I am always half amazed, half shocked when I see people doing certain things as if there won’t be any consequences; none of it’s real anyway, it’s all psychology and games. Let’s invoke demons, let’s talk to spirits, let’s do Wiccan magic with menstrual blood, let’s sell our souls to Satan, let’s convert to Islam. This belief that only physical matter is real and everything else is mere psychology, and, as such, inconsequential, is giving me the chils.

It’s all real. It all has consequences. There’s always a price to pay. All those spiritual contracts are real. Even if God wanted to save you from the consequences of your idiocy, the price would still have to be paid. It’s just that God would have to pay it in order to spare your sorry arse.

You don’t live in the world you think you live in. Its “materiality” is an illusion. It’s a persistent, very convincing illusion with terrible consequences, but an illusion regardless. Many things you may think to be illusory, such as souls, are in fact real; much more real than physical matter. All kinds of things that are being masked by the physical world, are incredibly important.

Also, you think you have all kinds of choices. Well, yes, you do, but if almost all of them are fatal, are they really the choices you want to keep in your pool of viable options? Thought so.

So, if we remove everything fatal from the pool of your options, and intersect this with your karmic tree, so that we see what of this is valid for you personally in this point of your life, it often turns out that your options are extremely limited, and the fact that this limitation is hidden from you by the illusion of abundance of choice doesn’t make it a pretty sight. It’s like being a young girl who thinks she has all the choice in the world because everybody wants to fuck her. It’s not about who wants to fuck you; it’s about finding the one you want to marry, and having him want to marry you. If you put it that way, suddenly all the “choices” turn out to be a barren desert. You can count all your actual options throughout your life on fingers of one hand, with enough leftover fingers to order multiple drinks.

If you sell your soul to every demon you encounter, will any options remain for you down the road if you decide to choose God? Will God have to buy out your contracts signed in blood, in all sorts of unholy places, and hide this fact from you, so that you don’t know what horrible price He had to pay for you? Or will you simply be lost on that road, and I will get more trash to clean?

I can tell exactly when the New Age concept of religion started.

It was September 11, 1893, in Chicago. There, Swami Vivekananda held a speech at the “World’s Parliament of Religions”, essentially sucking up to everyone by saying they’re all good: all religions lead to God, like rivers that all lead to the same ocean. Which is kind of obvious, considering how many people from all kinds of religions have reached God.

Yes, that was sarcasm, and the applause from appealing to all that narcissism must have been something to see.

God can truly adopt whichever form is most effective for leading the worshipper. Sometimes, it means that if you pray to God through a certain religion, God will reveal Himself to you in that form. However, sometimes it means God will reveal Himself in the form that actually teaches you and leads you from a wrong path to the correct one. I’ve heard of Muslims having visions of Jesus and converting to Christianity, or having NDE visions where they saw that Islam is completely wrong and Christ is the Lord, again, converting to Christianity when they were revived. That doesn’t look very much like “all religions are equally good”, or “God will reveal Himself in whichever form you pray to”. No: God is the Truth, and He will lead you to Himself. Your starting point can be whatever – it’s obvious that most are terrible. However, God can meet you in your pit of spiritual doom and show you the way out. That doesn’t mean you will see Allah if you’re a Muslim. It means you will see the way to God from your bad place.

I’ve heard about Protestant Christians who had a vision of Mary, mother of Christ, because that was the aspect of God they deliberately neglected and looked down upon, and that was the vision God chose as their next step and a way out of their spiritual darkness. It’s something you need, and don’t have.

People think what Vivekananda, and later Sai Baba taught: that you can imagine God in whichever form and God will reveal Himself to you, means that you can do whatever – imagine God in form of a sexy girl, for instance, and visualise some “tantra”. In Hindu tradition, this would be known as “aparadha”, translated as either “offence” or “transgression”, and means something that either ends your spiritual path altogether, or gets you a vacation in some picturesque section of hell. There are rules for this, you know. A form in which you can visualise God can be very few things, and always something that is the strongest association with God in your soul. It can’t be a bottle of Coca Cola, or a centrefold from Playboy, or anything that’s not actually God. Also, it can’t be anything that God personally wouldn’t approve of, because, believe it or not, God does actually have a say in this. If God doesn’t approve of your conduct, your spiritual path will either be thorny or lead through Shit Creek. When I followed this instruction from Sai Baba, that God will answer in whichever form was closest to us, I thought about it, and meditated on Jesus. Why, because He was the default association with God in any kind of form, and I visualised Him in the sermon on the Mount, in His moment of power and glory. That was obviously a good choice, because I received initiation immediately thereafter.

So no, you can’t just “do whatever” and hope to have good outcomes, because God has a say. God needs to approve of your consciousness, conduct and choices. You need to impress God with your actions, for instance by manifesting sincerity, purity and choice for transcendence and away from the worldly. Sure, God can sometimes show Himself to people who are on a very wrong path in order to snap them out of it, but I would not count on that being some kind of a rule. It is much better to do things that are recommended, and meditating on an incarnation of God, rather than some form that you “like”, is a good start. If you want to reach God, meditating on a person of God is the way to go. Trying to avoid meditating on the known person of God and instead visualising some other form translates into trying to avoid God because you have some issues with Him. Better get those sorted out first, methinks.

As for religions, have in mind that not all rivers lead to the sea. Some lead to deserts where they evaporate. Some lead into desolate, isolated lakes that serve as radioactive waste dumps. Some religions, in fact, don’t lead to God, are not created by God, and don’t have anything to do with God. Some have a transcendental component, but also contain serious errors. You can’t rest assured that whichever religion you are born in or have chosen for yourself, your eventual fate will be in God. Most likely, you will have to change your religion at least once if not many times, and at some point you will actually need to have thoughts of your own because no religion will suffice.

