There’s a thing in the last article that I think was not understood by most: “You become good, actually good, by appropriating aspects of God’s spirit, and thus participating in eternity”. What do I mean by that?

Let’s first clarify what is usually believed about the soul, and then I will specify points of contention.

People either believe there’s a soul, or not. If they believe in it, they usually believe that all humans, and in some cases all beings, have an immortal soul, whose destiny after physical death is influenced by its choices and actions during life. This destiny can be either temporary or permanent; essentially, those who advocate impermanence of soul’s destiny believe in some form of reincarnation, where conditions of the soul constantly change depending on its spiritual qualities and choices. Those who advocate a permanent destiny essentially believe in a heaven/hell dichotomy, where good souls go to a good destination, and evil souls go to a bad destination, where both destinations are permanent and eternal.

The main point of contention that I see is in generalization. For instance, I don’t believe in a soul as a Boolean (either exists or not, and if exists, it’s eternal), I believe in a soul as a range of possibilities, because I have a very empirical position based on personal observation of souls of various qualities in various conditions, which happens to match the Buddhist understanding of the subject matter very closely. You have spiritual substance which can be aggregated into structures of varying complexity, size and something you can call the difference in energy, similar to the difference between photons of infrared light and gamma radiation, or the difference between a rock and a black hole, where both are matter, formally speaking, but the differences in structure, density and behaviour are enormous. Well, in the spiritual sphere the differences between spiritual entities or beings, you can call them souls if you want, are comparable to the differences between material entities, such as for instance between a cloud of water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere, a cloud of plasma on the Sun, a cloud of dust on Mars, and a cloud of methane on Titan. Then you have the next order of magnitude of difference, between clouds, liquids, solids, and even denser things like protons pressured into fusion, neutronium and singularity. Finally, there is a difference in complexity, such as the difference between a super-simple things like clouds of hydrogen, or a lattice of carbon atoms, and super-complex things like human brain, or the newest microprocessor.

So, what I understood, decades ago, is that souls don’t actually appear to be some point-like abstract eternal entities, and that they don’t appear to be all of the same kind, and I mean that in a sense more radical than you can probably imagine. There’s spiritual substance which exists in a spectrum of, well, energy, if you can call it that, but this “energy” is also self-awareness, mentality, joy, beauty, and other things. Low energy of spiritual “particles” makes them feel “evil”, for the lack of another word. Evil, hatred, anger, spite, arrogance, cynicism, roughness, malice, stupidity, ugliness, that’s what I sense from observing the spiritual substance of low energy. Another thing about it is that low-energy particles don’t bond well with each other, because apparently an aspect of low energy is that there’s not enough power in them to form bonds that would allow creation of large and complex structures. So, when you have a being that’s made primarily of low-energy spiritual matter, it’s very unlikely to hold together for long, like ephemeral phenomena such as the dust devils in the desert. The low energy entities can attempt to prolong their existence by trying to steal energy from somewhere, but it’s always a losing game, and eventually they all disperse into basic constituents. In fact, it appears that spiritual matter behaves the opposite of physical matter: when energy of the physical atoms is sufficiently raised, the connections between them become looser and eventually impossible. With spiritual matter, the particles behave that way when they lose energy.

The higher-energy spiritual particles behave differently; they have more color, brightness, cohesiveness and ability to form complex structures, but we are still dealing with something that looks like a gas; a collection of particles that are held together in a larger structure due to some mutually attracting force, and they don’t tend to dissociate on their own, but their density and solidity is still low. This range, between low-energy gas, and high-energy gas, is mostly how I perceive the lower part of the astral spectrum. It’s all low density, and simple structure, comparable to clouds of various kinds. On the higher astral spectrum, things get very interesting, because the higher, more complex beings display much greater complexity and diversity of structure, comparable to the difference between, let’s say, some colloidal suspension or aerosol on one hand, and a computer, or a living being on the other hand. Lower astral entities are capable of simple energetic emotions, where the lower spectrum of entities are capable only of the low-energy states such as hate, fear, anger, spite etc., and the higher-energy entities are capable of higher-energy states such as joy, admiration, love, pleasure, fun and acceptance, but they are still in both cases only very simple emotions, and compared to the higher astral spectrum, they look like the difference between happiness of a mouse who is happy when he has enough food and there aren’t predators around, and happiness of a man who listens to subtle and beautiful music and thinks about some wonderful character in a book that he had read recently, and wonders what it would be like to fly without physical limitations and absorb sunlight as food. Essentially, it’s like a difference between a pocket calculator and an iPhone, where both can be the same size and general shape, but they are vastly different phenomena. Because of this vast difference in complexity and structure, you can somewhat understand my take on good and evil, where I perceive lack of development, sophistication and structure as the greatest evil, where spiritually speaking it’s much better to be the worst man than it is to be the best cloud of generalized emotion. Spiritual evolution, therefore, means greater structure, complexity, cohesion, density and each spiritual particle carries within itself some form of self-awareness, mentality and other forms of “spiritual energy”. Greater and more sophisticated structures have more permanence, and they have greater capability of capturing the qualities of the Absolute, of God. It’s like transistors, where each on its own is little more than a switch, but several of them together form logical circuits, like AND, OR, NOT etc.; put thousands or millions of them together and you get a CPU. Increase complexity and sophistication of the structure, and you increase their capability to process instructions in increasingly smaller slices of time. You can say that each transistor has some small inherent capacity to do something with information, which increases when they are intelligently aggregated in greater structures, and when the structure grows large and sophisticated enough, you get a kind of magic, with entire synthetic worlds simulated within the machine.

