People have a very interesting penchant for not understanding subtlety. For instance, children regularly tend to think that the evil queen from the Snow White is ugly, because she is evil and cruel, and threatened by the Snow White’s beauty. In fact, she’s not only not ugly, she’s the second most beautiful woman in the world, who is vain enough to mind not being the first enough to resort to murder.

Likewise, people tend to imagine Devil as a horrible, scary person.

How can someone appear horrible and scary if their fundamental role is that of a deceiver and a liar? It’s incredibly silly. It’s obvious from the Bible that Devil can appear as whatever is most useful for him in his lies and deceptions. He can fake appearances with no problem at all. What he can’t fake is the essence. He can fake whatever you think would be the appearance of God, but he can’t fake the feeling one has in God’s presence, because that’s about the substance.

Devil is, or should I correctly say “was”, because he happened to have one of those accidents that make one unavailable for all further appearances, not scary in the sense that he has horns, hooves and tail, and essentially looks like the Balrog from the LOTR movies. The scary part is not his appearance, because he would carefully avoid that; it was the feeling of ominous warning from somewhere that you would feel in his presence. You suddenly feel the need to be careful, to mind your every thought, word and action, to observe things with your inner eye and watch carefully, for you are in danger. There is never anything obvious about it, nothing you can point your finger at, and the only threat seemingly comes from having to oppose the reasonable arguments of Satan with those of faith and inner feeling, for which you have no direct evidence, nothing firm you can hold on to, while it is obvious that you will be laughed at or suffer other consequences if you choose faith over “reason and evidence”. And yet, only faith can save you.

The thing is, you don’t have to know how everything works. You don’t have to provide evidence for why you feel something is so. After all, the concept of having to back everything with reason and evidence is a modern folly. Despite all the nonsense about reason and evidence, people still have no idea how three quarks glued together bend spacetime and thus cause gravity. They can tell you in great detail what gravity does and how it behaves once it’s there, but nobody actually knows what it is and how it came to be. Souls exist despite science having no idea about them. Gods likewise exist despite the ignorance of science. You don’t need to understand how the presence of God influences the soul in order to experience it. I didn’t need to know how my yogic techniques actually work in order for them to work; I figured out the mechanics of it decades later. Trusting your inner feeling is much more important than having evidence to back it up. Every thief and deceiver will try to get you to trust reason and evidence over your feeling. They will try to get you to trust your eyes, so that they can pull a fast one on you. Devil is merely the ultimate expression of that principle. He’s not scary in a sense of being a red goat-man with fire in his eyes, he’s scary in a sense of being a calm, reasonable man who is trying to use reasonable arguments to convince you of something absolutely fatal and false, and you can point to nothing concrete to disprove it despite feeling a deep need to oppose it, and the only salvation for you is to resort to blind faith in order to reject everything you see and seem to know to be “fact”.

The scary part of Satan’s presence is that it forces you to dive blindly into the abyss of faith, rejecting the apparent salvation offered in form of reason and evidence, saying “I don’t actually have to know how something works in order to see that it’s evil, because I see the moral character of the fruits”. Satan forces you away from your comfort zone, forces you to resort desperately to the aid of God whom you can’t see, while the reasonable and logical gentleman offers you apparently rock-solid evidence, from the direction of which you can smell fire and brimstone and doom. That’s why he’s dangerous and terrible – because you can save yourself from him only by the most desperate of means.

Why did I initially advocate for vegetarianism, only to abandon it entirely later?

The answer to this is rather complicated. You see, there’s a very fundamental tradition in Yoga, as practical approach to religion, where people don’t actually know which one of the things they did worked, so they will make a list of every single one of them, and have students reproduce the list in their own practice, hoping some of it will work and the achievement will be reproduced as well. This sounds incredibly non-scientific for something that is often advertised as a scientific approach to spirituality, but that’s what it is, and how it worked for thousands of years. For a system that doesn’t actually know what works and why, it seems to work remarkably well. Also, the reason why the list of things one is supposed to reproduce doesn’t get smaller easily is the perceived cost of experimentation. Essentially, one would have to intentionally risk students by giving them an incomplete list of things to do, and if/when someone fails, repeat his list enough times that you can rule out chance or individual peculiarities of the person in question. Essentially, you would have to deliberately ruin people just so that you could have a more scientific discipline. Since nobody ever did this intentionally, this list of things to do and not to do if you want to be a yogi tends to be remarkably stable.

