Author Archives: danijel

Offensive

Posted on by
30

There’s been all that talk about the upcoming Ukrainian offensive, and I keep waiting for people in the West to figure it out, but I’m afraid it’s not happening, so I’ll describe why such an offensive is simply impossible. I mean, it’s possible, but it’s an incredibly suicidal idea.

To put it simply, the way Ukrainians fought this war so far can be divided into two main tactical modes. The first is to dig into concrete installations surrounded by civilians, and make themselves extremely hard to dig out, and force the Russians to kill their own civilians in the process. The examples of this are Mariupol and Bakhmut. The second tactical mode is to use American satellite imagery in order to see what positions are poorly defended by Russians, and make a breakthrough there.

Both tactical modes are the result of battlefield realities: first, the Russians own the sky, they own the option of heavy bombardment, they see everything with satellites, AWACS planes and drones, and facing them in the open means facing a superior army without an element of surprise, which means annihilation. The second battlefield reality is that Ukraine consists mostly of vast empty landscapes – both forests and agricultural land and fields. Those vast swathes of land are basically indefensible, you can’t have enough military coverage to be able to protect every spot against a concentrated attack, and to add insult to injury, the Russians tend to be using extremely low numbers in this war, and I guess it’s called special military operation for a reason, because they aren’t using troop concentrations sufficient to make it a proper war, and on the other hand it’s not a police intervention either. This means that the Russians can’t defend the entire length of the front against a concentrated pin-point attack, and both sides need to give up open land immediately, because any non-fortified static troop placement will immediately find itself under enemy fire. This also explains why the Russians chose to withdraw from certain positions; open land is costly to defend, and you gain nothing except the ability to brag about controlling more land. The corollary is that the war is about controlling key fortified junctions, and after those fall, you also lose huge swathes of land that surround them. Also, the two sides see the war differently; the Ukrainians try to control as much land as possible in order to present this as a victory. The Russians, on the other hand, intend to destroy the enemy, and see control over the land as a result of that; controlling much land before the enemy has been destroyed isn’t necessarily something that incurs benefits, especially if you have a large “fifth column” to contend with on the territory you control, as they did in Kherson city, where a significant minority of the population is virulently pro-Ukrainian and created so much problems for the Russians that they decided to give the city up and destroy the concept of Ukrainian state and nationality first; policing crazy people at this point was more trouble than it was worth.

To put it in simple terms, the Ukrainians want to take the land and genocide the Russians from it. The Russians want to destroy the genocidal Ukrainian ideological leadership and pacify the country so that it is no longer a threat.

This makes any Russian withdrawal a moral issue, because the Ukrainians will kill all “collaborators” (read: normal people) on this territory. This happened in Bucha, it happened in Kherson city, and in many other places. Also, at any point where the Ukrainians get close enough, they will deliberately target Russian and pro-Russian civilians; they even targeted their own prisoners of war in order to discourage surrender. Wherever the Russians take control, they try to establish normality and civility; however, the part of the population that has been infected by the mental virus of Ukrainianism constantly create trouble there, and the Russians have no clear idea of what to do with them. They don’t want to kill them, and nothing else seems to work.

What does this mean to the possibility of offensive warfare by both sides?

As for the Russians, I’m not even sure that they themselves know what they want to do. For them, it’s more about what they don’t want: they don’t want the Americans to continue occupying and indoctrinating increasingly closer countries and installing virulently anti-Russian “democratic” zombies there, not to mention American bases and nuclear-war installations. They also don’t want to cause a nuclear war with America. In addition, they don’t want other countries to dictate what they can or cannot do in their own sphere of interest, for instance trying to restrict trade and the flow of money. Other than that, I’m not sure that they either know or care. They are in the process of figuring out what they are, and so far they can’t decide between the Imperial/Orthodox past and the Soviet past, trying to own the legacy of both, and integrate it with what they see as the good things that came from the West – capitalist economy, freedom of expression, democracy and so on. Unfortunately, this process of figuring out what they are is being interrupted by the West, which would prefer Russia not to be at all, which unfortunately makes it all-but-certain that the most radical, violent and determined fractions within Russia will prevail, because that’s what happens when the country and nation are under attack by a foreign enemy. This means that the goals and methods used by Russia in this war might suddenly change, from the current careful and indecisive approach, to a sledge hammer of genocide that will simply wipe out everything in its path, when they have had enough of this bullshit. This means that the Russians are exclusively limited by political will and ideology, and militarily they can do whatever they want, when they decide that they want it enough to pay the price required for freedom.