Most humans have souls that are no more than astral clouds, of some complexity to be sure, but of little permanence. You can call them souls, but it’s really an insult to the concept. Impermanent, ephemeral, contradictory, inconclusive, they amount to nothing and usually decay into basic constituents, which rearrange chaotically like atoms of gas. Unfortunately, when I say “most humans”, I mean a rather large majority. This majority was created when the world was populated by the extreme number of humans, far greater than the number of complex and sophisticated souls that could merge with the bodies and experience physical matter. Essentially, they are either the lesser souls that would normally be unworthy of a human incarnation, or merely whirlpools of astral substance created by the astral interface in the human brain, creating “something” in the place where a soul is supposed to be, trying to form connections and communicate information. Those clouds or whirlpools don’t persist long after the physical death. The minority are what I would call the normal human souls – complex high-astral beings with a differentiated, solid structure, with abstract ideas, sophisticated longings, deeper awareness and desires for great, beautiful things, attempting to form connections of love and companionship with other souls, and attempting to know more about reality in its various aspects. They admire things that are good, hate things that are bad, and they try to learn and grow. Essentially, they are self-aware, intelligent beings of complex emotions, frequently conflicted within themselves due to their various, often incompatible choices and ideas, and their structure has both strong points and weak inclusions, of substance of lesser energy and quality, and they either manage to gain understanding that turns weaknesses into solidity, or they, in some cases, break apart into lesser entities. I would assume that in some cases several souls can merge in order to form a larger, exponentially more sophisticated and powerful entity, but from my experience, the best path towards growth is that which both includes more spiritual substance, and compresses it into increasingly smaller space, at the same time purifying the structure, raising its “energy”, in an analogy to the processes that take place in the stars. This compression and exponential growth in sophistication can be partial or complete. An example of partial transformation are the astral beings whose parts have been transformed into spiritual “crystals”, or “jewels”, which are essentially parts of one’s personality that became much more pure, powerful and participating in God’s various perfections than the rest of their beings. In the beginning you have a sophisticated higher-astral soul that looks like an angelic being decorated by one small jewel which is even more beautiful than the rest of the soul. The next degree of progression is when more parts of the soul transform and it looks like it’s decorated with many spiritual jewels, who each tell a story about God, perfection and eternity. The final degree is when the entire soul is transformed into jewel-stuff, “vajra”, and since this vajra carries within itself the aspects of God’s greatness, it is impervious, permanent, pure and a state of salvation. There are of course higher levels of participation in God’s nature, states of Godhood where spiritual jewels are merely ornaments, weapons and “clothes” of Gods, whose nature is more-less indescribable, except by very weak analogy.

So, you can imagine why I cannot limit my understanding of the subject matter to the simplistic concepts of heaven and hell, or reincarnation. Sure, reincarnation exists, but it’s not an eternal process, and is often very messy. Beings can appear to evolve for a while, but then they break apart and dissolve. In other cases, they fail to form any kind of structure and dissipate quickly. In rare cases, they grow in complexity, but only up to a point, where they reach equilibrium, and then stagnate. In exceedingly rare cases they grow in sophistication to such an extent, that the results appear to be magical, and followers of most religions would consider it blasphemous to even consider the possibility of such fate for themselves, for such things are supposedly reserved for Gods. I, however, see it as some kind of physics, not unlike the thermodynamic laws of matter. It’s just that spiritual matter has spiritual characteristics that influence its behaviour; the particles interact based on how they “feel” and, lacking other terms, “react to the truth of God”.

So, that’s the very literal meaning of my original sentence. If you fail to know God, you fail to attain permanence and eternity. If you fail to know God, there’s no eternal hell for you, because hell isn’t the state of eternal suffering, it’s the absence of eternity, or, as Jesus aptly put it, the eternal death, death without resurrection. Entropy, decay into chaos, disorganization of a spiritual entity due to lack of internal cohesion, because only the longing for God, for eternity itself, creates cohesion and structure and solidity and, eventually, eternity of the soul. When I say there is no possibility of salvation outside of God, I mean it so fucking literally you couldn’t believe. It’s the actual, literal truth of the matter. Only God is eternal, and you’re either of God, or you are not at all. Eventually, only those two outcomes are stable, and everything else is just a temporary phase that precedes collapse into either of those permanent outcomes.