Things did get crossed out by either chance or necessity, however. For instance, one of the staples of such lists was living in an Indian jungle near a holy river in a hut of your own making. There are even instructions on how to make one in the Upanishads. If this is technically infeasible, you would have to choose between not teaching people at all, or trying to find the closest possible equivalent, which varies between “find an equally extreme form of hermitage, such as a cave in the Himalayas”, and “find a place where nobody will bother you while you practice”. Believe it or not, people tended to go with the first option for a very long time, before enough people, unfortunate enough to lack access to remote caves, had to meditate in their room, managed to get a solid pool of datapoints in, and a conclusion could be formed that not being bothered is the active compound, and holiness of the place itself can be seen as a welcome but unnecessary addition.

There are other items on the list that were considered staples – for instance, celibacy, or brahmacarya. It was assumed to be essential, until multiple married people of both sexes attained success in yoga, after which it was merely “recommended”, and not seen as an absolute requirement. Similarly, vegetarianism is a staple requirement on each and every list I’ve seen, from every single authority on Yoga and Vedanta; at least at the times when I did my initial yogic practice. It’s seen as both a moral issue and an issue of introducing impurities into the system that aggravate the process of purification of the nadis. Since impurities can cause damage to the system when the energy flow increases to the point of stretching the limits of the conduits, you can understand why this is something nobody is willing to play with much in order to understand the exact parameters. In order to learn, you’d have to sacrifice people by pushing them too hard with an impure system, causing mental and physical damage, according to all schools of energetic yoga. Sacrificing students in order to improve your scientific knowledge would be immoral, so nobody does it. However, there are cases where people are literally forced to experiment on themselves and thus establish datapoints. One such example was Milarepa, who unwittingly provided two important datapoints. The first was meditating for a long time on a diet of a nettle brew. Surprisingly, nettles proved to be nutritionally valuable beyond what one would expect, and he managed to survive on this diet for, likely, years. This caused him to lose weight and strength and eventually caused mental fatigue and failure in meditation, and he was forced to interrupt his efforts and beg for food. He was given meat, ate it, and both his health and meditative success improved instantly and greatly. This is the second datapoint – meat actually doesn’t cause problems in advanced yogic practice; in fact, it seems to help. Sure, we can be conservative and say that this proved that starting with a nettle brew and continuing until a point of mental fatigue and failure, and then transitioning to a meat diet, is what will produce the desired effects. In fact, I am not sure I would dare to argue that this line of thinking is without merit, until I see evidence of someone who was always on a meat diet and produced same or superior results.

You see how that works? In science, experimentation is what provides datapoints. In yoga, experimentation is potentially fatal, and datapoints are provided usually only when someone has no other option but to break prohibitions, and then you see what the result happened to be. Even then, you don’t actually willingly repeat it because it could be a fluke, and only when enough people do involuntary experimentation, you can get more datapoints and eventually change the approach.