The Ukrainians are a different matter. Ideologically, they have no problem with any kind of murder, torture, genocide or plunder required to attain their goals, which are to kill all Russians and create a Ukrainian fake nation with a fake history in their place. Their problem is that they have no military or industrial capacity for any such thing, which necessarily makes them an instrument of the West. They also sustained heavy losses and simply don’t have the manpower left for offensive warfare. They supposedly have 12 brigades trained by the West, in reserve for the “spring offensive”, but if you have in mind that they lost 35 brigades in Bakhmut, and they presently don’t count brigades at more than 50% of conventional numbers, it becomes obvious that they can’t perform serious offensive actions against any position the Russians are willing to defend, and the Russian goal won’t even be to defend a position, as much to kill those 12 “brigades” of virulent Nazis, and once this is done, simply march to Kiev and take over. The Russians won’t fight the Ukrainians over some field, they intend to destroy the hostile Ukrainians, and the easiest way to weed those out is to wait for them to come to you with guns and try to kill you. Then you turn them into graves and repeat the process until they stop coming. At this point you march to Polish border and establish the Democratic Republic of Ukraine as a member of the Russian federation, the way it historically always was.

So, why exactly is it technically impossible for the Ukrainians to perform an offensive? First of all, they don’t have the high ground, which at this day and age means supremacy in space and air. In space, the Americans provide the Ukrainians with all the data, but the Russians see everything as well, so things are equal in that regard. However, the Russians control the air, and for all intents and purposes, the entire Ukraine is a Russian-managed no-fly zone. Whatever flies there is either Russian, or a target. To prepare for an offensive means to stage fuel, weapons, ammunition, food and men close to the point where you want to make a breakthrough. As you do the staging, the enemy does the watching, and when your warehouses and barracks are full, they blow them up. This is what’s been happening in the recent weeks, to great effect, and to a point where the Ukrainians no longer have anything to do the offensive with. Also, when you assemble all those troops, tanks and stuff, it’s very visible from orbit, and a very nice and fat target for the Russian cruise missiles and airforce. On the other hand, the Russians can assemble whatever forces they want in the background, and the Ukrainians can’t do anything about it. This means that the Ukrainians can’t technically perform significant offensive operations, and the Russians can, but whether they actually do it depends on their strategical assessment of the wider war with the West, and their intents on the international scene.

Post-Bakhmut analysis

Posted on by
11

After the liberation of Artyomovsk (or, should we say, successful accomplishment of the Bakhmut meat grinder operation), some numbers are starting to come up, so I’ll lay down the basic stats.

The Ukrainians seem to have rotated between 27 and 35 brigades in and around Bakhmut. Those units are now mostly destroyed – dead or wounded. The minimal number of Ukrainian dead in this operation was around 50000, although I wouldn’t be surprised at twice as much.

The vast majority of Russian fighters involved in the operation belong to the Wagner private military organization, and the number that is mentioned is around 26000 men, enhanced by some Russian regular troops – marines and paratroopers. The losses on the side of Wagner are not clear – I haven’t seen any actual reports, but I would guess two to five thousand dead, but the number of troops involved in the operation definitely puts the upper limit of 10000 to a total number of Russian casualties in the operation. The Wagner people also seem to be tired, stressed out, and in dire need of being rotated out of the front line.

The Ukrainian positions in Bakhmut were among the most heavily fortified positions in the history of war, and I’m not saying that lightly. There are hundreds of kilometres of underground tunnels and facilities there, plus the Soviet reinforced concrete buildings that are incredibly hard to grind down. They also had all kinds of drones and surveillance equipment, uninterrupted supplies and so on.

The conventional wisdom of war states that you need a 3x stronger attacking force to conduct a successful siege. The fact that the Russians managed to grind down such a powerfully fortified settlement with so few troops is a unique thing in the history of warfare. Their success can be attributed to several factors. First, the Ukrainians tend to approach warfare like moles and ground hogs, digging themselves in and counting on being very hard to dig out. By doing this, they forfeit all initiative of manoeuvre warfare, and basically just postpone their inevitable defeat. Furthermore, the Russians used more and better artillery, advanced tactical and operational skills, and worked against an enemy whose position is fixed and known, with their own force that is flexible and mobile. They also used some very advanced stuff, like electronic tags for preventing blue-on-blue fire, drones, infrared goggles and sights and so on, and they also controlled the air, being able to call on occasional airstrikes, although this happened rarely. The fact that the Russians had a much smaller force contributed to the length of the operation, but to be honest, the nature of the operation was such that you could hardly do this faster by throwing more men at it; you would merely increase your losses, which the Russians tried to avoid, and quite successfully.

