From the forum:

There are several issues underlying your question.
First is the assumption that renunciation of the worldly possessions and surrender to God are tightly correlated. I personally see no evidence for that. You can renounce all your worldly possessions all you want and still be a nasty, egotistical cunt, “Mother Theresa” was an example of that – an incredibly nasty and toxic person, but a first class sannyasi.
The second is the assumption that renunciation is tightly correlated with divestment of energy from the world. Here, as well, I see scant evidence for this assumption; the most fatal forms of investment of energy into the world that I had the misfortune to witness took form of surrender and devotion to “God”, where “God” was an intellectual pointer to Sanat Kumar. I never saw anything more harmful and fatal anywhere, so in order to avoid the most terrible outcome, I would strongly advise against this form of piety.
The third is the assumption that renunciation is somehow correlated to high spirituality. I see no evidence for that, either; in fact, not only does this world not reward “lilies of the field”, it so strongly attacks anyone who is actually successful in working against it, that such people don’t have an issue of renouncing anything, because there are ‘scripts’ designed to deplete them of resources. I was targeted by several such scripts and if not for the help from people present here, my career of a world-transformer would have been short lived. 🙂 However, if we ignore those scripts, I still don’t see a strong correlation between true spirituality and renunciation, because it is for the most part impossible to survive here if you strip yourself of resources; however, if you see it as a war in which you need to establish a fortified beachhead, your efforts to shield yourself from spiritually harmful influences will look like attachment to worldly possessions to a superficial observer, but nothing can actually be farther from the truth. Sri Yuktesvar, for instance, used his inheritance to fortify himself against attacks that vied to compromise his spiritual work and independence. Lahiri Mahasaya used his job at the Indian railroad to create a protected zone for his spiritual work. In cases I had the opportunity to observe, control over aspects of the world (usually in form of money, power and possession) are a significant asset to one’s spirituality, as they are much more of a shield than they are a hindrance. They give a yogi independence from other people’s energetic influences and, thus, from corruption. Lack of money, from what I can see, doesn’t mean freedom and detachment, it means vulnerability, exposure to harmful energies, and I see only grave dangers from this direction. Sure, there will always be some “spiritual” idiot to claim that you can’t take money with you to the other world, as if that’s what a yogi would attempt. Owning things isn’t the point, the point is to isolate and shield yourself against people who want to own and control you in this world. People who use mosquito repellent don’t do it because they like the way it smells. They use it because the mosquitoes hate it. That’s what money and physical power are to a yogi: a mosquito repellent. Interestingly, Sanat Kumar agreed, which explains his main vector of attack against me.
The siddhis are really the root issue. Fools will say that you don’t need siddhis to levitate food to your mouth if you have hands, as if that’s what one would use them for. No, the reason why siddhis are so powerfully banned here is not because of what you could do with them, but what they prevent others from doing to you. If you had siddhis, you wouldn’t be forced to work for money, therefore others wouldn’t have a claim on part of your life. You wouldn’t have to live in civilization, so you wouldn’t be forced to suffer the astral pressure of other humans. You wouldn’t be forced to interact with humans for every single need. Basically, the siddhis would negate all the satanic things this world was designed to *do to you*. They are a shield, which is why they were the first thing you were stripped of. The second shield you had was your memory, your understanding of who you are, what this world is, your ability to protect yourself from evil based on experience and knowledge. When that was stripped away, anyone could basically convince you of anything, and you were placed in a position of total dependence. This position of total dependence, incidentally, looks very much like sannyasa – you don’t have anything of this world, you can’t really do anything in this world, and the world can do whatever it wants with you. It’s a situation that is not really conducive to defending your spirituality from attacks, which is why I see exactly zero reasons to find it useful or desirable.
There’s another underlying assumption, and that is that power and money corrupt. I already wrote about that at length; money can expose one’s corruption if it’s already there, but won’t create it where it’s absent. A yogi won’t just develop a desire to blow money on whores and cocaine if he has money; I know people who think exactly that, and that’s because they fear their hidden desires. I have no such desires so I find the concept ridiculous and hypocritical: why would you shield yourself from such desires by renouncing money, instead of dealing with your desires in the first place? Depleting yourself of power, thinking it will make you more spiritual, is definitely an issue you have, and it is all based on misapprehensions and delusions of some kind.

