How can I know?

That last thing got me thinking: how can a person know whether what I’m saying is actually genuine stuff or I’m full of shit; assuming they are unable to personally verify crucial parts, and assuming that dying, ending in front of a Judge of Karma and being told the exact truth isn’t a currently available option.

Tl;dr: you can’t. Sorry. It’s theoretically impossible to verify things if your actual ability to verify them is defined as insufficient, as a premise. You can believe this or that, for all the good it will do you.

Long version:

You can work with probabilities. For instance, if someone is fake, they are generally fake everywhere, not in just one thing. So, if you can’t verify a certain part of someone’s claims, you can verify everything around it. It’s not foolproof, but it’s better than nothing, I guess. For instance, if someone does reliably rational and good stuff at every point you can check, it’s reasonable to assume that the trend continues in places where you can’t check. Unfortunately, that’s also something an expert deceiver would think of, so you can only rule out the possibility of one being an incompetent, mentally ill person. A deliberate rational fake will do his homework, lay out all kinds of evidence in spheres you can verify, and use that to sell you something really dangerous in spheres you can’t verify. What’s important to know is that this absolutely rules out a crazy person. A crazy person will be too crazy to do any of this. In order for someone to plant deceptions decades in advance and do this kind of complex trickery, the only two options you have is genuine and expert deceiver. Crazy is not an option. You can eliminate crazy quite easily by testing in this manner. You can’t eliminate malicious or evil.

There’s a possibility that one is not crazy, but merely deluded, and then works hard on sharing their delusion. That’s true, and I’ve seen it, but it’s kind of always obvious, for the following reasons. If we’re talking about spiritual things, one way of checking for authenticity is checking for overlap with existing spiritual revelations. We are here assuming that a certain percentage of those are authentic. Something that’s authentic will need to have overlap with other authentic stuff, unless we’re dealing with a situation that everything else is 100% wrong and just this one thing is 100% right. This is very unlikely, for all kinds of reasons that I think don’t require a detailed explanation. For instance, it would mean that the level of difficulty is so great, that probability of success for everybody else would be 0, and then it suddenly jumps to 1 in only one instance. Albeit not theoretically impossible, that’s usually not how things work in practice. In practice, someone gets something right, and others make improvements upon this based on things that work in practice, and at some point you get a working theory, which makes predictions and so on. Even in things like alchemy, you had things that worked, such as distillation, precise measurements and so on. Based on this, actual chemistry was made. It didn’t just happen out of thin air, after alchemy being 100% wrong. You can have theory that’s wrong, but you have reliable ways of funnelling gases and weighing compounds, purifying compounds, making non-reactive dishes and so on. Astronomy existed in form of very precise measurements before it had a solid theory, and those measurements were in fact incredibly precise, precise enough for Newton to have used them in making his theoretical system of mechanics. He didn’t just work with thin air, he worked with precise measurements of planetary positions by Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Tycho Brahe didn’t know how planets moved, but he measured their positions with extreme accuracy. So, it was all based on some kind of reality, regardless of the fact that the theory they came up with was usually flawed. Everything is always flawed in this world. It wasn’t all pulled from someone’s arse, and that’s what matters. They thought Sun revolved around Earth, but they knew the position of Venus on every day of the year with such precision you wouldn’t believe. So, when someone came up with a better theory, they could re-use the measurements with complete confidence, because it was spot on.