So, far from the picture of courageous but outnumbered Ukrainian soldiers fighting against a huge tide of Mordor, the truth seems to be the opposite – the huge number of Ukrainians dug themself deeply into concrete, displayed neither military skill nor tactical intelligence, underestimated their enemy, misread the tactical situation, and were an inferior fighting force by absolutely all standards of warfare, except for the level of equipment, which was of the highest NATO quality and included very current intelligence provided by American military satellites and analysts in Ramstein and other locations via satellite Internet link. Another deplorable thing about the Ukrainians is that they invariably tend to dig in in a civilian settlement, and not just any, but one with Russian population, because they know that the Russians will care about civilian casualties, and to them, the more Russian civilians die, the better. This fact complicates things immensely for the Russians, because they have to restrict the use of weapons of mass destruction, and basically dig out the ground hogs slowly with very granular and localised attacks, and not, for instance, with high-yield thermobaric weapons that would basically kill every living thing in the area, or with enough explosive to level the entire city blocks, which they absolutely could do.

All in all, this confirms my assessment that the Russians were doing this operation with basically their little finger, and one arm and both legs tied. They didn’t use practically any of their military, they didn’t use high-yield weaponry, they were constantly fighting outnumbered, and the enemy could count on NATO intelligence support from satellites and AWACS planes and what not, and they treated this not as some great adversity, but they literally called this “operation meat grinder”. They saw this as a slaughterhouse for the enemy, because they got them to defend a strategically crucial point they can’t afford to lose because it controls the entire area east of Dniepr river and is also the most heavily fortified area in that part of the world, and they knew several things: Russian soldiers are better, Russian tactics are better, and Russian weapons are better than NATO weapons. This sounds incredible, but the results speak for themselves.

Also, it is obvious that the Russians were in no hurry to end this quickly at all cost; they are in fact in no hurry even to end the regular bombardments of Donetsk city. My analysis of their strategy is that they are trying to accomplish two major things: first, not escalate this into a nuclear war if at all possible, because then the losses would be such, that the entire Ukraine would be a rounding error; and second, avoid being so successful in warfare that they destroy their own economy and relations with friendly countries in the process. Winning Ukraine is not really a goal; it’s basically not even something they really want, but rather something they tried very hard to avoid, but couldn’t. If they wanted to get Ukraine, they could do it easily by cutting all Ukraine’s ties to the West by entering from Belarus at the NATO border with several hundred thousand troops and thousands of tanks and other heavy machinery, turning off gas, electricity and water to all population centres of Ukraine, destroying the Ukrainian military, killing their leadership and installing their own military government in Kiev. This is still quite possible, but I have to ask, what would they actually gain, and at what cost? They would demonstrate strength and decisiveness and eliminate a very hostile force that is a puppet of their true enemies. Millions of Ukrainians would die. This would portray the Russians as ruthless, dangerous savages and would result in a serious propaganda victory for the West. Now they look “weak” and “indecisive”, but they also look restrained, careful and rational. Maybe they don’t want to look like someone who has the most powerful military in the world, and no virtue and restraint in its application, no? However, I’m not sure that their restraint works against America, because America seems to be too stupid to understand it or even to perceive it; they implicitly assume that the Russians would just go in and brute-force everything if they could, and the fact that they don’t means that they can’t. The concept that the Russians could easily depopulate Ukraine, but simply don’t want to do it because of moral reasons, is absolutely unfathomable to the Americans, because they see the Russians as a big violent stupid bear that does everything by brute force and great numbers, and they see themselves as surgical-precision superior-technology superpower; however, the mere statistical layout of the Russian victory in Bakhmut, which will be called Artyomovsk from now on, proves the opposite. The Americans are the ones who get by using low-precision (basically, kill them all and let God sort them out), brute force, numerical supremacy approach (so called “shock and awe”), and the Russians are using high-precision, high-technology, strategically and tactically careful approach, succeeding against a NATO force that has satellites and AWACS and all kinds of ground weaponry, and is 3-4x more numerous, and the result was a resounding Russian victory with minimal losses of manpower and equipment.