I would add something else.
The issue isn’t in what you renounce, or surrender. The core issue is what you are, what you are made of, and on what resources you are pulling on in order to build yourself, and to create thoughts, words and actions. If this resource you’re pulling on is brahman, then you have the right foundation and the issue of surrender and renunciation doesn’t even arise. It’s not as if such foundation will just magically appear by negation – you strip things away and brahman is what remains underneath. No. I’ve heard such theories and they are all completely wrong. If you strip things away, you will end up not only with nothing, you will end up being nothing, and I don’t mean it in some abstract sense where it’s a good thing. Renunciation is a pastime of idiots, because if you start with your consciousness, with asmita, and realize that asmita is good because it’s of brahman, and you pull more from where that goodness came from, you will understand how I write these texts, what sources I pull on, and you will also realize that the concept of “giving things up” in order to get there doesn’t even arise, because the very idea is deluded from start to finish, it has no healthy elements whatsoever. If you peel yourself like an onion to get to the core, you will unfortunately find out that onions have no core. You don’t peel the onion to get to the essence of onion, you just need to accept that you already have the essence of what onion is, right on the starting point. Spiritual growth starts by understanding that you are already in the core of things, only you don’t understand it properly and pull from it properly. Surrendering things and giving things up in order to get to God… it’s such a stupid and useless idea I wonder who ever thought of such damn nonsense. It’s actually what Śakyamuni tried first, and guess what, it didn’t work. Then he changed the approach, and guess what…

ps. Ever thought of why my first book is called “A Yogi approach”? Because it’s about the approach to things. That’s where the “click” has to happen. A yogi approach is what is needed.

The reason why I prefer Patanjali’s “asmita” to the “atman” of vedanta is because it’s a “virgin term” for most people; it’s not “poisoned” by interpretation. You see, brahman is explained as something that’s so awesome it can’t really be part of your experience, and atman is basically a symbolic link to brahman, and also can’t be part of your experience, because it’s so awesome and you suck so much, so your definition of self must be that other term, the filthy one used to describe everything that’s wrong with you and needs to die: ego, or ahamkara/mamata.

That’s why I decided to introduce Patanjali’s term for atman manifested in human consciousness: asmita, or the sense of self. You can call it ‘ego’ if you prefer Latin to sanskrit, but it has no nasty implications. Basically, it’s the best approximation of atman that you have as a human being without entering samadhi, where asmita reveals itself as atman/brahman, when you realize that “tat tvam asi“, or “tat brahman aham“. Or, translated to English, “God fucking damn it, it was here all along!” 🙂

From the forum:

I feel many harmful misunderstandings here.
The way you are formulating things makes it sound as if immersion in Brahman is something like immersion in molten iron, where a piece of iron loses its definition and identity and becomes one with the large mass. If I could pinpoint the single greatest misunderstanding of what samadhi feels like, that would be it.

What it actually feels like is illusory limitations being wiped away from you. There is no immersion of limited you into that, there is expansion of your normally suppressed consciousness, a regaining of memory and identity. You seem to imagine there to be some difficult battle between limited human identity, the “you”, and that awesome great thing called brahman, but that’s not what it feels like. It feels like being freed from a prison for your mind, liberated from a dark dungeon where you were lobotomized and mindfucked. There never is that brahman thing, just you, and once your spirit jailbreaks, there is that understanding vedanta talks about, “tat brahman aham!“, or “so ham!“. To translate it literally as “I am this brahman”, or “I am That”, would do it as much justice as putting my Croatian writing through Google translate. 🙂 It feels exactly the opposite from what you imagine. You imagine ego fighting against loss of identity, you imagine surrender, trying to get out of the way of something bigger, but that’s exactly the opposite from what it feels like. It feels like the waking up from a nightmare where you were small, stupid, afraid and weak, and remembering you are great, wise, fearless and powerful. It feels like relief, “it was only a dream, and I AM THIS, truly THIS, and not that limited ape thing I thought I was”. There is immense joy of the kind you experience when you thought something terrible was about to happen, only to realize that you got it wrong, something great happened and you misunderstood, only much greater. It is sat-cit-ananda, bliss of self realization, consciousness broken free of chains, reality that can finally fully be.

