keeps reminding me that I cannot truly be myself, that I am confined to an existence that is inherently incompatible with my true nature, and to me, this is actually more spiritually damaging than anything people can imagine being a result of enormous wealth. So, to me poverty is spiritually damaging, and wealth is something I perceive as normal. Wealth is when you can have a car that doesn’t break down because it’s so old it could almost vote, it’s when you can get the best tires for your car and not the most economical ones, it’s when you can get a really good computer and not the most economical one, it’s when you don’t have to dedicate as much time to the material things, because it’s much easier to just go get something you need, instead of making lists of cheaper alternatives and considering all the drawbacks and choosing what you can live with. Essentially, if your phone dies you just go get a new one, you don’t have to make a huge research to see what’s the most economical option out there because you need to budget everything very carefully. You take a look at the best options out there, just pick one you prefer and go use it. So, wealth in fact makes you think less about the material things, and more about what you want to use them for. You don’t have to think about the laptop or a camera you want to buy: you just get it and then proceed to writing books and taking pictures. You don’t just suddenly go crazy because you have money. Money itself doesn’t force you to spend it on whores and drugs. It just frees you to do the things you want to do. If you want to write books and take pictures, there you go. It doesn’t make you worse or better a person. It just allows you to actually do things instead of dreaming about them, and then we get to see the quality of your dreams. So yes, it can show that you’re a rich asshole, but only if you already were a poor one. Money can turn a poor asshole who pretends to be pure and untouched by the material things and reveal him for what he truly is, but it cannot take a truly spiritual person and corrupt him. That doesn’t happen. What it does is get you a truly spiritual person who has a nice place to live in, a nice car to drive, wears clothes that aren’t falling apart or look like shit, and so on. It improves the level of quality of the peripheral things. Money doesn’t make you go crazy, it just lets crazy out of the cage, if it was there to begin with.

I feel this is such a basic thing, completely trivial, absolutely intuitive and not even worth writing about for all its simplicity, to the point where I can imagine the audience rolling their eyes and saying “duh”. And yet, every single fucking time I see a fake spiritual person making a poverty show, people are gobbling it up like candy. That fake Pope Francis, or Mother Theresa, for instance. It’s almost as if the fakes have pretending to be a saint down to a science; just go down a list of poverty and misery worship items and you’re all set for the heavenly laurels. Even having to say that’s not the way to go about it makes me feel as if I’m explaining that 2+2=4, but people in general actually seem to be just that fucking stupid.

You’re not a saint if you don’t care about the material things. You’re a saint if your soul is so permanently absorbed in God, you only care about the material things to the extent where they are kept at the minimal level of interference with your spiritual focus. Essentially, if you are able to, you will get the best tool for the job and get on with it, you will not make a show out of getting the cheapest tool in order to show off your contempt for the material things. A show of poverty, humility and modesty is a form of manipulating humans, its only purpose is triggering a desirable response in others. It has absolutely nothing to do with spirituality, it’s a form of insidious power play. A truly spiritual person is as likely to be poor because he doesn’t care about matter enough to bother with becoming wealthy, as he is to be wealthy because he’s contemplating God who is freedom, power and magnificence.

I’m considering translating the last book I wrote in Croatian, “U suton” (tentative translation “Into the sunset”) to English, and since it’s not an insignificant amount of work and I’m not sure whether it’s worthwhile, I would like to know how many people are actually interested in reading it, and I mean people who don’t know Croatian and to whom the original is inaccessible due to the language barrier? If you’re interested let me know in the comment section, so that I can get some measure of the potential audience.

There’s something that puts the end of the world in perspective.

You see, in a hundred years at least 7 billion people will die. It’s a certain thing, completely unavoidable. It’s so routine it’s no longer considered much of a tragedy, because it’s been going on since the dawn of time – every hundred years or so the oldest human on Earth dies, and as he dies, everybody that was alive at the time he was born is already dead.

So, it’s not dying that is exceptional when we talk about the end of the world, because death is inevitable to the living. What is exceptional is that there are no replacement bodies, there is no longer a next generation. There is no longer an endless circle of birth and death, there are no longer human bodies to provide the experience-vessels to those who think this place has something to offer. That door had been closed.