The silliest thing is, the West still thinks it has a technological and tactical superiority, and believes in magical virtues of “modern NATO weapons” and “NATO training”, both of which proved to be obviously inferior. Unless American military analysts do an analysis similar to the one I made, this is absolutely not going to end well for anybody, because they are going to double-down on their mistakes until they feel they have to resort to a nuclear option, which the Russians are trying to avoid at all cost, but this seems to actually increase the probability of such outcome. I don’t think it’s possible for the Americans to accept the facts of the situation, which are that their technology and tactical training suffered a resounding defeat by a technologically and tactically superior, but vastly numerically weaker enemy. They just had too much of their own kool-aid, and the talk of sending F-16s into Russian air defence umbrella is strong evidence thereof. They just don’t get it that the Russian rocket technology is at least 20 years superior to their own, that Russian radars are superior to their own, and that the Russians also have satellites and AWACS planes, high-precision and long-range rockets, and all kinds of technological wizardry. Unfortunately, after the cold war they stopped being afraid, and they could very much use fear at this point, because they were never so relatively weak against an opponent since their independence war against Britain.

Consequences

Posted on by
4

One of the most common questions I get when I say that this world isn’t real are, basically, “so if it’s not real, it doesn’t really matter what we do?” and “why not just kill ourselves and get it over with?” The second, implicit thing that is seldom or never asked, but people just assume it, is that if the physical world isn’t real, the astral world lies in the direction away from the matter, and in the direction of human imagination, fantasy and abstract things.

First of all, if you pay attention you will see that I don’t really formulate things that way – I don’t really say that the world isn’t real. I say that it’s software and not hardware. I say that it isn’t the reality. I say there is no “here”. I say that there are levels of reality, or levels of illusion of you want, and you can nest illusion within simulation and so on, and God is the most fundamental reality. The “it’s not real” formulation is what the audience infers, because they think that’s what I’m saying, but this is a mistake.

This “place” is a mixture of reality and illusion. The world itself is a persistent, convincing illusion. I won’t say it’s a simulation, because the word implies that it mimics something that looks very much like it, which it does not – it’s its own thing, not a lower-reality copy. The most accurate description would be that it’s of the same kind of a virtual reality as the interior of a video-game that is not designed to mimic our world, but it has its own laws and logic, it’s consistent in its behaviour, and once you’re connected to it, all your memories and perceptions of the outside world are suppressed. So far, nothing I said contradicts the idea that it is not real, other than the fact that “real” is usually defined as something you can consistently perceive and scientifically test. However, when you have actually real souls connected to such a virtual reality, things become very real, in the sense that all the interactions they have are real. You can hurt actual people in the virtual world, which is something you can easily see in the online games, where you have sociopaths who use the virtual reality to intentionally hurt others because they think it’s not real, and so they can do whatever they want. This is what I would call a nested illusion, or an illusion within an illusion, the only difference being that we can’t yet create illusions that completely suppress memory and perception that contradict it. However, if you observe how people behave in those online multiplayer games, you’ll see that those who behave as if it isn’t real, and they can do whatever they want to others as if it has no real consequences, turn into very real assholes, and their actions produce very real victimization of others. If you could perceive their karmic bodies, you would see that all those “virtual” actions have very real consequences, because if you practice being an asshole, you actually turn into one, and you can’t just turn that off. Also, rules of the game matter a lot, and people instinctively try to win, and so they adapt to the rules in ways that allow them to score higher. If the game defines “winning” as obtaining control over the greatest number of virtual in-game resources, such as special kinds of swords, armour and amulets, in-game money and assets and so on, and you need to hurt other real players and treat them as stepping-stones on your way towards greater virtual acquisitions, what’s going to happen is that you are going to break the rules of an actually real world made by God, in order to score virtual achievements in a virtual world, and the world will try to suppress the feeling of wrongness you feel in the actually real world, and rationalize it by “but I got the level 12 sword that damages armour and scores one-hit kills against dragons, and I got 10000 gold coins”, and all you had to do to get it is kill your wife in the actual world, or something equally “unimportant”. Also, when I talk about attractors, imagine some bullshitful in-game thing such as Amulet of the Green Forest that gives you the ability to shapeshift and phase through objects, and in normal circumstances you would shrug and say “whatever”, but let’s say that the game engine has the ability to blend such virtual structures with something from the real world, that is actually attractive, because it radiates higher reality or fulfilment, and such a virtual achievement becomes attractive to you on the level of a much deeper reality, and when you see that stupid amulet in the game, you feel some deep attraction you can’t logically explain, and you feel as if it gives you a reason to invest time, energy and effort, and it gives you a worthy goal to strive for, and you become willing to sacrifice all sorts of things that matter to you in order to get that thing, but when you get it, it doesn’t feel right, and it feels as if the goal has shifted to another thing, another sword, amulet, book or cloak, and you keep hunting those mirages, at the same time sacrificing things that actually matter, hurting people who actually matter to you, because you are hunting “greatness” and “fulfilment”.