This was how it worked for me. I started spiritual practice that was initially non-yogic, consisting of advanced self-hypnosis and some concepts to meditate upon. After the initial results, I had experiences that looked very much like the descriptions of impure nadis in literature, and literature from all schools was perfectly clear – no drugs, alcohol, smoking or meat. I never took drugs, stopped smoking recently and drank alcohol only infrequently, so that part was easy. Not eating meat, however, was complicated, because I thought one can’t actually survive without it, and I had to survive in order to practice yoga, so that looked like a no-go. It turned out you can survive without meat, but you can’t just remove meat from conventional Western diet and be left with enough nutrients. You have to find substitutes, so I did that. It seemed to work, so I added vegetarianism to my personal list of things you have to do in order to succeed in spiritual practice. It took me about 13 years and various health issues before I abandoned it. I still think it would be morally preferable to be vegetarian, if it were a feasible option, but in my case, the amount of strain I had to put on my system was such, that it was not. I find vegetarianism preferable in all ways but one – it didn’t work for me in the long term. So, it wasn’t a philosophical change of mind, but a purely practical one, where ligaments on my hands and feet started breaking, and I had multiple injuries in a matter of weeks, one of them permanent. This was combined with a period where I craved meat, and tried to find substitutes. Eventually, I started slowly introducing meat to my diet and the problem with the ligaments was solved, and I had a significant increase in strength and endurance, combined with absolutely no adverse spiritual or energetic symptoms.

This doesn’t mean that I would feel easy recommending beginners to ignore the traditional and scriptural requirement of vegetarianism. I know what worked based on what I did. Advising someone to do something else would feel risky. I am pretty sure eating meat has nothing to do with impurity of the nadis, now, after decades of experience. For the most part, I think it’s about physical body’s slow adaptation to high spiritual states. I would absolutely advise against anything psychoactive, though. First of all, it will interfere with yogic practice, and second, it will be much harder to figure out a point where yoga is starting to become effective, and it’s a very sensitive thing initially.

So, I can positively say that meat is not a problem, while vegetarianism might either help, or get in the way, but only in the long term. Basically, it’s safe to go vegetarian for a few years and then gradually switch to meat. I see no harm in that. As for sex, of course whoring around would be spiritually detrimental and I strongly advise against it. Celibacy, however, isn’t of any good use spiritually, and is merely another set of problems that need to be managed. It doesn’t help in any way. Having a spiritually compatible sexual partner is ideal.

If vegetarianism and celibacy are of no use, what are actually the dangers in spiritual practice, that I am aware of?

Yes, those exist. They are actually described in scriptures and tradition. Interacting with worldly people messes up your concentration and is harmful. You need to reset yourself after every such interaction, and if you don’t, interference builds up to the point where you get so overwhelmed you can no longer practice yoga correctly. Radio, TV, Internet – those are all sources of interference. They are sources of useful information as well, so one would be poorly advised to cut them off entirely, but if you’re not cautious, you get overwhelmed easily. Books written by idiot authors are also harmful, because your mind gets saturated with bad ideas, and you need to purge such influence afterwards by exposing yourself to good things and good ideas before you can properly proceed with sadhana. If something is predictably harmful and you know you’ll have to repair the damage afterwards, it might be better to eschew the problem altogether. Yoga is a process of spiritual purification. You theoretically can alternate between spiritual purification and messing yourself up with stupid garbage online, but one would be justified in asking what exactly is the point of this exercise then. When you can reliably tell that something is harmful to your practice, and it is something you can eliminate, it would be wise to do so. Some things you can’t eliminate, unfortunately. Electromagnetic radiation, pesticides in food, all sorts of stuff in water and air – those, unfortunately, are a given. Also, getting sick will mess you up, and if you have a flu, you won’t be able to practice yoga until you’ve healed. It is what it is. However, adding TikTok to the list is inherently unhelpful. It’s enough that most of us had to live in polluted and noisy cities, and surrounded by unhelpful people. Overcoming those obstacles is hard enough. Introducing unnecessary ones might just be that one straw that makes the difference between success and failure. So, you can understand why I was extremely reluctant to deviate from the course recommended by scriptures and tradition in any way. In some cases, you just can’t help it – if tradition says you need to meditate in Himalayas near the source of Ganga, tough luck, because that’s simply inaccessible. You can understand the general intent of the instruction – find some good spot in nature far from human interference. Some improvisation is required. Also, when I personally found out that some traditional instructions are wrong, I omitted them. I was usually so reluctant to do so, it took me years or even decades to be completely sure, and I would not do so unless I had at least some kind of confirmation from above. Traditions are there because they worked, or at least people thought they worked, and for a long time. I’m not messing with that unless I understand exactly what’s going on and why. Since that’s very hard, I’m usually just not messing with it until absolutely forced to do so.

