It has been recently brought to my attention that I am a negative person – because I see this world as a negative phenomenon and I see all the “positive” efforts here as either outright delusion or as attempts at self-medication by focusing one’s attention at things that are opposite to this world. Basically, by doing good you fight the evil nature of this place and oppose it. If you live “in harmony with nature”, you’re basically choosing against transcendence, and surrendering to spiritual darkness and evil.

So, yes, I’m “negative”, and the fluffy bunnies from the “spiritual circles” should avoid me, lest they be contaminated by my nastiness. I don’t see why they should have a positive opinion of me, since I have a very negative opinion of them, and it is both fair and logically consistent that both sides be balanced in mutual contempt.

In my defense, I would say that I am in good company. Vedanta clearly states that only brahman is real, and everything else is an illusion (brahma sathyam jagat mithya), which is meant in a way that is properly translated, in context, as “brahman is hardware and all perceivable worlds are software”, because “illusion” in this context doesn’t mean something that is a fiction, but something that is a derived reality, a reality less real than a deeper reality that maintains it in itself. According to the Upanishads, brahman permeates the perceived world the way butter permeates milk, which is perfectly consistent with the concept that hardware permeates every aspect of the software that’s running on it, but, as Vedanta also states, every single thing in the world is “not that, not that” (neti, neti), meaning that brahman can’t be positively defined in terms of the world – it’s not the biggest thing in the world, not the greatest thing in the world, not in one thing more than in another, and yet nothing can exist apart from it and without it, and it’s the foundation and existence that supports all. Of brahman it can be said that it is unknowable (acintya) and without properties (nirguna), and yet it is sat-cit-ananda, reality-consciousness-bliss, which is in fact what we perceive, in a very densely filtered form, as points of meaning and purpose in the world – things that are real, blissful and conscious, things that are life and awareness and greatness, things we strive for, love and aspire to, but we are deluded if we think them to be of the world and attainable through the world. No – they are the dim aspects of the light beyond, the transcendental reality, consciousness and fulfillment that is brahman, the true light that manages to shine through even the darkest night that is this world.

So, yes, I think this world is the darkest night and evil, and if you find this to be negative, then I’m negative. However, I don’t see this world as darkness and evil because I am blind to the tiny specks of light that are present in this world, and which someone might find so desirable and fulfilling; no, I see it as a dark pit because I saw the true light and I know it. Don’t expect someone who saw the light of day to worship the glow bugs in the night; to me, this entire world is unimpressive, dull, boring and, as a whole, unworthy of either existence or my attention. I am not here because I like it, and I have sufficient perspective to see it for what it truly is. You might ask why I’m here, but you might not like the answer any better than you like my negative and abrasive person.

I just wrote something to someone privately and I think it’s too broadly useful to be kept in the dark, so I’m reposting it here:

What came to my mind as the answer to your question is St. Augustine’s view on this.

God is Eternity, beyond space and time, but this Eternity is also present in space and time as Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth, and is also an attractor that pulls us towards itself, if we allow it. If we follow the Ariadne’s thread, it shapes our lives in the shape of Eternity, so that we can leave space and time behind and never look back. But there is also the opposite force – worldly attachment, pride, habit and vice, that tries to make us into the shape of the world; all the weakness is of the world and for the world, and all the true strength makes us in the shape of God, where we become Eternity in space, on the path of time.

So this is my answer to your question. Hold on to all the pieces and aspects of Eternity in space and time, and you yourself will become an aspect of Eternity in space and time, and the shape your existence takes on that path will be appropriate for your salvation.

Surrender to God is not letting go, it’s the brilliance of mind that allows you to see, understand and act of God.

There is a very significant question that might legitimately be asked when someone sees how much I talk about Satan, because people tend to trivialize it by saying that God is so great and awesome that Satan is basically just a big nasty bug in comparison. That is a consequence of Greek thinking – find the root causes, the fundamentals, and everything else is meaningless. This is in fact as deceptive as it is useless.

OK, God is the deepest reality, He is the “mind” in which all other realities, beings and things are merely thoughtforms. Nothing exists outside of God.

However, if God is the great supercomputer that runs all of reality, Satan is a big crocodile that lives in the lake beside your village, which is the only water source. A dismissive attitude of “oh, it’s all in the mind of God” basically means that whether the crocodile eats you and your children when you go there to get water, or not, both possible outcomes will still be only thoughts in the mind of God. However, from your position, the outcome where you and your children don’t get eaten is preferable.

Another analogy is that God is the creator and maintainer of the real world, together with all the souls that live there, and Satan is the owner of a virtual reality engine, offering souls a unique experience they will get when plugged in, after they sign a release form, of course. When this virtual reality engine suppresses your memory and overrides your senses, the fact that God creates and maintains the real world will be of limited benefit to you, in your particular situation.

