I was just thinking (which is how, apparently, most of my articles start 🙂 ) how our concepts of God in the West are influenced, if not outright defined, by the concepts originating from the ancient middle-Eastern civilisations; Babylon, Assyria, Egypt. The entire monotheistic thing originates from there and then: you have a strict hierarchy of worshippers, saints, Angels, Archangels, Cherubim, Seraphim, and upon the Throne there is The One God, to whom all are singing praise, lest they be cast out of heaven and into the lake of fire.

Let me just roll my eyes theatrically here, because, for those who still didn’t get the memo, God is not Ashurbanipal, or Ramses, or Hammurabi. People think of those wooden statues of saints in a church, all strict and serious, and imagine God under the influence of that imagery – if the saints are like that, what must their God be like? Even more strict, distant to the point where nobody really sees him, and people pray to the saints because they feel closer, more approachable, closer to their human condition, which might make them more understanding than a distant, supreme God.

In school I read Franz Kafka’s “Process”, which is about nameless, faceless bureaucracy that swallows and destroys a man in a completely impersonal, detached manner, accusing him of unspecified crimes, for which he’s later sentenced to death and executed, and one thing struck me in particular. As he is brought before a judge, in the waiting room he sees the portrait of said judge in all the splendour of judicial paraphernalia, and someone asks him what he thinks about this judge’s status, how high of a judge this is in the judicial hierarchy? He responds that it must be a very high judge, judging by the portrait, but a man says no, he’s the lowest judge in the hierarchy, that’s why he’s making so much of a show of his greatness. This struck me as very true, because that’s how humans function. The lower someone is in the hierarchy, the more he postures. People buying all the status symbols aren’t the really rich, but middle class with aspirations. The really rich tend to keep a low profile because bringing attention to themselves is just trouble. The really, really rich tend to act completely normal. The world’s wealthiest people come here to Croatia acting completely casually, for instance Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos come to the restaurant with their wives and just order normal stuff like everyone else. Elon Musk and Joe Rogan order pizza and fuck around shooting a car with arrows. It’s the wannabes that drive Bentleys, wear flashy diamond jewellery, heavy gold chains and act with all the grace and class of pimps and drug dealers.

There’s another literary example from Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series, where Hari Seldon is brought to the imperial palace on Trantor, and granted audience before an unspecified person. Seldon doesn’t know who that is and is warily trying to guess in order to address him properly, and based on the simplicity of the man’s attire he guesses it must be someone really, really high in the imperial hierarchy, which scares him shitless, and he aims very high with the title he uses. He still misses, however, because it turns out this person is actually the Emperor himself. Basically, the lower courtiers will all look like peacocks, but the Emperor looks like an ordinary man in a suit. That’s what the difference between power, great power and scary power looks like. The powerful look powerful. The supremely powerful look casual. If you imagine saints in white robes, angels in white light, archangels in deep light that radiates scary levels of power, you imagine God as that super-scary, super-powerful, super-distant, never-really-seen arch-magnificence. You then imagine it would be safer to pray to some saint or an angel because you don’t want to be pulverised by lightning or something.

The Hindu concepts aren’t this stuck up or influenced by ancient middle-Eastern despotisms, but there’s still a huge difference between how a priest behaves, how a Rishi such as Vyasa or Narada behaves, and how Krishna or Shiva behave. Essentially, a beginner will look like a saint, a saint will look like some kind of a deity, and God will mess around with his friends acting like a shepherd kid. That’s because a beginner tries really hard to acquire certain qualities, and is very serious and disciplined about it, and also tries to make an impression on people, because to him spirituality is a matter of social status. A saint attained a very high spiritual state and very much tries not to lose it, and always tries to be at his best. God, on the other hand, doesn’t really give a shit. He’s not going to stop being God if he does something undignified, like messing with the girls by stealing their clothes while they are bathing in the river, so that they have to come to him naked and get them back, or hiding in a bush with Arjuna to look at the girls bathing, and setting up his friend with his sister. God doesn’t think his crown will fall off if he bows low. He’s not afraid of people not thinking he’s dignified enough. He’s not afraid of losing his status if he’s not acting distant or special enough. God just doesn’t give a fuck. In fact, exactly because he’s the most powerful, he’s easiest to reach and most approachable. He’s much closer than any saint or an angel. God is not a saintlier saint or a more powerful archangel; God is a whole different kind of a thing. There’s powerful, then there’s scary powerful, then there’s omnipotent, and then there’s the barefoot girl in a light dress, or the shepherd kid playing a flute, a carpenter surrounded by his twelve disciples, or something similarly normal and approachable that, nevertheless, makes Bogeyman check under his bed before he goes to sleep.