What I mean when I say this place is a combination of illusion and reality, is that you didn’t actually leave the real world to come here, because there is no “here”. You are still in the real world, and so are all the other souls you constantly interact with. However, the “Amulet of Golden Dawn” and “Sword of Thorough Maiming” are illusions. If the rules of the game persuade you that you need to win at all cost, and this means breaking your relationships with actual people in the real world, or committing karmic violations that will harm or destroy your soul, in order to attain the Amulet of Golden Piss and win the throne of the kingdom of Kebabia, you will find out that winning and losing aren’t what they seem at the first glance. When you’re done “winning” and wake up in the real world, and see how much you actually fucked up, your perspective might change drastically. Also, there are things that require you to commit yourself in certain ways that go beyond this life in order to be allowed to attain something here. For instance, you commit your soul to the Creator of the World in order to be able to manifest “miracles” or achieve some state of consciousness while incarnated. Once you wake up, you find out that the commitment you made inside the illusion still binds you, and you permanently lost your freedom and spiritual sovereignty, and you are basically a slave now, or a battery that powers some in-world attractor. A trivial case would be selling your soul to Satan, either figuratively or literally, for some in-world achievement, and finding out that what you got is a mirage in the world of mirages, and what you sold is the only thing that has value.

So, when I say that there is no “here”, but also that this place is a mixture of reality and illusion, I mean that quite literally. This place is not real, but God is very real, and God is also reality underneath all else. God is “hardware”. Remove the veil of matter and you find out that you were in the mind of God, the entire time. The fact that the world is an illusion doesn’t mean it’s not rendered within the most holy and sacred reality. When I say there is no world, it means you are in fact in the mind of God. It doesn’t mean that everything is shit. It means the Amulet of Wealth and the Sword of Conquest are shit, but your co-player might be your actual wife or best friend from the real world created by God, and killing them in-game to get the amulet might be a really bad idea with real-world consequences. Also, since you’re really in the mind of God, everything you think and do has actual consequences in terms of your relationship with God, who is the highest of realities and greatest of achievements. God can be touched through real things even in an illusory world. That is the secret.

So, obviously, there’s much more to it than people initially think, and it’s both more complex and far simpler than you might imagine.

Liberation

Posted on by
10

I recently talked about scripts and attractors, and I’m currently dealing with one that is probably the most obscure, weird and scary things I ever saw. You see, attainment of liberation/enlightenment during life is one. Specifically, the “during life” part.

Let’s first deal with the definition of the goal, according to Vedanta and Buddhism. Vedanta is not a singular teaching; advaita according to Shankaracarya defines liberation as a state of direct and perfect realization of oneness of atman and brahman, which burns up all seeds of future karma and all connections with the illusory world (maya). This is moksha, or mukti. If this is attained during life, it’s referred to as jivanmukti.

Dualistic teachings, like those of Ramanuja, Madhva and Caitanya, have much more in common with Islam and Christianity than they do with advaita Vedanta, which is probably because India was under Muslim occupation when they were developed, and the Muslims tended to violently eradicate philosophies that contradicted Islam. This is how we ended up with the versions of Hinduism that basically believe in a monotheistic deity and see liberation as ending up in heaven with this deity after death. In dualistic Vaishnavism, reincarnation is not seen as necessarily bad, because even deities seem to incarnate in this world occasionally, when it fits their purposes, but involuntary reincarnation caused by karmic necessity or attachment is. In general, being “conditioned” by anything is seen as bad, because it is the opposite of freedom. Basically, being born here because you wanted to follow God who was born here to do something is an act of unconditional free will, and as such it is fine; being born here because you were forced to by your past karma means your fate is conditioned and not free, and this is not fine. Essentially, the dualists see the goal as developing such spiritual refinement that you are no longer attracted by anything other than God, and resolving all kinds of past karmic obligations and not creating new ones, in order to prevent loss of freedom, or conditioning of will.

