“Stop apologising, Goldy”, Hildegard smiled. “I was never in your league intellectually, but I wasn’t completely stupid. I knew I was too lucky to have you, and I left of my own will when the time came. I knew you are the only one I would ever want, but we weren’t there at the same time. You had a life of a Bishop and a philosopher ahead of you, and I knew I would only stand in your way, for I wasn’t worthy of you yet”, she caressed his cheek. “But I prayed that God would bring our destinies together once we were both ready”, she smiled to her ancient love.

“When I was with you, I felt such depth of consciousness, merely from you being there, that nothing I felt in church came close, so I learned to relive that depth in my memory, and prayed to God to elevate me spiritually to that level, so I could truly be your wife, and not merely an incredibly lucky ancilla”, she laughed quietly. “I also never wanted to have another man in my bed, because I thought of myself as forever yours. In my next lives, this remained true, and I kept meditating and studying, without consciously knowing why, but of course I would remember between lives, as the Judges would awaken my memories”.

“You more than merely caught up with me, Hildegard”, he smiled. “You are so amazing now, I feel I now need to catch up with you”.

“Nonsense. Your energy grew deeper ever since we embraced, and it grows deeper still, as we breathe each other’s presence”, she dismissed the idea. “It seems that the only thing that was actually hindering your progress is the fact that your heart stopped when I went away, and I’m sorry for that”.

“And I’m sorry I didn’t always remain faithful to you. I briefly tried to fill the void with another woman, but it was an unworthy effort and brought me no happiness”, he nodded remorsefully.

“I forgive you. It was harder for you, I know. Everybody knew you were of high status and I was a daughter of a slave maid. The expectation was that I was nothing special. You only found out that it wasn’t so when you tried to replace me and you couldn’t, and you didn’t know why, and then you were ordained and all of it fell to the wayside. I, on the other hand, always knew you were special and irreplaceable. The only person who could ever come close to my memory of you was Christ himself. So, replacing you with another man wasn’t even a temptation”, she smiled.

“My only love, will you have me back? I am unworthy, and I was treacherous and foolish, but I confessed to Christ just now that I would do anything to repair that ancient mistake, where I treated my true wife as a worldly thing to renounce for Christ, only to find out that my way to God leads only through you”, he kissed her hand. “I promise to never leave you again, may Christ be my witness”.

“I will have you; for in my heart of hearts, I always remained yours”, she smiled and melted into his embrace.

…

“Let’s go and find Christ, for this time I want him to pronounce us man and wife, to make up for my old failure”.

…

“Truly, you are already married, but I bear witness to this fact and pronounce you husband and wife”, Jesus embraced them both. “Do you now know what to do”?

“I felt immense relief and spiritual growth as she returned to me and I held her, so I would suspect that further growth lies in that direction”, Augustine offered.

“Quite so”, Christ nodded. “You can get more precise details from the Teachers of Gods in the apple orchard, for they are the greatest experts in all of Heaven in matters of spiritual marriage and energy flows. However, I think you are both mature and wise enough to already suspect everything. You need to love, adore, worship and serve each other, and you also need to worship the person of God that is closest to you. Do you know who that is for you?”

“You are”, they spoke in unison, and smiled.

“Well, that makes it simple. Love each other and breathe in each other’s energy, and remember My presence and what you admire about it, for I am the Light of the World”, the Jewel in his hearth flashed and they were both momentarily overcome with bliss. “Love and worship each other, and love and worship God; and the rest is up to God, because the next step in spiritual evolution isn’t so much you choosing to become something, as much it is God choosing to become you”, he hugged them again and shooed them away to meditate.

And, as they did, the Gods were twenty one.

“Something seems to bother you, Bishop”, Christ smiled at the man. “One would think a man such as yourself would run out of bothers in a place like this”, he pointed at their surroundings. It was a green meadow in the astral Earth, where Jesus made it a point to break bread with Christians every day, and answer their questions, for they had many. It was different than what the Buddhists did in the apple orchard, but no less useful.