That’s what I mean by overlap with existing stuff. The interpretation might differ wildly, but there’s some serious common ground in most authentic cases. The way Hindus put this, there must be alignment of Shastra, Guru and Sadhu. They go too far with this, because they assume their scripture to be far more than it actually is, but the idea is that scripture, your guru and the genuine spiritual people will be in alignment and will all teach you the same stuff, which is how you can tell it’s true. If your guru is telling you stuff no other spiritual person is talking about, and there’s nothing about it in the scriptures, the possibilities are that the guru is either fake, or he’s a point of revelation of higher reality than anything else up to that point. Since the latter is something that would literally be a unique point in history, the former is more likely to be true. There are, however, such points of revelation, and they do happen every few thousand years, so it’s not impossible. It’s just that they don’t happen every Tuesday, and if you’re dealing with such a person it would be accompanied by serious indications which would increase the probability of it being true. For instance, miracles, visions and spiritual experiences by others etc. would be likely to lend credibility to such a person, but if you’re unable to personally verify any of it, it becomes a recursive issue of faith – basically, you would need to believe that a person b had a valid spiritual experience regarding person a, in order to accept validity of person a. If you’re unable to verify, you can only default to faith, choosing one way or another depending on your personal character and attitude.

So, if your ability to verify is zero, you need to default to faith, and in that case you are also going to be unlikely to resort to faith either, so you are likely to reject the whole thing. However, if your ability to verify is non-zero, but incomplete, you will still have to ultimately resort to faith, but this faith will be based on something not wholly insubstantial. If that is of any comfort, even I resort to faith when I’m not in a state where I’m directly experiencing something. After a few days or weeks at most, a spiritual experience becomes a mere thing in memory, and you need to believe that what you experienced was this and not that, because you’re no longer there and no longer able to verify it directly. Essentially, if you’ve been to the Moon, a day after you landed back on Earth it’s a mere memory. Twenty years later it’s an old, faded memory, and even for you it’s a matter of faith to believe that the memory is accurate and represents what it seems to represent. So, you can never really avoid resorting to faith in this world. It’s a matter of faith for you to believe that you can drive a car once you’re not actually driving it, let alone anything else. But if you have something you can verify, your faith will be more established and stronger. For instance, if you had visions of angels or Gods telling you things about me, you can still be sensitive to doubt regarding your experience, but you’ll be in a better position than someone who didn’t have any such experience and can only believe this or that based on emotions and thoughts. This is a very weak basis for faith and I wouldn’t actually recommend it. The way I would personally verify things is try the stuff they teach and see if it’s useful. If it produces a genuine spiritual experience, it’s still not perfect evidence, but it’s good enough to assume there’s some serious shit going on there. However, evidence of supernatural is not evidence of the Divine, and one needs to be extra careful with that difference. Eventually, the only solid way to know whether one is a genuine spiritual person or not is to be one yourself. The closer you are to that, the easier it is for you to verify. The more distant you are, the harder everything is. That’s why I personally don’t actually care much about convincing people of anything regarding myself. I mostly tell them how yoga works and how to practice it. If they manage to become genuine spiritual persons, my job there is done, and I still wouldn’t care much whether they know who I am or not, because that’s actually so demanding that even I don’t actually remember who I am most of the time, and when I do it’s not the most pleasant thing, since I need to be separated from it for the duration of this life. So, the entire thing about people wanting to know who I actually am and how authentic I am is a pastime for idiots, beginners and people otherwise completely unqualified for verifying anything in spiritual spheres. You can know that I’m smart, and you can reliably establish that I’m not crazy, but whether I’m some kind of a super-Devil who is here to deceive you, or a yogi who attained some spiritual experience he’s probably exaggerating, a yogi who attained spiritual experience he’s genuinely reporting, or a God who manifested a tulku here in order to do some things unique in history, you can’t actually know for sure, and relying much on faith in these matters isn’t actually productive. Faith is good when you experienced or did something and you remember it a month later, and you believe it’s all true. In such a case, it’s hard faith, because it’s based on your own experience and facts. Having that kind of faith is essential. However, having faith that’s based on weak foundations, on mere belief without actual experience and facts, it’s not actually something I would recommend having, and it’s better to work on establishing better foundations for your beliefs, than to rely too much on feeble nonsense.

So, that’s that. If you’re not sure who I am, and want to be, I would recommend against mere belief, one way or another. I would recommend learning more, having more actual experience, developing a stronger spiritual core, attaining spiritual transformations and initiations, attaining darshan of God, not once but many times, and learning about reality from that. As a corollary of great knowledge, you will understand more about me without actually bothering to know more about me, which is as it should be.