And then there are questions. Samadhi obviously doesn’t work like you expect it to – why is there such a huge difference felt in Yogananda’s Autobiography between some yogi who can enter samadhi, and someone like Mataji and Babaji, who are obviously incredibly more than that, and it doesn’t feel like it’s about just being in samadhi more and being more attuned to brahman. The answer is more complicated than one can imagine, and I went through a very long process, none of which included samadhi, in which it became clear to me how that works, the process I’ve been trying to guide others through since 1997. Samadhi is actually not the cornerstone experience the Hindus make it out to be. Sure, it’s important to know, but it’s a sad fact that samadhi can produce a fixation, it can actually hinder spiritual progress, because sometimes spiritual progress is walking through the woods in the dark while being eaten by mosquitoes, trying to kill a fox, and meditation is just cowardice, a spiritual dead-end, and all the musings about ego and getting out of the way and immersion in brahman are actually the shackles for the mind, the instruments of its subjugation and enslavement. When I said there is a male and female way of doing things, I made it sound as if there were two paths. There is also a third path: the fake meditation, the fake spirituality. It’s when you’re trying to do what you think is expected of you, when you try to be a good spiritual person and make progress like the gurus told you you should. This third path is not a path at all, it’s a pit of doom, a long slumber in which nothing happens, because it’s the exact opposite to where brahman is. Brahman is where things are so real and alive your dick gets hard. It’s not about getting out of the way, because that’s never the problem. The true problem is when you are so empty you have nothing to get out of the way of. The concept of surrender doesn’t exist in that empty state, it starts to assert itself once the experience is so powerful and the energy flow is so great, you start feeling every sin, every wrong thought, as pain, and surrender/remorse is the way those imperfections burn as something better is revealed. But the dichotomy in that state is not between ego and brahman; it’s between the greater power and beauty that is you, and the sin and imperfection that is also you, and the sin and imperfection burn you, they hurt, as you surrender to the perfection and power and beauty and understand, and release.

If you actually came to the point of a darshan of Krishna, and your limitations were wiped off, and you truly felt Krishna, you would not become a copy of Krishna, you would become the true version of yourself. The version that’s not constantly trying not to exist too much, the version that is so immersed in the greatness of Krishna that he just automatically assumes greatness, power, sinlesness, responsibility and authority, and only then would you truly understand the spiritual meaning of submission. It’s not submission in the sense of trying to assume posture of a worm, but submission to the fact that you’re actually great, no matter how hard you would rather be a small thing that worships the great thing. You get out of the way by submitting to the fact of greatness that is, and you are that. Tat tvam asi. That’s how you get out of the fucking way.

Fucking up is not some remote danger for you. If anything, fucking up is a way of life if you are away from the darshan of God. Whatever you do, or don’t, is doomed and riddled with failure. The fear that, when you get greater spiritual power, you’ll fuck up with same ignorance but greater power, is unwarranted. If anything, power and knowledge/wisdom come from the same source and at the same time. I wield the same power as I write this, or when I manifest death to replace evil, or when I manifest light and energy to replace darkness and death. Sure, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll fuck up as you learn. I sure did my share of fucking up. However, you need to understand how it works: the part that fucks up, that’s you now. You do almost nothing but fuck up. It’s your normal “quantum state”. When you mix that with darshan, you become capable of something other than fucking up. Sure, you still fuck up, sometimes you misdirect blessings and cause havoc, but that hurts you and you quickly learn to stay away of that, the way you now stay away from very hot or sharp objects. But it’s not just power, this power is also knowledge, it’s the mind of God, and it’s also the righteousness of God. As you adjust to not being a small ape-thing that fucks up, you actually fuck up increasingly less, on a converging path

The biggest joke is, for each person that gets it, the reaction from the audience will be “good for him, but that doesn’t apply to me, because I wasn’t born enlightened, I am small and weak and sinful and fucked up and there’s no way that could ever apply to me”.
I’m usually the first exception – Danijel doesn’t count because he’s, well, Danijel.
Then Romana doesn’t count, she’s an exception.
Then Biljana doesn’t count, also an exception.
At which point will it “click”? I mean, the “if those people can do it, it’s incredibly obvious that it’s within my reach” kind of click. But, apparently, it’s always someone else who’s destined to be more enlightened. I’ve heard lots of talk about ego, whereby people mean its inflation, but from what I had the opportunity to witness, it’s actually the feeling that you’re small, worthless and undeserving of God, that is the most harmful and pernicious manifestation of what’s usually known as ego.

From the forum:

Bhagavad-gita isn’t really the most accurate text if you want to understand karma, because Hinduism in general and Gita in particular don’t really get it, and at the time of writing the commentary I didn’t feel like getting into it in so much detail. I put much more thought into it in the later books. The Hindu concept, according to which one is born because of some karmic impurity, and no longer needs to return after this impurity is removed, is riddled with inaccuracies to the point where it’s actually the opposite of useful. There are better ways of looking at it: karma is not an extrinsic element, it’s the stuff your spiritual body is made of, and it’s not “removed” with the process of cleaning, it’s restructured. Excess “thermodynamic energy” of stress, desires, fears or misapprehensions is “excreted” like excess heat from a thermodynamic system, and as a result you get a more calm, “compressed” substance, liquid instead of gas, or solid instead of liquid. Yoga Sutra deals with this excess of energy and its removal from the spirit-structure. The other problem are the attachments and desires, basically, investments of energy into all kinds of stuff. In your cases, it would be investment of energy into ideas, and desire to have those ideas work in order for them to justify the investment. 🙂 It’s not necessarily stuff like houses, cars or family, the way it is for most people; for some, almost all projections of energy go into their religious worldview, or authority of scriptures or holy persons. This also poses another problem: it mimics the vertical connection, to the point where it would be difficult to describe to some people why their religious ideas are a horizontal structure and not a vertical connection to God, but nevertheless, that’s what they are, and once you are in the state of darshan, samadhi or something similar, it becomes quite apparent. For instance, in the process of initiation into Vajra those things are quite obvious.