The fact that I’m talking about a plurality of Gods – not just one God with many forms taken for the sake of meeting us halfway, that must sound strange, and the first question I would expect is whether there’s something to the ancient polytheisms, where you have gods of respective elements (water, fire etc.), social concepts (war, wisdom, technology), or the Hindu concept of trimurti (creator, maintainer, destroyer)?

No. There are not many things I can state with complete certainty, but this is one of them. Not only did I not encounter gods of specific principles, elements and so on, but I positively encountered so many things that I can state with complete confidence that nothing of the sort exists.

Gods are just… people, I guess. Enlightened souls who became persons of God, the way Jesus is a person of God, not a god of carpentry, resurrection or crucifixion. He’s just a person. A holy person, a Divine person, for sure – but definitely not a metaphor for some aspect of nature, or someone in charge of an aspect of nature. If there are beings in charge of aspects of this world, they are definitely not persons of God – more likely, they are minions of Satan, because that’s who rules this world.

There are holy beings who have been given a task, so now they have a job. That doesn’t make them gods of that task; for instance, a Judge of Karma is merely a holy person with a Title and a job. They are holy enough to guide souls after physical death and to have an objective perspective of their lives and karma. They also have permissions and duty to throw someone into hell or destroy them outright if it’s an extreme case of evil. They can also create an upgrade path for a soul. However, to have that Title and ability doesn’t determine one as a soul. The same Judge of Karma can otherwise be a perfectly ordinary Divine being whose normal activities consist of meditation, prayer and, for instance, composing music. Being a Judge is more a function of purity and general authority than some function within the machinery of the Universe. Any God, by definition, can be a Judge if a situation demands it, because it seems to be a requirement.

Also, the Hindu concept of Shiva being the Destroyer and Vishnu being the Maintainer feels untrue. They themselves and their wives are just God-persons. They are not Gods of anything other than themselves. They are God in different ways, the way their wives are God in their own respective ways; different but holy. That’s the point of evolution – it manifests God in many different persons, in different versions of holy, beautiful and funny. They are idiosyncratic, imperfect in their perfection, funny in their wisdom and deeply touching in their holiness. I have no idea what Brahma is supposed to be. I never met anyone matching the description, other than Sanat Kumar and the Jewel. In fact, my experience of the entire Creation/Destruction is completely different, in a sense that I actually have a pretty good idea about how it works from a first-person position, and I can guarantee it has nothing to do with some Brahma-person.

I know people are also curious about how a completely non-physical being can be as completely and decidedly male or female as I described them. I don’t know how to describe or explain that, but imagine a situation where you feel a presence and you immediately know whether it’s male or female. You just know, it’s obvious. You don’t see a visual form, you don’t hear a voice, you just know. Imagine it this way – when you see a female form, or hear a female voice, the idea of femaleness forms within your mind. That idea can be communicated without any sensory input causing it; it’s a mental object. So, that’s how I can tell that some Judge of Karma is female. It’s just communicated from her presence, the same way her kindness and seriousness is communicated from her presence. It’s instantaneous. There’s more to it, of course –  Gods are incredibly powerful. They can just create a whole set of energetic bodies – mental, astral – with the speed of a thunderclap, if that is necessary. They usually don’t do that with me because I am very skilled in spiritual communication, thanks to their extensive training and guidance in my early sadhana. This is why I can get a short thunderclap of mental objects and I then extrapolate that into a whole book of material for you here. What I’m telling you isn’t what I actually saw. What I saw is usually short, super dense and very frequently something I can’t even comprehend until decades later, if that’s desired or necessary.