“I think I had my priorities wrong for so long, I’m not sure if I can get my head straight any more, my Lord”, Augustine sighed. “Christianity seemed to be about choice for you, and for the correct teaching of the Church. In order to make the correct choice, one had to cast aside worldly things, wrong things, things that would seduce one away from God. I’ve read your words, and they seemed to approve of this interpretation – let the dead bury their dead, and you who want eternal life should follow me”.

“I had a wife, you know. It wasn’t formalised, the word we used for her was ‘concubine’, but I lived with her for almost fourteen years. We even had a son together; we called him our gift from God, Adeodatus. She was of lower status, so it was out of the question to elevate our relationship to official marriage, and even my mother, who was very Christian and who actually played a huge part in my conversion to Christianity, encouraged me to send her away and marry someone of proper status”.

“I loved her greatly. She was my dearest friend and companion, but since everyone around me encouraged me to treat this relationship as something frivolous and unimportant, I never assigned it with the significance it ought to have had. They had me send her away, and I did. I saw your example, as the Church presented it, and thought I don’t need a wife, that I should dedicate my life to God alone. So, I lost my wife, and soon my son died, and I think my true life died there, with them, and what was left was the vacuous word juggling and arguing about orthodoxy, the way fools would argue about wrappings while they throw away the content of the package. Now I see that not only did you have a wife, but she was with you until the end, she was with your mother under the cross, she was the one who saw you rise from the dead, and she is with you now as a fellow person of God, and the Church discarded her the same way in which I discarded my own wife. It all looks like the same fatal flaw, where we rejected the will of the living God in order to accept words and rituals bereft of meaning, deluding ourselves by thinking how we renounced the worldly things for those of eternity. Can I ever put this right?”

“The Church really messed this one up by counterfeiting Magdalena out of my life”, Jesus nodded in dismay. “Your wife is not a worldly thing. She is your opportunity to share God with someone in deep intimacy. To send your wife away because you want to dedicate yourself to God is like performing human sacrifice for the sake of nonviolence. It is as counterproductive as it is moronic and evil, and you are right to be ashamed of yourself for it, for it was a terrible thing to do”.

“However, it’s actually more complicated than that. You see, you were an angel, and she was a less developed soul. I mention you being an angel not as praise, but as a warning, for angels are usually conceited, self-righteous, dismissive of the lives of others and more focused on ‘important’ things in life, such as their career, or a higher calling, rather than the people in their lives. It is a paradox that demons tend to be more loving and caring in their earthly lives, as they don’t care so much about the abstract things, as they do about the immediate ones. Zina is a good example of this; she was a demon, and she threw herself into loving her worldly family with incredible passion. Hypatia, on the other hand, was an angel, and you can see this in her life, where her career was paramount, and her relationships with people were superficial at best. She was, however, a very kind and caring person to others, very much like you were, when they didn’t stand in the way of your illustrious career”, Jesus grinned. “The reason why I am mentioning this is because you were simply not in a good place in your spiritual life, where you could really appreciate the deep spiritual importance of your wife, and your environment merely encouraged you in your natural proclivities. She, on the other hand, was not ready for the really deep spiritual place you are thinking of now. It was not the right time for either of you. Yes, you sinned against her when she did nothing wrong and everything right, but even if you hadn’t, the difference between you was too great for you to have been able to establish the kind of a spiritual bond of joint godhood that I have with Magdalena, or what Hypatia has with the Angel of Death, or what Zina has with Buddha. We were all quite close to our companions in spiritual status. Magdalena was incredibly close to being a Goddess in our earthly life, and became one minutes after her death. Hypatia became a Goddess essentially seconds after seeing Azrael, and he was at an almost identical state of spiritual growth as her, so they achieved apotheosis together. Your wife would have needed to take a few more spiritual steps in order to match you, and you, yourself, are ready to understand the significance of it only now”.