So, what turned out to be reliably dangerous? For the most part, ego trip that comes with success in spiritual practice that beginners experience. That will mess you up like nothing else. Also, not instantly obeying the guru and instead waiting until you figure it out yourself, because you don’t want to be a blind follower. That’s insanely harmful, because this kind of knowledge comes at the end of things, and is reliably unavailable before that. For a beginner, the expectation that he is to figure out the reason for the command before obeying it is as foolish as it is harmful. If the problem is big enough that your guru resorts to orders, it’s usually immediate and grave and needs to be acted upon instantly. Sometimes you will figure it out immediately after you obey the command, and you’ll see what that was all about, and sometimes you will understand it after multiple decades. The likelihood that you will ever figure it out unless you obey the command is negligible. You absolutely need to be a blind follower. After you do enough blind following and have enough “aha!” moments of understanding what that was about, you will gain independent expertise. No blind following, no expertise. Also, the reason why one would object to being a blind follower is typically insecurity, or some other Western ego trip about emancipation and similar bullshit. Even at this point, if God tells me to do something, I will first do it and then ask what that was all about. It’s probably the most important thing for one to learn, because failure to do so causes the greatest number of fatal errors one can make. I had situations where someone ordered me to suddenly stop in the middle of the road. I did. Seconds later a cistern truck came speeding through the bend, completely on my side of the road. Had I not stopped, it would have killed me. It’s merely one example, and I had loads of them, and only occasionally did I have a luxury of finding out why the order was issued. Mostly, I just survived and went on, not even knowing what I missed. So, obey first, ask questions later.

Another cause of failure is the assumption that problems are a sign you’re doing something wrong. That’s kind of a hard one, because sometimes they are, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes you are causing problems, and sometimes the Devil is causing you problems because he wants you to stop doing whatever you are doing, because it’s working. You need to develop the wisdom necessary to tell which is which, and I can’t help you there.

Paying attention to other people, and not your guru and the scriptures, can also be very harmful. Everybody has opinions, and they will share them with you. Knowing which part of that you can safely ignore, and which part you should pay attention to, is what wisdom is about. Of course you can’t just ignore what people are telling you, because odds are, you will sometimes act foolishly in ways that most people can warn you about. However, sometimes you will only appear to act foolishly, because you know something they don’t. Having enough confidence to discern between the two, and listen to people when they are right and completely ignore them when they don’t know what they are talking about, is a learned wisdom. You will make mistakes. Be sure to learn from them quickly enough and try not to repeat the same ones, because you don’t actually have all the time in the world, and some fuckups can’t be undone.

So, yeah, that’s about it.

There’s a thing that keeps annoying me when someone brings it up, and that’s the attitude of looking for good in everything, as if that, somehow, is a praiseworthy feature, and you’re a good person if you do it. Also, the attitude of not condemning anyone because there’s bad in everyone and good in everyone, and so on.

Let me make a few illustrations.

Let’s take two big containers of ice cream, five litres or so. They are both freshly made and perfectly tasty. Now, we take a spoon of fecal matter – shit, if you like – and mix it into one of the ice cream containers. It’s fraction of a percentage, two millilitres of shit per five litres of ice cream. A few hundredths of a percent, if my math is right. Now we randomize the containers so you can’t tell which is which.

I would like to do that in front of one of those people who tell me they like to see good in everything, and would never discard a person because of a “small flaw”. Go, eat. It’s 99.9% ice cream; by your definition, almost completely pure goodness. Me, I’d throw both containers into the trash, because not only is the contaminated one pure shit, and not 99.9% ice cream, but the other is so suspicious by mere association that it’s shit as well and needs to be disposed of.