Buddhists are more complicated. Because nirvana is defined in ways that are completely inconsistent with normal human existence, they usually don’t think such a goal is attainable during life, but some mahayana schools, such as Zen, believe it is possible to achieve “insight” or “enlightenment” that changes the way one perceives things, and allows one to acquire something between detachment and change of perspective, where things are perceived very acutely and in the present moment, but the self-centered aspect of existence is lost. Between attempts to attain emptiness and attempts of clicking-into a change of perspective, it is quite obvious that Buddhists in general have no idea what nirvana is or how to attain it. This is understandable, because nirvana is defined as something you can’t really understand if you didn’t attain it, but I would say that Buddhist existence is most clearly defined as a confusion of paths and goals. Between trivial accomplishments and confusions, there is a very impressive path of Vajrayana, which I can describe only as “we don’t know what nirvana is, but there are Dakinis, there are higher levels of consciousness they lead us towards, there are blissful and scary spiritual things, and if we achieve those things it might not matter whether we understand nirvana or not, because our personal reality might be a mixture of reality and illusion, and nirvana might very well be the state where the mixture consists of 0% illusion and 100% reality, whatever that is”. This is a very honest approach that seems to have perfect alignment with my personal experience – basically, start somewhere, follow higher reality and avoid illusions and nonsense, and always take God over a good theology.

When we normalize this set by trimming away obvious non-accomplishments and trivialities, we end up with, basically, three viable definitions of enlightenment.

The first is that brahman is the only true reality, and what we are perceiving is a paradox of dual/relative existence which takes place when maya is superimposed upon brahman. When we permanently depart from this illusion of duality, we are free.

The second is that there is God, there are all sorts of spiritual entities of various degrees of purity and complexity, that inhabit all kinds of planes of existence according to their levels of sophistication, purity and attachment, and the goal is to attain greatest sophistication, purity and detachment which will allow us to dwell in the highest of the realms, together with God and his saints.

The third is that we live a complex mixture of reality and illusion, which includes our spiritual bodies, which can evolve in sophistication, complexity and purity; if we really try to make progress, we will be offered help by Dakinis, which are in essence angelic beings that manifest nirvana to us, in our limited condition, and if we follow their guidance our perception will consist of more reality and less illusion, which also means that our spiritual bodies will look less like a chaotic mess, and more like a jewel of vajra. Nirvana might just be a fancy name for a state of our spiritual body where it is hard, coherent and pure vajra, and solving actual problems and attaining actual goals is preferable to having a clean theory that explains everything, especially since our bodies just might be incapable of formulating a theory that is both accurate and useful, since a higher reality is by definition something that cannot be either contained or described in terms of a lower reality.

The great advantage of the third definition is that it is pragmatic, useful for attaining actual spiritual results, and useless for intellectual posturing. This can never be overstated, because it is my experience that advaita Vedanta produces incredible intellectual contentment by providing “final answers”, and the result is that its followers are basically stupid people with a very high opinion of themselves and their “Self-realization”. They obviously don’t look like they achieved anything near an actual ultimate reality, and it’s more like they fell into some kind of a trap for egotistical pricks. The second definition, that of dualistic Vedanta (which includes Christianity and Islam) has one important advantage over advaita, which is that it inherently doesn’t allow one to be content with his level of achievement during this life, if he has any brains in him, because it is obvious that the final judgment of his achievement will be made by God after this life, when his fate will be determined. This, by definition, should discourage fucking around and having any pride in one’s salvation or its certainty, but of course there are stupid people who manage to miss even that obvious fact.