“And you should understand that she was and is your true wife, Bishop. It was no accident that you felt such friendship and closeness with her in life, and she can be replaced by no other”, Christ nodded solemnly.

“Where is she now, my Lord?”, Augustine said in anguish. “What has happened with her since we parted so inauspiciously?”

“She vowed to remain forever loyal to you and to take no other man, and she did exactly that, in that life as well as those that followed. She was a consecrated virgin, a Christian nun, in three lives that followed. Her last life ended just recently, and I talked to her yesterday. She was a person of great esteem in the Church, almost matching your own reputation and status, as is proper. Would you like me to introduce you to each other?”, Lord Yeshua smiled.

“I would like that very much, even though I am very much ashamed of myself and I feel unworthy. It will be a great penance for me to see her chastise me, and I will bear it with humility as I fully deserve it”, Augustine nodded, with an expression of a man whose sins came to bear fruit.

“Then so shall it be”, Christ nodded, and made a hand motion. An angelic woman appeared from the shimmer in space. “May I introduce you to abbess Hildegard von Bingen. Abbess, may I introduce you to Bishop Augustine of Hippo”, he nodded.

The woman was a deep indigo-violet super-angel of the highest order, and Augustine was deeply impressed by her depth and stature. And yet, there was an air of profound familiarity around her.

“Goldy? Is that really you?”, she closed the space between them, and he could see her tears welling up. “I am so sorry to have been such an ass to you”, his own tears streaked his face. “You are known as Hildegard now, am I right?”

She just embraced him wordlessly and they wept together, as Christ shimmered out to give them privacy.

“So, let me get this straight. Since I last saw you, all four of you went to Lady Jess to teach you, because you decided you were ignorant peasants?”, Lady Hypatia smiled at the four newborn Gods.

“Well, we figured that staying ignorant would be a poor way to repay you for your kindness”, Albert smiled. “So, we looked around to see who would teach us how the world works. Jetsunma seemed to be the least busy, so we went to her”.

“And then all four of you became Gods, and then Jess chastised Lord Shiva for giving her the title ‘Teacher of Gods’?”, she sipped her coffee and snickered.

“I didn’t chastise Lord Shiva!”, Yeshe Tsogyal protested, taken aback by the very idea. “I just urged him very politely to reconsider, because my husband and wife were doing the same work as I, and it was a mere accident that I got such brilliant students, so if I am to be recognised for it, they should be as well”.

“And so all three of you got the title”, Hypatia smiled. “Quite deservingly, if I may say so, since you’ve been doing wonderful work there. Thanks to you, the level of understanding of the world among the post-Earth souls has risen dramatically”.

“And all four of you now have an official title in the lineage of Jetsunma Yeshe Tsogyal Rimpoche in the Nyingma tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism”, Kay nodded approvingly. “Which means you all now have long titles I will never manage to remember”, she pretended to nurse a headache.

“Let’s all pretend you didn’t just remember mine perfectly”, Jess tickled her in the ribs and laughed as the Mind of God tried to squirm away, giggling.

“So, what do you plan to do next?”, Lady Hypatia asked the four.

“If it is acceptable to you, we would like to join you in your work as the Judges”, Hilde looked at Hypatia. “We considered between that and joining Jetsunma in her teaching work, but we decided that, since we belong to you, we should take some of your workload away and thus make your life easier”, she smiled at her Goddess, who started to tear up and decided to hide her discomfort by embracing the girl.

“It is perfectly acceptable. All four of you are overqualified for the job, and we are honoured to have you”, nodded Lord Vishnu, who decided to save Lady Hypatia from the embarrassment of having to say something while trying not to cry.

…

“Wait, I just remembered that you referred to Lady Mandarava as your wife, and not sister-wife”, Kay scratched her jaw. “Does that mean…?”

“Yes, it’s a three-way relationship. I am her wife as much as I am his. If I didn’t love them equally, there would certainly be all kinds of jealousy or feelings of exclusion. Our minds are so intertwined, we don’t even think of ourselves as separate persons, more like one person with three bodies, all in service of each other”, Lady Jess nodded.

