I recently saw something that made me think about typical mistakes people make in everything they do. Basically, I saw one person trying to learn how to play Oldfield on guitar, and another wanting to learn how to play heavy metal.

I don’t know shit about guitar, but I would expect that what they are doing is going to fail, because in order to learn how to play something specific, you first need to learn how to play anything in general. You learn how to pick out notes, then you practice scales, then you elaborate from the scales and develop melodies and so on, and you need to practice this boring stuff ad nauseam, so it’s your second nature. This is the point where I understood that I saw this pattern before, with “spiritual” people. They all want to become enlightened. They all want to attain some very specific thing at the very peak level of achievement; basically, they want to play Oldfield. Invariably, they all fail, and I’ll tell you why.

They fail because of their contempt for methodical, gradual, systematic approach. They fail because they want to reach the top of the pyramid, but they don’t want to start at the bottom, because that’s boring and unpleasant. They just want a hack that will get them to the top. If only they reached the top for one second, they think, this would tick the “achievement unlocked” box.

Let me put it this way. My personal way of learning things was far from anything orthodox. I didn’t have a teacher and I didn’t belong to a spiritual school of any kind. I did, however, have experience with science, and I did have experience with writing code. I also had experience with failing many times in many spectacular ways, and I was smart enough to see a pattern in failures.

The pattern is that when you don’t invest enough time and effort into the ground work, into the “boring” basics, as you progress further this quickly results in chaos and disorder that inhibits your ability to go any further. Basically, it’s like climbing a ladder. It’s quicker and easier than building a solid structure that will allow you to ascend, but a ladder is flimsy and after a few meters you’re done. You either stop and fail, or you fall down and die. In coding, the equivalent of this is writing quick&dirty functions you don’t test thoroughly, and you write complicated stuff that can’t be tested independently and it all needs to work at once. As a result, when you get unpredicted or unwanted behaviour, it’s exponentially harder to fix as you build further, until you eventually end up with immensely complex, unfixable code that almost works. The pattern is, if you want to succeed, stop trying to succeed. Succeeding is a stupid idea. Instead, try not to fail. If you work very methodically on every single step not failing, you won’t have to work on succeeding, it will take care of itself.

The stuff I practiced most was perceiving what desires, emotions and thoughts do – energy goes in, emotion flares up, the thoughts whirl to give it reason and promote it, and then you grind through more thoughts to feed emotion, regardless of whether emotion is love or depression. The worst pitfall I perceived is a self-destructive pattern where you, basically, act like a baby that cries and makes itself miserable in order for mother to come and make everything better. I understood that this is a severely dysfunctional pattern that is based in physical body’s genetic design, and it’s a deadly thing, because there is no “mother”. Nobody is going to keep rescuing you as you make yourself miserable in order to get attention. All responsibility is on you. You need to stop digging holes for yourself to fall into and cry for help, because this leads to a perpetual fall into the pit of nothingness, and you fall apart in your misery long before you reach the bottom. You need to make sure that you don’t fail. Also, you need to control your impulses that result in fail-patterns. As you observe those things, your skill and accuracy improve. You perceive energies directly, and you learn that your entire mental and emotional structure is made up of various energetic loops and nodes that cause failure, and you work on gradually dismantling those, and absorbing the emotional energy of suffering that is released from them. As you suffer, you learn to release it vertically and learn Kundalini up-stream kriya. As you develop skill with perceiving the minefields of bound energies, you learn the inner-space technique; you basically learn to dig up mines by ringing various emotional “bells” that make them resonate, and then focus as you get a signal, poke where it hurts and have it show itself so you can deal with it. Basically, you learn to wallow in shit and poke at wounds. None of it is fun, none of it is “spiritual”, none of it is a quick hack that will give you a status symbol of having some achievement unlocked so that everybody will know how spiritual and enlightened you are. It’s just emotionally painful, hard and tedious work, and it goes on for months and years. However, as things progress you understand that you are spiritually much more powerful, and occasionally things just start happening, things like initiation into vajra, or being able to perceive higher realities, or being able to transfer karma from other beings, and “flash” a path towards God through their consciousness, or be able to purify energetic impurities from external objects, or be able to create objects of power, create and discreate souls, bring dissipated souls back into existence on kalapa-level, or work directly with structures created by Satan, depleting their energy sources, and then “spending” their control substance.

The thing is, the stuff I’m doing now is “playing Oldfield”, and most of that stuff I never practiced, it came to me easily and trivially as a consequence of other work. The stuff I actually practiced was, essentially, shovelling shit, draining pus from infected wounds, and suffering with calm detachment – basically, I did stuff nobody ever wants to do, and as a result I got to do stuff nobody ever was skilled enough to do.