Another thing that is associated with the idea of the end of the world is suffering. This is because the idea of individual death is associated with suffering, which is imagined to be terrible by those who have never been close to death. I have, and I know this to be nonsense. I’ve been so close to death, I don’t think it’s actually possible to get closer than I’ve been and end up with a functioning body afterwards, and I can tell you with complete certainty that death as such is only a breath away from a bad situation. When you’re terribly sick, or gravely injured, death actually halves the suffering, because it takes at least as much suffering to recover, if not more, than it did to approach death. So, basically, when you’re gravely ill, you have the option to end the suffering there by dying, or at least double the suffering by slowly climbing out of the hole that is sickness, in order to fully recover. If you’re suddenly injured, you’re usually in too much of a shock to experience much suffering, and if you then die, it’s a very swift and easy thing; however, if you wake up in the emergency room or in an intensive care unit, that’s where the actual suffering starts, if you are to get better. You can experience days, weeks, months, sometimes years of pain, disability, disfigurement or other forms of hardship, and yet, people see this process with optimism, because it’s recovery, you get to live afterwards. So it’s not suffering that people fear in death – it’s not being. They fear not being so much, they imagine it as huge suffering, a terrible thing that is to be avoided at all cost, but it’s actually the prolongation of life that causes suffering. Death ends it. It is the fear of death that makes people prolong the suffering of their elderly parents and other relatives, making their agony linger and extend the limits of suffering far more than was common throughout history, and it’s not seen as senseless cruelty that it is, because it’s supposed to fight or at least delay death, which is so feared. It is the fear of death that makes you attach your elderly parents and grandparents to machines that prolong the worst agony that precedes death, not because death is horrible, but because you are afraid.

The end of the world is the point where there’s no longer the advanced technology and medicine and misguided compassion to prolong the suffering from the point of the inevitable suck, to the point of soul-crushing, seemingly endless agony in which you forget you ever were something that is not this degradation and suffering, and that there ever was life or existence that wasn’t degradation and suffering. When you are injured or sick to the point of death, you just die, and are free from the shackles of suffering that this body imposes upon you. There is a limit to how much you can normally suffer before you die, without anyone to “help you”. It can look terrible, and it is terrible, but it is not that much more terrible than the many illnesses we all had and recovered from; the difference between influenza you have and recover from, and the one you die from is insignificant, in terms of suffering. Also, when you take a look at the historic methods of execution of the death penalty, it turns out it is easy to kill people quickly and with relatively little agony, but it takes quite a bit of ingenuity to kill them in a slow, lingering fashion. The modern life support for the sick and elderly, however, takes the cake for being the most viciously cruel, routinely sadistic and awful way of giving someone a slow, lingering death. Crucifixion and impaling don’t even come close. So, essentially, it turns out that hatred and malevolence never produced as painful, humiliating and lingering a form of death as did fear, compassion and love.

I cannot say that all people are wrong to fear death. Some are so evil, that what awaits them beyond death is much worse than any agony they could possibly experience in this life, and they are fully justified in fearing death. Some live such a meaningless, empty and trivial life, that it’s quite possible there’s no afterlife for them because there’s really nothing there, there is no immortal soul present in the body, and death cannot create what doesn’t exist to begin with. Death isn’t the same thing to all people. To the evil ones, the cruel, mocking and cynical ones, who make this life a hell for all others, death is the end of their evil playground. In death, they lose the ability to control and hurt others, and are about to face justice. They are right to be afraid, because what awaits them is indeed most terrible. Also, for those who are virtuous, whose sophisticated souls incessantly tested the limits of the world in attempt to exceed it, who improved the lives of others with love, beauty and consciousness, they are freed by death, to expand into greatness undreamt of, something that cannot even be properly imagined while limited by flesh.

But death doesn’t create. It only liberates what you truly are, in your essential nature, and what you are then faces God, and you then see the reality of it all, devoid of all deception and illusion.

The end of the world, therefore, isn’t much different, on an individual level, from the ordinary death we all face. What makes it special is not more death, because death is certain to all who now live, in any case. Also, what makes it special is not judgment after death, because that, too, is what we all face. What makes it special is that there will be no children, no continuation, and no hope projected into the world, no burial by the caring survivors; and deaths come not by trickle, but by flood. Whether you end or not, however, is quite a separate matter, dependent upon your personal relationship with God.