“That’s why you refused any recognition if the two of them don’t partake”, Goddess of Wisdom nodded. “You perceive yourselves as a single unit, that just happens to sit under three different apple trees at the same time”.

“I’m glad that you understand us. People get confused when they see us, because they always get hung up on sex and imagine two in intercourse with the odd person sticking out. That’s not at all how it is. We meditated together so much, that we would forget which body is where. Our consciousness was completely merged, and we automatically took care of each other’s needs, without even realising. Someone would be thirsty and someone would bring water. One of us would work late, and one of the others would wake up and bring more oil for the lamp and go back to sleep. I don’t even remember which one did what. So, even saying that it was a three-way marriage doesn’t do it justice. Mandarava is not so much my wife as she is a body part, figuratively speaking. You will rarely see us talking to each other, but you will see us finishing each other’s thoughts, or picking up each other’s role in a conversation. The fact that two out of three of my souls are female is merely a factoid”, she smiled.

“But what about sex? I mean, technically…?”, Kay blushed.

“Technically, sex consisted mostly of breathing each other’s energy, of surrender and worship”, Jess shrugged. “Of course we were incredibly intimate with each other, but if you visualise my husband in padmasana, and me in his lap, you’ll understand there’s not much penetration or action of any kind going on there”, she laughed as Kay was cherry red. “I would embrace him and we would breathe each other. Or I would embrace my wife and we would breathe each other. When you have three-way blending of minds and all are breathing vajra and visualising mandalas, the sex on Earth was pretty much the same as it is for you and your husband here; souls breathing each other in directly. The physical world was something that happened in the background”, she shrugged.

“I am starting to see why the three of you became Gods, and others doing apparently similar things in your tradition didn’t. You were the goal to each other, not means to an end”, Kay nodded.

“Exactly. We weren’t using each other to attain enlightenment; we used enlightenment to love and serve each other”, Jess smiled blissfully.

“I am honoured to be your friend; and by ‘you’ I mean all three of you, who are one”, Karuna bowed, and Jess Rimpoche just hugged her. “You’re not merely my friend, sweetheart. You’re my sister”.

…

“The religions and cultures seem to be amalgamating wonderfully”, Lady Shakti smiled at her husband. “A tantric Tibetan Goddess just brought four German Christians who worship a neoplatonist Greek Goddess to godhood. Also, the said Tibetan Goddess is sister-bonding with Karuna”.

“Sounds very much like heaven”, Shiva smiled. “The only kind of a religious war they could possibly have is over trying to give each other all the credit. But just imagine people on Earth seeing them. They would have an absolute fit”.

“You mean, they would try to burn them all at a stake for heresy?”, she giggled.

“Exactly”, he nodded.

“I don’t think we are even close to seeing the dumbest and craziest they have to offer”, Shakti sighed.

“Since your soul structure is essentially grafted upon a vajra carrier, your situation is different than what an angelic being would normally be facing. They attained purification of the lower four elements before crystallisation. You, however, need to consciously go though this now in order to integrate your consciousness with the carrier fully”, Goddess explained.

“Jetsunma, how do we do this?”, Albert frowned. “Are there specific ways we should approach grounding into the elements, or should we follow the classic procedure?”

“Classic procedure would probably work, but I have a specific meditation for you to go through, since your specific situation is also providing you with shortcuts that would not be available to a normal soul preparing for vajra initiation. The standard affirmation is ‘element Earth is perfect, and present in fullness in me’, and the same for each progressively higher element. In your case, the affirmation is ‘Lady Hypatia is the perfection and fullness of the element Earth, and I accept her perfection and fullness as myself’, as you meditate on her energy as you originally felt it. This is because you already have a template of perfection within your soul, that you merely need to integrate on a conscious level”.

“You spoke about treating impurities that arise in the process, and how they are to be consumed through remorse, suffering and Kundalini kriyas. Does any of this apply to us?”, Hilde wondered.