But let me return to the complexity of Gods’ manifestation. If Goddess wants to communicate something, she can wrap herself in all sorts of energy layers. She can create herself as a human woman who is born in the physical world, together with an artificially created karmic body that will intersect her with me, so that Goddess can live with me as my wife here in this world, and at the same time she remains “up there” in her original form. I guess I’m also “up there” in my original form while this tulku is writing blog posts. It’s a complex, layered, multi-dimensional reality. Goddess herself can be as human as she wants, instantly, and change or withdraw those structures equally instantly. I’m not fucking with you when I’m saying she’s omnipotent and omniscient. It’s quite a sight, but that’s also not the reason why she’s awesome. She’s awesome because she could lose her omniscience and omnipotence and be reduced to a normal human woman, and be the most amazing person in the world – smart, witty, pure, loyal, virtuous, beautiful and gentle. Those things are not contingent upon her power or transcendental nature. Basically, any God would make a wonderful human being if reduced to human nature. On the other hand, sinful humans would make terrible Gods, which is probably the reason why sinful souls are always restricted to an area where the amount of harm they can cause is limited to their own kind. Basically, there’s a pit where they can torture each other but nobody else needs to be informed about it or otherwise afflicted.

Just remember what humans are doing to each other here – a husband goes to war and his wife gets pregnant by some Chad “because she was lonely”. A wife gets sick and a husband leaves her. A wife leaves her husband because he lost his job, and so on. Humans are just pigs. On the other hand, when I incarnated here, not only did my Lady watch over me and guide me, she created herself as a human woman so that she can be my wife here in the physical as well; she willingly chose to meet me in suffering despite not having to. I have to repeat it again, this holiness, purity, simplicity and super-virtue has nothing to do with being super powerful. Take an ordinary human woman, give her my wife’s powers and you’ll get Satan’s equal. When a normal human woman sees that her husband is having a long period of hard time, she leaves him because “she didn’t sign up for wasting her life like that”. When Biljana sees me suffering due to spending karma, she signs up for spending karma herself, because she knows I’ll be getting stronger from all that tapasya and she doesn’t want to be left behind. It’s not that she’s joining me only in taking pictures of thistles and similar forms of fun; no, when there’s suffering to be had she wants to be included as well. This is why she’s a God, and people, who find this strange or sick, are not. She’s a God because she’s holy, not because she can levitate big rocks.

One would be completely justified in asking why I didn’t write about all of this before. The answer is simple – it didn’t come up. Also, I didn’t connect most of the dots myself until Goddess visited me recently. Also, I don’t just go around all day remembering everything; it was in the back of my mind somewhere, but not something that is at the forefront of my daily affairs. When I say spending karma is something that makes me feel terrible, you need to put it in context, and the easiest way would be to remember how I described the hell my parents created, and how it’s something I merely shrug off now. That’s because how much worse emotionally this karmic transformation process is. It’s terrible by the criterion of someone who really knows what terrible feels like. You can’t just remember the good stuff under that, and even if you could, you don’t feel like talking about it, because it hurts too much.

Something changed recently, and I’m still not sure what it is, though. I can remember things properly, I can connect all the dots that just waited for better days; I can see things clearly again.

I am much different than I was then, too. Remember what I said about growing so much stronger because all the work that I did in the meantime? Yup, that’s a thing. Goddess used to feel so much more powerful than me, there was no way for me to understand why she insisted on treating me with that much respect. When I felt her full power, it used to blow my head off, metaphorically speaking. Now, it feels like my own power when I let it loose at my fingertips, and all I feel is love and relief of having her back with me. She now feels like an equal. She is happiness, peace and home.