But let’s return to the matter at hand, which is the global attractor I’m presently having the misfortune of dealing with. It deals with spirituality here. Even the people who believe that salvation is only determined after this life are not immune to its influence, because it deals with a very broad spectrum of “achievements”, spiritual ones included, and it is very easy to convince one that he needs to accomplish or attain something here as a pre-condition of salvation. This “here” part is the trap, and if it ensnares you, you will basically attempt to pull the entire world with you to God, because you will not want to let go. Bushmen of Kalahari catch monkeys that way, by offering them something they want, but in a very tight space, so that if they close their hand around the object of desire, they can’t pull out their hand and escape, so the choice is between having the object of desire and escaping. The monkeys invariably wish to have both – to escape with the thing they want – and they invariably end up as lunch.

People want to have the kingdom of heaven, but they want it here. They want enlightenment, here. They want supernatural powers, here. The here part creates a mantric contradiction which binds you to this world, and not only that, but it invests the energy of your efforts into feeding the importance, necessity and reality of this world, thus making it stronger, and you weaker. The funniest thing is, the same attractor that makes people want a Rolex or a Ferrari also deals with this. As strange and crazy as it seems, wanting a Rolex in this world and wanting to achieve liberation during life are equivalent attachments.

Also, if you want to achieve things here, you need to have its owner’s permission. What part of your very real soul are you willing to give Satan, the Prince of this world, in trade for an “achievement” in this illusory place? I figured that part out long ago, when I read something in Yogananda’s autobiography, about a saint who used atoms of his previously cremated physical body to manifest a temporary physical body in order to encourage disciples after his death. Why specifically the atoms of his body? Why not any atoms at random, when he has the power over arranging atoms into physical structures, anyway? Why not just condensed light? Why did Jesus have to resurrect his physical body, not just manifest another structure by condensing light into matter? Because they don’t have permission from Satan, but they do have permission over their physical body that they obtained under the original incarnation contract, and they hacked this arrangement. See the problem? Want something here, you have to come to Satan for it, and of course he’s going to give it to you, out of the kindness of his heart, without asking for anything in return. Right.

You need to let go. You are already on the other side, so there’s no reason to fear it. This place doesn’t actually exist, except as an illusion-generator. It does, however, block your vision and memory, feed you reflections of real things projected onto illusory things, and promote attachments. You don’t have to go to the spirit-world; your spirit never left it, because the best hidden secret of this place is that matter can’t actually contain spirit; your soul is not actually in the physical world, it’s still “up there”, only under an influence of a very strong and persistent illusion, and the part of why we seem to be stuck here is because we are deluded into thinking that we need it for spiritual purposes. We don’t. Let go.

The arrogance of skepticism

Posted on by
2

I just finished reading the comment section of a recent youtube video where someone comments Rogozin’s skeptical claims regarding American Moon landings, and it was a profoundly depressing experience which left me with a belief that stupid people should never attempt being skeptical. They should just believe what the authorities tell them, because whatever that is, they have at least some probability of being on a right trajectory in life. If they try to think for themselves, they are absolutely certain to get it wrong and destroy not only their own lives, but also throw the world into chaos. That’s how we got materialism and atheism, when stupid people tried to think critically based on “reason and evidence”, and everything they ended up with was absolutely wrong in every conceivable way, and resulted in mass slaughters and chaos, from the French revolution onwards.

Stupid people don’t know how physics works, they don’t know how rockets work, they don’t know how gyroscopes and inertial guidance works, they heard something about radiation but don’t really distinguish between alpha, gamma and beta kinds, they heard that Van Allen belts are bad but they don’t really know what they look like and what’s the actual problem with them, they don’t know how computers work but it’s intuitive to them that you can’t do shit if you don’t have an iPhone, and they don’t know how photography works but they look at the pictures from the Moon and think they can see all kinds of issues. They think that if they can’t get a good cell coverage, it’s obvious that NASA couldn’t communicate with Apollo all the way to the Moon. I read all this and it makes me feel sick, not because I couldn’t answer any of those supposed issues, but exactly because I can, and I understand what the actual problem is. The problem isn’t even that those people are scientifically ignorant. That’s actually expected – it takes quite a bit of work to become scientifically and technologically proficient in various disciplines, to the point where you can actually understand how a microwave transceiver works, how a computer works (in a sense that you understand how to build a microprocessor with NOR gates alone, because that’s all you have), how you can integrate data from accelerometers into knowing your position and speed, what miracles you can do with very weak computers if you code everything directly in machine code and design the user interface so that you actually have to know what you’re doing to use it, instead of wasting a supercomputer on making something that chimps and cats can use. No, the problem is not that ordinary people don’t have the ability to understand the technological and scientific intricacies of space travel. The problem is that ordinary people have been trained to think that all men are equal, and if they can’t understand something, nobody can. They are trained to be inherently arrogant, they are trained to believe in democracy and rights, and they are trained to be skeptical.