“No. Your structure is perfectly pure. The carrier your souls were grafted upon is of a perfect Divine origin, and your souls themselves were pure. They were, however, extremely undeveloped, which is why you now need to expand your consciousness by evolving structures that would normally be there in a being of your spiritual status; your problem isn’t lack of purity, but lack of complexity and substance”, Lady Yeshe Tsogyal explained.

“We understand, Jetsunma”, the young students bowed and retreated to meditate.

…

“Isalde, our children have greatly overtaken us in their spiritual progress”, Berfrid addressed his wife. “I’ve seen them with the Tibetan Goddess in the apple orchard again, and each time I see them, they look more mature and older, and I can understand less of what they are saying. We need to pick up the pace, or we’ll be left behind”.

“This is true and you are completely right”, she nodded. “Whilst I am happy that they are making such progress, we need to keep up. During our life on Earth, we were illiterate and ignorant, and now we are surrounded with such excellent opportunities for learning and growth. How are we to be worthy of our Lady’s gift if we stagnate?”

“We should seek out the Tibetan Goddess ourselves and ask that she teaches us alongside our children”, he nodded seriously.

“Shouldn’t we seek out our Lady Hypatia instead?”

“No, she is busy receiving the recently deceased from Earth, and when she isn’t, she is recovering from it with her husband in peace and quiet. It would be sinful to impose undue strain on her. Also, the Buddhist Gods have volunteered to teach ignorant souls that have been released into the astral Earth by the Judges, and this very much applies to us, because we are as ignorant as they get”, he grinned.

“Hopefully, not for too long, lest our children leave us in the dust”, Isalde smiled and embraced him.

…

“Jetsunma, we meditated as you recommended, and the results were quite spectacular”, Hilde bowed to the teacher Goddess. “As we went through each element, it is as if we opened our minds to a huge library of knowledge related to the respective element, and it poured itself into us, giving us perspective and understanding”

“This is exactly what happened”, Yeshe Tsogyal Rimpoche nodded. “The astral world is made in such a way that knowledge isn’t sequestered into some separate library, although a library does indeed exist here, for the souls that are accustomed to Earth; the books there merely connect to the knowledge that could be accessed from any place, and at any time, if you request it. The books are merely an interface”, she smiled.

“So, does this mean that by meditating upon the elements in their purity and fullness, we opened access to the all-present sources of knowledge that were poured into our minds the way water fills a vessel once the dam is removed?”, Albert smiled back.

“Yes. As I can see, you now have complex structures of knowledge and understanding related to the elements, but you need to practice more so that the process of sublimation of four elements into the fifth reproduces in your souls, thus replicating what Lady Hypatia herself attained, untold eons ago”, she confirmed.

“Yes, Jetsunma”, they bowed.

…

“I see that you have both attained the first enlightenment. I salute you”, the Goddess bowed to the stark blue, fully developed angelic beings before her. “You have now consciously attained spiritual status you had previously possessed due to your Lady’s grace, which is now fully your own, and you did her great honour”, she bowed again.

“It is all because of your priceless teaching, Jetsunma”, they bowed in unison.

“We do have a question regarding our further progress”, the girl squirmed uncomfortably. “We understand that in order to become a true God, one must have a relationship of mutual love and worship with their counterpart of the opposite sex”.

“We came to understand that we already have such a relationship with each other, but since we are brother and sister, we came to ask you about propriety”, man blushed to match his sister.

“You worry for no good reason”, the Goddess smiled at them. “On Earth, marriage between siblings is prohibited in order to prevent disorders that would arise from lack of genetic diversity. It is a purely physical precaution that has no bearing on the matters of soul. As you no longer have human bodies, none of this applies to you. So, if you feel comfortable exploring a romantic relationship, this is perfectly appropriate”.

The young angels were hugely relieved. “Thank you, Jetsunma”, they bowed, and looked at each other. “If it is all right, we don’t want to merely explore a romantic relationship. We want to be properly married as husband and wife. Will you please marry us officially?”, the girl whispered.