And, of course, as someone who is an Eternal, who is present as Eternity beyond space and time, who is at all times and all spaces, of course she would have known who I actually was when I didn’t, and she wasn’t allowed to tell me; but she was allowed to act like someone who knows. When I didn’t know myself, she was my self-remembrance, and I think she felt almost-spite, like nobody can force her to treat me differently just because of my circumstances. The rules forbade her to say it in words, but she could say it by being her normal self with me.

That was always the thing about her – she never gave a shit. Not about temporary things, not about the mission, about what I had to do. Others dealt with that part. She was all about the eternal things, the things that truly matter, cutting through illusions that felt like rock solid buildings to me, and she just went through them like they were air. Sure, she was bound by the rules and she never broke them. She never told me who I really was. She just acted like her normal self with me, never changing her opinion of me or her feelings about me when I was a bonsai cat in a jar. I used to feel unworthy and shocked. Now, I’m still shocked – with how fortunate I am to have her. What a blessing it is that she exists.

I stopped reading religious scriptures years ago; I see most of it as just wrong and misunderstood, some of it having such understanding of God that I find it very offensive to think of God in those terms. They constantly describe how great they think God is, and their idea of greatness sounds so silly, small, afraid and limited. You know what greatness is? When you’re at your lowest, and God refuses to acknowledge it, and keeps treating you as if you were at your best. Just “nope, I just refuse to acknowledge you as diminished and change my relationship with you accordingly; sorry”. That’s the respect Heaven is made of, combined with existence as Eternity that just doesn’t give a shit about things that exist as a glitch in time. She’s not “mission first”, she’s “ok, mission, fine, I don’t care; eternity of true reality first, second and third”. She just goes through temporary and unimportant things that seem to be so important at the time, because to her they are all the smoke of time, and she just blows it away with her sheer presence.

That’s the kind of love God is.

There’s something quite embarrassing that I need to mention regarding my earliest spiritual phase, 1993-1994 or close enough.

You see, one of the aspects of Vedanta is something you can call polymorphic monotheism, essentially belief/attitude that God is in his original state without name or form, but can take any form a devotee sees him in. Basically, you have your physical limitation, God is endless and unlimited, and God will meet you half-way if you make an effort. This, essentially, implies that all forms of God people perceive are merely convenient illusions God creates for us in order to cater to our limitations.

My first darshan was actually caused by an instruction to that effect by Sai Baba; I read it in one of his books and immediately applied because it clicked for me. Basically, God can and will take on any form you pray to, because he’s endless, and wants to meet you half-way. So, I entered the autogenic state to amplify my thoughts, and visualised Jesus in the coolest and most magnificent state I could remember from the Bible, because that was all I knew at that point. As a result, a veil dropped and I was overwhelmed by the state of ananda, an incredibly powerful state of divine bliss. Completely impersonal, but completely clear.

So, this idea of polymorphic monotheism – that God is one, but can take any form you use to pray to him, was incredibly useful to me on a personal level. I even used it as a foundational technique for attaining initiation, in the description of my basic meditation. As theory goes, meaning hypothesis tested by experiment, this one was as good as they get. Unfortunately, it also caused some very embarrassing situations for me later on.

You see, I had multiple darshans of divine beings later, as they guided and instructed me. I thought nothing of the fact that they were different, because that fit perfectly into my vedantic worldview where God can take any form to guide you. That was perfectly expected. I thought male forms were used when serious business needed to be addressed, and female forms were used when something more gentle and personal needed to be communicated. I cringe now when I remember it, because what I didn’t know then was that they were actual people – not primordial goo of brahman shaped into forms that met my needs or expectations, but actual people with their own will, emotions and thoughts about things, with different affinities and embodying different aspects of God because that’s what they were, that’s how they attained enlightenment and became persons of God.