That’s what mortal sin is. Not only is it so bad that every single fraction of it in something makes the entire mass shit, but it’s even worse – the other positive virtues make the mass more dangerous and problematic, not less. The fact that 100% shit can look like 100% ice cream and can deceive an innocent person into eating it makes it worse. If you see dog shit on the road, you’re not going to eat it. If you see a bucket of ice cream that contains 0.04% of shit, you might eat it, and for all intents and purposes it’s not less bad than the shit that’s self-evident and thus avoided. Likewise, positive virtues on an evil person make them worse, not better.

What am I saying here? I’m saying that lack of discrimination gets you doomed. Discrimination is the ability to understand what something is, in its nature. Discrimination is the ability to understand what needs to be understood in what context. An insect in amber makes amber more valuable. An insect in coffee makes coffee less valuable. Shit in a garden is useful. Shit in ice cream makes ice cream useless at best and dangerous at worst.

So, we now have to understand that some people have all kinds of flaws, but they are great people. We also need to understand that some people can have only one flaw and lots of virtues, and they can be extremely dangerous and evil. Quantity isn’t even a thing. You can’t just make a quantitative analysis and say that a certain percentage of impurities is acceptable. No; sometimes a huge amount of impurities is not only acceptable, but improves the mixture. An example is penicillin mold in cheese. Sometimes, any amount of AIDS or hepatitis infected blood in the blood bank can make the entire batch useless and dangerous. Having a thin layer of ice on the road doesn’t make it mostly road, it makes it black ice.

In the end, the only criterion is what someone actually does. If a person is mostly virtuous but has a a slight penchant for genocide, you expect that person to be condemned, not 99% praised and 1% condemned. No, you want them 100% condemned, fuck their virtues. Nobody cares that Hitler had good ideas about preserving the environment, increasing employment, making great public roads and was a very good painter. The concentration camps kind of make his virtues moot. Also, you don’t care if some great person had flaws. For instance, Ernest Shackleton had all kinds of flaws, but if you got stranded with him in the middle of nowhere, he was the best person in the world to be stranded with, because he ended up getting everybody to safety, where others calculated with “acceptable losses”. He didn’t have acceptable losses, which is why people he got safely out ended up being his friends for life. Sure, he drank too much and died in debt. People whose lives he saved couldn’t care less.

Various spiritual people have different opinions on this. Jesus, for instance, said that the fruits are the only valid criterion of one’s true spiritual significance. Not what virtues they have, not what flaws they have, not what they look like or what they say – just what the results end up being. If someone is a great person but gets everybody killed, is he truly a great person? Likewise, if one is all kinds of flawed but ends up saving everybody, is he truly flawed?

This puts things into perspective, and the quantitative model of spiritual advancement looks completely inadequate; you know what I mean, the idea that one is increasingly more pure as they approach God. In fact, that doesn’t seem to be how it works at all. Someone can be all kinds of flawed, but if they get the important things right, they can be judged as perfect in the eyes of God. For instance, one of the criminals crucified alongside Jesus, the one who repented and prayed to Jesus to remember him when he gets to his kingdom. That’s the first saint recognised by Christianity. On the other hand, one could look all kinds of pure, but if they hated Jesus during his life, it wasn’t seen as one tiny speck of impurity on an otherwise good person. No, it was seen as a crucial giveaway, a sign that this person truly hates God and is destined for hell. All his other virtues and merits don’t amount to anything at all – they are like an expensive rope on a dead and rotting ass: just worthless trash.

So, if you say you try to see good in everything, what you probably wanted to signal is being a good person that rejects evil and aspires towards the good. What I heard is something altogether different. So, have some of that 99.9% ice cream while trying to condemn God for creating hell that is full of people you would be compassionate enough to save, unlike God who condemned them. You are obviously a better person than God. Either that, or you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Compassion without discrimination results in evil. Love without discrimination results in evil. Wisdom without discrimination is folly. Without discrimination, you will condemn God and vindicate Satan. Without discrimination, you will end up eating shit ice cream all the way to hell.