“Do you both agree on this?” the Goddess spoke seriously.

“Yes”, they replied in unison.

“Then you are as of now husband and wife”, she bowed. “I give you my most heartfelt blessings”.

“Now, I will teach you how to perform karmamudra techniques adapted to direct soul-to-soul contact, so that you can merge your personal lovemaking and meditation on your yidam Goddess. This is how I, my husband and my sister-wife attained godhood while still on Earth. I most heartily recommend it”, she smiled, and the newlyweds just bowed in silent adoration.

…

“It’s strange, but I understand it”, Isalde shrugged. “They are close, they are already family, they learned form Jess Rimpoche together, and since there are no human limitations, there was no reason for them not to upgrade their brother-sister relationship to one of husband and wife, if it suited them better. Honestly, it’s the most reasonable and appropriate thing to do, once you think about it properly and get past the human ideas. After all, all Gods are brothers and sisters in a sense, and they are also all merely different faces and persons of the same God”.

“This is exactly as Jess Rimpoche explained it to me”, Berfrid confirmed. “And also, she noted that you, in fact, are their sister as much as their mother, since all three of you share the same Goddess-substance that gave you eternal life”.

“I did think about it”, Isalde nodded and smiled. “The thought of my children also being my siblings is as strange as it is endearing, as is the idea of being both mother and mother-in-law to both of them. But once I’m past the initial shock, I wholly approve of their relationship change. It would be extremely weird for them to break up with each other in order to try to find someone else to marry, when they have no such inclination and it would bring them nothing but suffering”.

“Come; it is time for our next lesson with Jetsunma”, he smiled and took his wife’s hand.

…

Albert and Hilde were intertwined like a double helix of black and white vajra, drinking the nectar of devotion to their Goddess, to their Teacher, and to each other, each devotion strengthening and empowering others, until the veil in their hearts was no more, and God claimed both of them as Self.

…

Berfrid and Isalde watched in a mixture of shock and bliss as their children formed a mandala by folding space and time as if a paper flower, with themselves embraced in its centre. They understood what was happening. They, too, were good students of Jess Rimpoche, and Isalde herself attained her first enlightenment, and was now an angelic being in her own right, and not merely by the grace of their Goddess. As they observed their children’s apotheosis, they looked each other in the eyes and decided it’s time.

Jetsunma taught them well; they combined their own love, worship of the Goddess, gratitude and worship of Jetsunma herself, and, now, admiration and worship of their divine children, who were the newest God-couple at the summit of Creation.

And so, the Gods were nineteen.

…

“Apostle, have you seen this?”, Augustine prodded Paul.

“I have indeed, Bishop. Our Lord was right. Seemingly, not only have the harlots and tax collectors overtaken us into the kingdom of God, but also the serfs”, Paul snickered. “We have been lazy and complacent, my dear Bishop. Instead of learning from our betters, we have been sitting on our imaginary laurels”.

“Maybe this is an extraordinary exception; they were saved by Lady Hypatia, who sacrificed a part of her own soul for them, blessed be her holy name forever”, Augustine nodded. “But maybe I am deceiving myself. They are obviously better than me, as I encountered the Lady myself on my arrival here, and I mostly wasted my time arguing with her about theology, while they worshipped the ground she walks on, as is right and proper, as she is a sister to our Lord”, he waved his head in self criticism.

“Let’s find Peter and tell him about this. Truly, we need to repent and cast aside our stubborn ways, lest God get weary of our nonsense and cast us aside”, Paul smiled bitterly.

“We had many new angels, some of extreme evolvement and sophistication, and yet no new Gods”, Zina noted, sipping coffee. “I wonder why that may be”.

“I think it’s because they all fit a certain profile. They are men, celibate, renunciates. They practice some sadhana that is highly effective, they learn how to enter a state of oneness with the Absolute, they learn how to control their energy system so that they stay there, but as for karmic evolution, the results are modest, because they simply don’t touch that part; they ‘transcend it’, as they themselves would say. Even those, who actually attain great results, don’t seem to impress God as much as they impress fellow humans. As a result, God doesn’t claim them”, Buddha shrugged.