But without that, if the difference between what I am and what you are is too great, you wont be able to know or verify anything, and that’s not even your actual problem. Your actual problem is that if you knew anything about God, you wouldn’t have that problem.

About matters and seriousness

When I mostly wrote about politics for a few years, some people understood it as me “not being interested in spirituality any more”. When I started writing about spirituality again, shocked Pikachu face, I guess. So, what’s the deal?

Well, it’s kind of obvious. When I saw Western propaganda accompanying the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, I understood that such propaganda is something that would happen only if they had a long-term plan for a war with Russia. As I analysed the events from this perspective, it gave me such a good match that I started a political blog as a place where I can unload my thought processes as a form of a warning, because there’s no way for a war between West and Russia not to eventually go nuclear, and people should know about that well in advance in order to be able to prepare, and by prepare I mean be ready to absorb lesser impacts before the major one, and when the major one comes, be on good terms with God.

What do I mean by lesser impacts? Well, if you’re in Ukraine, you got to find out already. Likewise if you’re in Israel, or the region around Iran. It’s not particularly great in some parts of the West either; London, Paris etc. have turned into terrible shitholes that resemble Africa. America is also not a great place to be, and it’s getting worse.

I expected that, because the nuclear ultimate escalation isn’t something that just happens out of nowhere. You don’t attack Russia and China because you’re doing well. You’re doing it because your civilisation is at an impasse, and you’re looking for a desperate way out. Others react to your desperate measures in progressively more desperate ways, and it ends in mushroom clouds.

People have a silly idea about nuclear war – basically, both sides push a button and twenty minutes later there’s no world. I wanted to explain why this isn’t so, and why they will try everything else first, and why most people in the world won’t even know there was a nuclear war until much later. You need to understand the logic of those things.

So yeah, that was a priority. Also, the reason why I didn’t write about “spirituality” – God, I hate that word – is because I was thinking and meditating and figuring things out, and I don’t like talking just to hear myself talk. I basically needed a decade or two of processing to do, in order to get to the next level of understanding, and it’s not something you can copy-paste from somewhere, because, simply put, nobody has ever done it before. I did write bits and pieces as I was sure, and eventually “The Light Beyond” happened, as a culmination of all this. One of the more important reasons why I didn’t write much is because people who read it generate their own ideas that feed back into my perception, and then it makes it harder for me to figure things out and get a clear signal through all the interference. Then, as I got the pieces together, I could write it all down, since feedback loops no longer matter once I get it.

There’s another silly thing I found out recently; you see, I sensed that people ask Chat GPT and other LLM AI models about me. I asked Romana to try asking the questions I felt people are asking, and indeed, the answers came immediately, which means the system already had everything cached from recent inquiries. She copy-pasted some of it to me, and I found it incredibly silly. For instance, when you ask AI how competent I am, basically asking it to evaluate me because you trust a statistical evaluator of other people’s opinions more than you trust your own judgment, it tells you, essentially, that I’m quite competent at photography and programming, and less so at politics and religious philosophy – essentially, evaluating my deviation from the data pool that defines its primary neural networks as “being wrong”, while matches with consensus opinion are interpreted as “being right”. People who don’t know how that shitbox “thinks” will mistake it for actually having thought processes, which it doesn’t. The true interpretation of what it said is that my IT knowledge is generic enough that every competent IT person shares it, my photography knowledge is essentially what every competent photographer shares, and my pictures are composed along the lines of what is generally found aesthetically pleasing. My political opinions, however, are completely out of, what its western and leftist data pool of generally accepted propaganda defined by the CIA, defines as “normal”, so it’s “wrong” and “not substantiated by facts”, where facts are what the CIA tells the “journalists” to publish. Also, my opinions about spirituality are not the generally found copy-pasta; it’s actually the real thing, because I have my own independent access to the facts, which is orders of magnitude better than anyone else’s. In fact, some of the facts I have are my own memories from long ago, which are accessible only to me, and nobody else (with the exception of a few who also happened to be there); in simple terms, nobody else knows what actually happened because they weren’t there as it happened. I was. If someone didn’t learn it from me, they don’t know. So, Chat GPT thinks I’m taking myself too seriously, because it can’t verify my sources, so it thinks they are questionable. They are not.