If you actually read more of Vivekananda, you will see that his actual opinion on this is far from “any religion will do”. In fact, he thinks that various religions are good for people on that particular level of spiritual evolution. The idea that anything will lead you from the beginning to the end is naive. In the beginning, sophisticated ideas will be too much for you. Near the end, no idea will likely encompass your understanding properly, because it will simply be too vast. Also, of course, Vivekananda held a reductionist view of religion, where advaita vedanta is the real truth, and everything else is a lesser knowledge that might be necessary along the path, but will later be discarded for a more superior knowledge, culminating, of course, in what he personally believed. 🙂

In the end, always remember: God isn’t some impersonal energy you can focus and manipulate. God might not be a person the way you are a person, but only because He’s much, much more of a person than you are. Where your level of personality is like a mass-value of a rock, God’s level of personality is like a mass-value of a galactic supermassive black hole. God is much, much more of a person than you are, and not just one; and He has opinions, He has a say in things, and He will make a judgment on you. Doing “whatever” will end “wherever”. Doing your best to find God by focusing on the best possible idea you have of God, is likely to get God’s attention. But that’s not a magical recipe for invoking God, because, remember: God is a person, and He has opinions, feelings and judgments. He has the final say.

Something global recently unlocked for me to spend, and I understood that it’s all related to all kinds of non-transcendental religions and quasi-religious systems. You can already guess what I mean – all kinds of pantheism where “God” and “Universe” mean the same thing; astrology where things happen because “the stars align”. Systems of belief where there are no “good” and “evil”, only “positive” and “negative”. Such systems don’t have a place for the Devil, because they don’t have a place for God either.

That’s not what got me thinking. I understood all that already. I am very familiar with those systems. What got me thinking is the fact that the “taste” of it, when I’m spending it, feels identical to the content of that hell for the godless people I processed earlier.

Initially, I thought it can’t be right. Most of those people may be ignorant, but they have a yearning for the transcendental; it’s just that they have silly ideas about it, like everybody else in this world. And then the next thought was: “Oh really; then why did their godlessness annoy you so much when you talked to them, and complained that all they are interested in was some kind of astral manipulation and energy exchange with some self-serving material purpose?”

Oh.

Indeed, I used to have impersonalistic ideas about the transcendental, mostly because I was told that was the correct way to understand spiritual experience, and it wasn’t until quite recently that I was forced to revise it all. My understanding of it, however, was profoundly transcendental. I mapped transcendence onto a flawed understanding; I didn’t paint a rosy tree-hugging mask onto the physical world and pretended it’s spirituality. I never had a “holistic” view, where body, mind and spirit are a unit, and should be treated as one. No, I felt that the physical body is just something the soul is locked into, and forced into a limiting and humiliating experience of the physical plane, which is an illusion and a lie. I didn’t think this damn place is God. I mean, sure, in one sense it is, because ultimately everything happens in the mind of God, but that doesn’t mean that a video game is God in a very literal sense, the way those pantheists perceive the physical world. And I surely didn’t think that good and evil are merely “positive” and “negative” things, or that things happen “because the stars align that way”.

I believed that God wants us to be free and to inherit the eternity in Him, and I believed that Satan wants us to be enslaved and destroyed in this world of illusion and humiliation. I believed that wanting the things of the world enslaves us by means of projecting fulfilment into things that lead only to misery and suffering. I believed one should desire only God, because only God is eternal and true, and everything else is a dream and dust. To me, things and ownership are a necessary thing in this world, but not as means of fulfilment, but rather as means of avoiding terrible suffering that looms in this place, like a predatory beast in a dark cave.

This is why I never truly got along with the New Age people and their worldview of impersonal energies, world-worship and self-serving attitudes. I understood that they mixed the physical world and astral “energies”, called it “spirituality”, and as far as they are concerned, being one with God and being one with the world is one and the same. To me, God is a brilliant, super-personal consciousness compared to which this world is but dust, a video game designed to devour your life. Worshipping the world, to me, made as much sense as worshipping Satan – an obviously deluded and self-defeating idea. And then I thought – what if we’re dealing with an issue of semantics. Replace their word “God” with “Satan”, and suddenly all their ideas about the world, its creator, its energies and worship thereof suddenly make a whole different kind of sense, and it’s suddenly clear why I went along with them like oil with water.

They want to be one with Satan, and they worship the world he made. They just call it God, the way all kinds of false religions call all kinds of false or evil things “God”. There used to be a hell that was full of godless people, and most of them used to be religious. It wasn’t a hell for atheists in the narrow sense; it was a hell for people without transcendental desires or interests. A religion can be wholly non-transcendental. Just remember the cult of Dionysus, a Greek “god” of wine, debauchery and madness. There’s not a single transcendental thing about it, and yet it used to be a religious cult with many devout followers. All those fertility deities – they are as transcendental as a pile of rocks. Worshipping life, worshipping “Mother Earth” and so on – it’s all non-transcendental. The fact that it’s often all mixed up into a broader term of “religion” doesn’t mean it’s all the same. No, not all religions are rivers that lead to the same ocean. That’s bullshit. Most religions, apparently, are of this world and they don’t lead anywhere, other than perhaps into a desert of this world where their followers die of thirst.

And then, eventually, the remains of their souls end up being the trash I’m currently spending, because something needs to be done with it all.