Skepticism is a terribly destructive thing, and even the sharpest minds should use it very sparingly. This might sound strange until you see all the conspiracy theorists who completely lost not only their minds, but also every connection to reality, just because they were skeptical of everything. Not everything – they are never skeptical of their own ability to understand things. This is the difference between them and me. I am always skeptical of myself and my own abilities first, and I always started with faith first, using skepticism extremely sparingly and carefully – if you can imagine a prayer to God for guidance, keeping God and the truth that He is constantly in my mind as I carefully questioned, explored and eventually revised my views. If skepticism is combined with arrogance (of thinking you’re the measure of truth and knowledge, for instance), you’re lost. You’ll start believing that the Earth is flat, that men didn’t go to the Moon, that there are no satellites in orbit, and eventually you’ll go so crazy you’ll question reality of gender and thinking men can be women if they feel like it, or something equally insane.

You can now respond by stating that blind faith in authorities is not a good thing either, and that all those people, who got vaccinated with American bioweapons four times just because they unquestionably believed the authorities, are now about to taste the consequences of that, and I will agree. However, it’s not their fault that they believed the authorities. They can hardly do much else. It is the sin of those in power who mislead them. You see, St. Augustine would describe civilization with an image of a flock of sheep guided by shepherds, who are assisted by sheep dogs, who guard the flock against the wolves. The sheep are normal people who mind their own business baking bread, milling wheat, fixing roads and plumbing, making cars and computers, and so on, and simply have neither the interest, ability or time for other matters. The shepherds are the priests, philosophers and scientists who devote their time to understanding God, righteousness and truth to the best of their ability, and guide the people in the right direction, so that they can live a life that will be grounded in truth and reality, and have a trajectory towards God. The guard dogs are the worldly powers – the army, police, courts and administration, as well as healthcare, fire departments and so on, who take care that the crimes are punished, that those in need are taken care of, that the sick are healed, that the fires are put out, and that the foreign invaders are stopped and fought. The wolves are evil people who want to disrupt, seduce and destroy. If the wolves infiltrate the system to pose as guard dogs and shepherds, you can hardly blame the sheep for being confused, or victimized for following them. You can’t expect a baker or a plumber to be an expert in theology and science, and to see fault in something that requires a PhD in biochemistry. No – if the shepherds and guard dogs fail in their duties and are compromised, the flock will be lost. If the sheep don’t understand that they are sheep, and try to skeptically question the shepherds, they are lost, because they don’t even understand what it takes to be able to understand that stuff. The problem with stupid people is that they think hard stuff is actually easy. I think it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect. I think the media actually encourages this in people, by oversimplifying issues so that everybody thinks they understand them, and encouraging everybody to have an opinion about everything, under the assumption that everybody can do it. Sure, you can have an opinion, but you are all but guaranteed to be wrong. You can’t integrate acceleration across time but you think you can have an opinion about spaceflight? You can’t differentiate between gamma and beta radiation but you heard radiation is bad and you think the astronauts couldn’t cross the Van Allen belts? You heard that lightning is caused by electricity and now you no longer believe in God because God doesn’t make lightning? As I said, skepticism is dangerous and even the smartest people should first be skeptical of their ability to exercise skepticism safely and without losing the grip on reality, but for stupid people skepticism is absolutely fatal. The only thing a stupid person – and by that I mean you – should be doing, is making a choice on which expert to believe, based on their inner feeling of reality obtained from prayer to God. If you follow this diligently, at some point you might actually evolve to the point of being one of the experts, very gradually, and at some point you might carve out a new, yet unknown path to a greater truth than what was previously revealed. However, the “I don’t understand this so it must be wrong and stupid” kind of skepticism, that ends your journey towards the truth then and there. And if your inner response was “I’m nobody’s sheep”, you’re either a wolf, or you were indoctrinated by them. You see, the wolves define sheep as stupid followers who are exploited by the shepherds. God defines sheep as good beings that follow the voice of God that leads them from space and time into salvation and eternity.

Don’t be a sheep if that’s your choice, but those, who don’t follow His voice into eternity, shall perish in time.