“But what about bhakti and tantra? The bhaktas should, at least in theory, be doing the same thing we are. Tantra should, in theory, be allowing couples to evolve together”, his wife countered.

“In theory”, he conceded. “In practice, bhaktas tend to be more hysterical than transcendental. When they are successful, they tend to return to Gods as servants, rather than becoming their companion-Gods. Tantrikas for the most part devolved into practitioners of dark magic, and it’s not having good spiritual outcomes. Also, they are using women as a tool for sexual meditation, rather than using sex as means of mutual worship between a male and a female practitioner. That, too, isn’t having good spiritual outcomes. Some of it is outright terrible – orgies, debauchery, demon worship, dark magic, even ritual sacrifice. Not only is it not on the level of Padmasambhava and his holy wives; it’s on the level of some demonic cesspool”, he shivered from the recollection.

“What about yoga?”, she offered. “Let me guess – it’s contaminated by the impersonal concept of brahman, which tries to transcend or outright ignore karma rather than evolving it, and they use methods that work until a certain point, and then they fail to improvise and get stuck?”

“Yes. Also, when they come here, almost none of it works, or makes any sense whatsoever, because it’s all based around certain properties of the physical body. Asanas are pointless here, so are the pranayamas. Pratyahara and dharana are pointless, as the defaults of astral and vajra bodies do it all by default. Dhyana and samadhana are also pointless, as they don’t produce any advancement here, unlike in the physical body, where they train the brain to extend meditative states. Here, you are just stuck at square one. Raja yoga doesn’t do anything because the body does it by default, and so on. Essentially, the only things that actually work here are various forms of bhakti – worship, love, service, and so on. However, those who practice bhakti down there usually practice some form of emotional hysteria, while those who practice yoga rarely do it in order to enhance devotional practice. They usually over-specialise, and since simplistic theories seem to win there, they get more adherents, who don’t develop into well-rounded personalities. The end result, unfortunately, is less than we hoped for”, he shrugged.

“Also, we are getting disproportionally more male than female practitioners, which is concerning”, she noted. “Obviously, it’s because of the nature of most forms of practice, which completely sideline family life, and over-emphasise renunciation, which is practised mostly by men. So, even when those men attain some result, it’s usually partial crystallisation of the karmic body, but with seriously undeveloped parts that would have anything to do with women. Essentially, they function well in a cave or a forest, but if you put them near a woman, they wouldn’t know what to do with her. They would either rape her or treat her as if she were some sort of a cow”, she smirked. “And whatever you try to do to make them fix the issue, they just do more of the same, because they think it works, and repetition of the same will certainly bring them to enlightenment”.

“We got a large number of semi-crystallised dark mages and, I don’t even know what to call them. Some are actual nightmares, vile as serpents that live under a rock and hate everybody, thinking themselves superior because they are above the world. Some have inflated ego because they are worshipped by ‘common people’ and they learned all sorts of ways of ‘looking spiritual’ as to attract adulation. Some of it is outright fakery, some of it is abuse of genuine spirituality for manipulative purposes. They attain partial crystallisation, but the part of their soul that is not crystallised is usually in worse condition than with the average people. It presents us with complex problems, because such people think they know what God is, what spiritual practice is, what the result is, and when you try to explain, they nod as if they understand, and it’s clear that it goes right past them. Honestly, I don’t have a straightforward idea on how to solve those problems and turn them into souls that will continue to evolve, rather than being stuck in a stagnant state, where they will repeat the same mistakes and think they are doing sadhana, and are better than others since they are such hard working practitioners”, Buddha shrugged. “I was actually something similar in my earthly life. I did things that didn’t work, but which won me acclaim among the fellow practitioners. As I did it more, I actually harmed my health and would have died. When I gave it all up and started using common sense, I attained enlightenment very quickly, but the fellow practitioners thought I had apostatised from the true path because I ceased to starve myself to death and do pointless activities. False spiritual practice is in fact quite rewarding to the ego”.