From the forum:

Sometime between 1993 and 1997, I was dealing with incredibly hard issues and I was thinking something along the lines of “[insert some famous yogi here] had it easy, he was born within a Hindu tradition, had an enlightened guru, someone taught him yoga and the theory, and I’m rowing against the currents of shit creek without paddles”, at which moment something became clear to me: “at some time in the future, others will look at me and say, it’s easy for you, you were born enlightened and awesome, but we are having it so hard”. At which I thought “if anyone was stupid enough to think I was born enlightened, they should see me now, and they would be instantly cured of that misconception”, and the response, “they would never believe it; people instinctively don’t believe change is possible, that someone fucked up can become great, that you don’t get to be born enlightened regardless of what your soul looks like, that everybody has to carve paths into neurology in order to build the body-spirit connection; they believe every enlightened person to have been born enlightened and perfect, and every fucked up person to be doomed forever; they don’t believe that yoga is actually possible and that it works, and that’s one of the greatest obstacles everybody has to overcome; look at how hard I find it to accept that others had to go through a process, how I find it easy to debase myself because I actually know all the nasty parts of the process I had to go through, and find it almost impossible to accept that known enlightened people would have had to go through that”.

I must apologize for not writing anything significant here lately; I’ve been otherwise preoccupied, what with maintaining my level of physical fitness, what with transcribing the forum to another software, and answering questions there. Not to leave you completely empty-handed, I’ll re-post some of the forum content here:

One thing crossed my mind and I think it’s rather important.

It’s not just about samadhi and how your position changes then. it’s also applicable to how things are now, in the relative and limited mindset. Because, you see, that’s one of the first things I was taught from above, when I was thinking in terms of “all I need is to be in samadhi more, that will purify all that needs to be purified and solve everything that needs to be solved”, but that’s not how it works. The relative sphere of karma remains untouched by samadhi, because they don’t exist on the same reality level. It’s like hardware upgrade not automatically producing better software. What you need is write better software, and realization that it’s all run on hardware and is thus only a state of hardware isn’t really helpful. Software is a way of pulling hardware into manifestation. Let’s put it this way: a kalapa is the smallest possible manifestation of brahman in the relative. It’s a tiny spark of spiritual light. By itself, it doesn’t do much, but it’s a start. A tiny wisp of astral “smoke” is an aggregation of many kalapas, and it forms some consciousness, awareness, intelligence, desires, it manifests something more than the sum of its parts. A tiny “jewel” is an order of magnitude more, it’s a huge astral soul “condensed” into greater power, virtue, wisdom, will, spiritual music, bliss or whatever specifically, because they can be very different. Here, we already have something that is very clearly a local relative manifestation of sat-cit-ananda, and in the spiritual body of a God this progresses exponentially, and it becomes clear and obvious that you are dealing with a “relative absolute”, a presence in the relative sphere that is basically so much brahman that all beings that actually see it (have its darshan, in sanskrit) have an experience of self-realization, of atma-brahma-jñana, or samadhi. That’s what is described in the bhagavata-purana, that spiritual beings experiencing Krishna have self-realization moments, points where they understand their own true nature, position and purpose.

But the important thing to realize, the thing I’m trying to say, is that it doesn’t begin with Krishna. It begins with that one little kalapa, which is the spark of asmita, of sat-cit-ananda, in the relative. You are all made of those little sparks that radiate Absolute into the relative. You need to draw power, virtue, knowledge, courage, awareness, love, respect, devotion, and yes, also the things like self-sacrifice and acceptance of pain and hardship if it is necessary, and if it is the cost of greatness. Drawing power of that kind now, drawing it through the center of self, through asmita, your “own nature”, makes those tiny sparks of light glow and coalesce together to form a greater power, they aggregate, they excrete disturbance through the process of suffering and they eventually crystallize, and the virtuous self-center progresses in God-manifestation to the point where nobody can tell a difference, and you give God a new name.

God is something you draw from, now. God is both a distant goal, and a present reality. As a present reality, it might be something latent, of low visibility, low manifestation, and that might be your state now. But you are the one who decides what happens there. You can crawl like a maggot on the ground, or you can rise up, as Mario said. Your call.