Let me put it this way. Only a few people have been on the Moon. A few more have been in orbit around it. They have a unique perspective on it, and others are not really in a position where they can verify it independently. If they tell Neil Armstrong that he shouldn’t take himself too seriously with his stories about walking on the Moon, my answer is that they, in fact, are the ones who are taking themselves too seriously and they shouldn’t, while he’s taking himself exactly as seriously as he should, as he has an independent source of experience that they can’t access, duplicate or independently verify, so they should shut the fuck up.

Nirvanitas

It’s interesting how fallen souls always resort to similar language in order to present their fallen state as something enviable and, in some cases, an ultimate achievement.

Either it’s compassion – but for the low and fallen beings, while resentment and criticism is reserved for the high ones, who are of God. Or it is some quasi-religion, like the false interpretation of Buddhism which embraces something they call Emptiness, which due to imperfections of human language can be misconstrued to resemble what Buddha was talking about.

Essentially, there are two things on the polar opposite of spiritual experience, that can both be called Emptiness. First is the state in which a rock exists. It is empty of spirit, mind and feeling. It is also immune to karma – if a rock kills, it cannot be punished, because it lacks positive substance that would incur karmic retribution, and you can also not conceivably degrade it further. You can argue that the state of a rock is equivalent to this “Emptiness” that false spiritual people teach of. The thing is, you would need to be really pathetic and desperate in order to aspire to this condition. Achieving the state that’s natural to rocks isn’t a worthy achievement. Rather, it’s the lowest point to which you can fall as a spiritual being; it’s a point from which every way is up. Also, we have a local, traditional term for this state; the Latin word for it is “vanitas, -tis, f”. It is translated as either vanity, or emptiness, lack of Divine being. You can mockingly call it “nirvanitas” and accurately describe this falsely spiritual mockery of a teaching. You need to be rather stupid to embrace this idea, since it brings you literally nothing of substance, but stupid people are dime a dozen so it’s not hard to imagine how such nonsense can take hold and spread. The interesting thing is that claiming ultimate spiritual attainment can give you an ego boost even if it’s literally about being too spiritually degraded to be punishable for sin. Preach baseline state of non-differentiation of ego as the ultimate goal. Yay, you’re the great Buddha. The problem: every rock is your peer.

It’s a problem with human language, because there is an extreme state of spiritual ecstasy and fulfilment in the presence of God that can be described as Emptiness, because it’s emptiness of thought, of desire, of wish for any change, or for anything at all other than to remain in His holy presence forever. However, the Isha Upanishad speaks of this differently, using the word “purna”, fullness. Lord is the fullness that remains full even after infinity of infinities emanates from it. Also, it’s the emptiness of motive after everything has been achieved, emptiness of desire after everything worth desiring has been achieved, emptiness of thought because you rest in the totality of bliss, consciousness and truth. Fullness of being is also emptiness of all human nonsense. The same word can be used for the opposite sides of the spiritual spectrum – for God and for a rock. But of course, the confusion is intentionally spread by the quasi-spiritual fakes and deceivers on an ego-trip.

It’s similar to being wordless because you experience a fullness of meaning that exceeds your ability to put it into words without choking up, and being wordless because you are dumber than dirt. Opposite things, but somehow can be described with the same words, especially if your intent is to deceive. If it is not, you will make sure to avoid using deceptive language and speak very clearly of the Lord and His infinite abundance of fullness.

The terror of Satan

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.

Rules

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.