Yes, God is absolutely great and awesome, and yet this doesn’t make the issues I’m dealing with illegitimate, or minor. They are great and real enough that Jesus had himself crucified in order to attempt to solve them, and for Buddha to postpone nirvana in order to attempt to carve a path out of them for others to follow. One would say they are the cornerstone issues for anyone in our position, in the same way slavery is a cornerstone issue for slaves, and food is a cornerstone issue for the starving.

The topic of the previous article started me on a line of thought which basically goes like this: “what is the fatal flaw of those people who profess salvation and what not, and secretly manifest all signs of spiritual fall, and how to avoid it”.

I think they assume that they must appear to be outwardly perfect, which creates a dichotomy of a perfect outward façade meant for the public, and their normal private condition, which they well know to be far from the ideal. As this dichotomy persists, they basically give themselves license to go incrementally more beyond the pale, because, from their perspective, it hardly matters – they are far from the ideal façade anyways, so it doesn’t matter whether they are off by an inch or by a mile. They are either doomed regardless, or saved regardless, depending on God’s point of view. Basically, they masturbate in secrecy anyways, which neither their Church nor scripture approve of, so they might as well have someone else do it for them.

From the perspective of their religion, that makes some kind of sense. From my perspective, the problem starts with separation of one’s consciousness from God, with the result of spiritual emptiness, which then manifests as many things – from desire for material things and pleasures, to actually sinful actions, such as treating other souls poorly, as if they were mere things. As you can see, my definition of sin is more abstract than the Christian one – I don’t see sin as something that is on a list of forbidden actions. I see sin as a state where your consciousness is not in God and of God, and this condition doesn’t make you experience agony. I see sin as willful defiance of God, and contempt/hatred for both God, and beings who love him. Basically, I see atheism and anti-theism as sin, and I see murder, rape, robbery, deception and other evil physical actions as manifestations of this inner spiritual state of sin. Sin is the state of apostasy from God.

The problem with those Christians is therefore that their religion has such impractically harsh definition of sin, that they basically can’t function as normal human beings without feeling that their religion condemns their actions, and they also feel that they have to keep up the outwardly charade for the sake of others, whose faith, they feel, will crumble if they knew how weak their leader actually is. And the more they outwardly condemn all sin, inwardly they drown in the feeling that they are fundamentally and irredeemably sinful, and even if God could somehow understand and forgive, their followers can’t and won’t, because the position of scripture is clear in condemnation of their actions.

The solution is that sin needs to be understood in a more abstract, fundamental way, so that people can focus on what matters, which is their personal relationship with God, and less on things that don’t matter, which is whether you allowed yourself to experience some innocent pleasure that didn’t hurt anyone. This doesn’t mean “tolerance for sin”, as some Christians would say. No, it means you need to stop being such bloody Pharisees, “who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel”. Focus on the important things, such as treating others the way you would treat God himself, and being forever in God. Stop annoying both yourselves and others with silly nonsense. If that made any sense, the early Church would not cease with the practice of imposing all those Jewish “laws” on the pagan-to-Christian converts. As St. Peter wisely stated, “Now then, why do you test God by placing on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear? On the contrary, we believe it is through the grace of the Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”

What I want to say is, that by widening the spectrum of what is considered a sin, you think you are being moral and obedient to God, and what you are actually doing is falling into the trap of the Pharisees who even chastised Jesus and his disciples, thinking themselves more pure and lawful. Also, by broadening the definition of sin, you make it all but inevitable for one to consider oneself sinful, and from that point it’s a slippery slope, where it’s easy to cross the line into actions that are sin proper. Stop making both your lives and the lives of others more difficult without good reason, and instead focus your attention on that which is most important, and that is the presence of God within your soul.

There is another thing that I think is important; one of the reason why people fall into sin. You see, they see themselves as irrelevant and worthless, and they think their actions don’t matter one way or another. They think they are weak, powerless, worthless, small and inconsequential. As a result, they act like a child who takes his father’s gun, thinking it a toy, and kills his sibling. If a child truly understood the actual power it has in its hands, that would not have happened. It is only because they don’t understand what they wield, that makes it truly dangerous. In a similar manner, I’ve seen people condemn both themselves and others, thinking that their words and actions don’t matter, that seducing others away from salvation is merely an intellectual game. It’s like throwing rocks on a live land mine, or picking up a cobra thinking it’s a piece of rope. If people only knew how powerful their actions can be, and how much everything they do matters, they would tread very lightly through life.