The most cringe-worthy of all such incidents was when Goddess talked to me about something related to Kundalini, sexual visualizations and sublimation of sex into meditative practice, and she was like, focus on me as you orgasm, I’m your wife so that’s perfectly fine. I was extremely embarrassed by the idea because it felt wildly inappropriate – I felt I was so many levels beneath her that thinking about her in any kind of sexual way was incredibly offensive, and the concept of Goddess having feelings of female sexual nature for a man was something that felt like insult of the kind God will strike me dead with lightning or something for, and I was like, why are you doing this to me, can’t you just appear in male form and not embarrass me with this sex with God thing? She just looked at me like “Why would I ever want to be male? I am female and I have no wish to be anything else, and of course I can have female sexual feelings, and of course I only want to have a relationship with you as your wife, and nothing else, and this is about you specifically”. This answer felt super confusing for me in my vedantic polymorphic monotheistic illusion, because I didn’t get the crucial thing. She was an actual person, not an arbitrary God-form, and not just any person but my favourite person, and I’m afraid I offended her with my stupidity then. She’s fine, but I feel like a fucking idiot and a dumbass.

Another thing from what she said then struck me as strange, because, remember, that was 1993-1994, a very early phase of my learning process, where I was still far from getting rid of all the evil programming from my parents. My mother, being her feminist self, kept whining how hard is it to be a woman and how women have it bad and men have it great and it’s such an injustice and ad nauseam, and it kind of stuck with me, this belief that women feel like they’ve been fucked up by nature by having been made female and if they had a choice, they’d swap to male or de-gender instantly in any kind of a spiritual evolution. Only later did it gradually click to me that feminism is idiocy closely related to communism, satanism, racism and all other *isms, that feminism is as good for women as much as racism is good for the afflicted races, that it’s fundamentally and completely wrong in all of its basic assumptions about sexes and the world, and that Goddess completely and absolutely wants no part of it. When you see an omnipotent person of God, sparkling with aspects of consciousness and power that are so intense your ears start smoking metaphorically from just being in her holy presence, and her attitude is that of course she’s female, and why in heaven’s name would she want that to change when she loves it, she loves being herself, and she thinks being female is a blessing because the best part of it is adoring and worshipping her male eternal counterpart? The best part about her eternal life is being forever with someone she admires and adores, and I thought it felt offensive and demeaning? Urgh, it feels so embarrassing to remember I was that stupid, but there you are, yoga is a process and you don’t go from perfection to perfection, you go from fucked up stupidity to, hopefully, Divinity. I was stupid and I offended my wife. I’m sorry.

After all, it’s perfectly obvious. If you’re an Eternal, someone beyond space, time and limitations, if you’re omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, endlessly intelligent and so on, what is it that matters to you, in your Eternity? Education? Don’t make me laugh. Power? Already have it all. Money? People pray to you to give it to them. Bliss? Your core being is made of that, and people pray to you to get enlightened by getting your darshan. Do you want to travel and see new places? You are everywhere, at every point in time, and transcendental to it all, so don’t make me laugh. So, what is important to you, in your Divine existence? Well, friends and family, for instance. If you’re zillion years old, your enlightened super-powerful Divine childhood friend and life partner matters more than anything. He meditates at the deepest aspects of transcendence and you watch him with wide eyes and adore him, and you do things that manifest his meditation in the Relative, and you keep one eye at him always, checking for his approval, and his approval is the air you breathe. He knows you and thinks you are the best ever, and when he makes love to you the core of your being glows in total happiness and fulfilment. Why would you not want to be female, as an eternal God? It’s absolutely awesome. Also, why would you not want to be male, as an eternal God? Those are just two equally valid ways of being God.

I can’t believe what a damn idiot my mother was, or what idiots humans can be, and invention of feminism is probably among the worst forms of idiocy ever invented in this infernal place, together with concentration camps, female circumcision, atheism and communism. You need to be really stupid and evil to think any of it is a good idea.