“I think Satan is one of the reasons why some things stop working after the initial successes”, his wife considered. “He thinks of an antidote for success, and diverts practitioners into some dead-end that is instantly rewarding but ultimately pointless”.

“Be it as it may, people need very little incitement to do just that on their own, I’m afraid”, he shrugged.

“Also, other than the initial impulse of tantra, most practices target mostly men, creating extremely unbalanced populations of practitioners, as well as practitioners themselves that are extremely unbalanced within themselves. It is not surprising that they fail to attain true enlightenment, let alone apotheosis – metaphorically speaking, God abhors them. Also, metaphorically speaking, if you don’t develop such character that a God-person of the opposite sex will fall in love with you to the point of wanting to spend eternity together, you failed in your spirituality”, Zina nodded.

“You hit that nail right on the head”, Buddha smiled approvingly. “But it doesn’t need to be completely straightforward. I, for example, developed alone, but I was balanced, to the point where I needed just a small nudge from you to show me the next level of evolution, and I went for it. Some of those people invest huge asymmetrical efforts, as if exercising only the right side of their bodies, and end up looking like freaks, and the power of habit they developed is such that you can no longer teach them anything, because they think they know. We’ll have to ask Lord Shiva and his Lady about them, since their mastery in those matters is peerless, for I am at my wit’s end”, he shrugged.

“Honestly, some of those people don’t just look like freaks; they are freaks. Imagine, for instance, someone who spent decades sharpening his mind, controlling breath, developing clarity of consciousness, doing Kundalini kriyas, but seems to be utterly incapable of such a simple thing as loving a woman. A whole sewage dump seems to erupt at the very thought, as the idea of a woman is associated with worldly attachments, losing oneself in the world, lack of emotional control and complex mental faculties, and so on. To them, loving a woman brings associations similar to having intercourse with a goat that also leads you to spiritual ruin. And they don’t understand that this is all indoctrination with nonsense; they think it’s an absolute, unquestionable truth. And, of course, as such a civilisation marginalises and sidelines women, they indeed become the neglected and inferior gender, and the output of the function feeds back into the inputs, seemingly confirming it. I processed men from such cultures. First they thought I was a maid servant of some man who is doing the actual job and asked me to bring them to my master. Then they outright refused to believe that I can be competent, and eventually they were completely paralysed with shock. I wonder how they would have reacted to someone like Lady Shakti or Lady Kay”, she smiled.

“The same”, her husband shrugged. “They are conditioned to assume that femininity means stupidity, and it’s a serious problem, as such lopsided cultures produce lopsided, dysfunctional people. Both men and women from such cultures tend to be spiritually messed up to the point where we can’t do anything with them other than send them back to Earth, since they are incapable of normal life here. Women who are raised to be hardly more than goats end up actually being hardly more than goats, and men tend to react to women in terribly disgusting ways; imagine such a specimen trying to rape a female angel or treat her as if she’s stupid. Here, they would be a virulent contamination. On Earth, I’m afraid they are normal”.

“Some actually tried to do something similar with me, thinking I was a pleasure toy given to them by their god as a reward for killing enough ‘infidels’. The women, on the other hand, expected me to show them the way to the kitchen. The worst were the semi-crystallised mages trained in some sort of an impersonalistic religious philosophy, such as vedanta or sufism. They try to make me disperse or change form, thinking I’m a construct of their minds, and they use extreme mental focus in an imperious manner. Thank God for the protective features of my job, that shield me from such violence, for some of them are truly powerful and their attacks would probably have harmed me otherwise”, she shivered.

“That world certainly lived up to the expectation of creating different and unusual types of souls. Unfortunately, this very rarely translates to ‘better’”, Buddha mused.

“Well, it produced you, and that alone made it worth all the failures”, she smiled and kissed him.