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.

I’ve been thinking about something that crops up every now and then in discussions about religious traditions.

The atheists, arguing that religious traditions are not needed, state that every rational individual can figure ethics and philosophy on their own, without need for belonging to an organized religion.

The members of organized religions state that nobody can expect to attain salvation without accepting revelation from above, by which they invariably mean their respective religious systems and/or organizations.

I am quite annoyed by both statements.

To respond to the atheist argument first, if figuring out correct ethics is so easy and intuitive, how do they explain the vast difference between the customary ethics of the ancient Rome, and Christian ethics? What, there was a lack of rational people in the Roman empire? I assure you, there were lots of people trying to figure things out, and they were quite smart, and nobody managed to come up with Christian ethics. However, today some atheist like Dawkins or Molyneux thinks he can just pull ethics from the hat, because it’s so intuitive? It’s intuitive to them because they’ve been surrounded by Christians from an early age and everything they’ve experienced had the Christian ethical system beneath it. The problem is, they don’t understand the sources of their ethical feelings and thoughts, they think it’s “reasonable”. Reason has nothing to do with it; they are just stating the basic premises of their upbringing. It’s interesting how they don’t find Buddhist premises intuitive and think anyone could follow pure reason and come up with them. Ibn Tufail thought Islam was so intuitive, you could put a child on a desert island and have it brought up by animals, and it would follow pure reason and end up with mystical Islam. It’s also interesting how atheists think that anyone could come up with a their worldview if only they followed reason and evidence, when they themselves can’t do it – they just copy each other’s stupid arguments, including logical errors and illustrative examples. Diversity of thought among atheists is about the same as in any crazy cult, they just parrot their authorities and no significant thinking is either demonstrated or required. It is obvious that original thinkers, who are capable of creating entire philosophies that are actually innovative and revolutionary, are exceedingly rare, to the point where you can only expect to find a handful of them in a millennium. The expectation that one can follow reason and evidence and come up with a valuable and mature philosophy is therefore incredibly naive. Even the great thinkers usually produced derivative work, with few actual innovations. Jesus, for instance, introduced no significant original ideas; his thoughts were recognized as very much like those of the contemporary scholars, only spoken with the authority of direct knowledge and power. Sankaracarya introduced very little in terms of original thought; for the most part, he isolated the core thought from the Upanisads and made it into a succinct and powerful argument. Teachings of Ramanuja, Madhva and Caitanya essentially elaborate on the Puranas, Upanisads and the Bhagavad-gita. Even the Bhagavata-purana is highly derivative, for the most part explaining the teaching of Vedanta through many different stories, repeating the core thought ad nauseam. How is it, then, that everybody keeps stating that their own religious, ethical or philosophical system is intuitive to the point where every rational individual could discover it anew, if only they followed reason and evidence, when it is obvious that religious philosophies exist as separate and distinct islands of thought, where you have highly derivative thinking on each respective island, and huge and insurmountable differences between the islands? If atheism is so intuitive, how come there were no significant thinkers in the history of the world who were atheists, up until very recently, and now all of the sudden it became some sort of a fashionable “meme”? If humanistic ethics are so intuitive, how come owning slaves and working them to death was the ethical norm throughout the world, across all history? Nobody really figured out Christian ethics before Christianity, that’s why it’s one of the few original ideas in history. Believing that anyone could figure it out now without being exposed to an entire civilization that was built upon it, is just arrogant and stupid. Atheists who keep their Christian ethics but state that you don’t need God for that, are but fools. Of course you do, it’s just that they are too stupid and arrogant to understand where they got it all from. It suffices to see how many things the Christians got right, and how few of those belong to the category of trivial intuitive things anyone would get right; whenever Marxists or some other atheist bunch tried something they considered “reasonable”, “modern” or “obvious”, they produced a disaster. Their disdain for the sanctity of human spirit produced the slaughterhouses of modernity. Their “progressive” ideas about sexuality or human equality resulted in the nightmare that is today’s society. Every time they thought they will make “progress” by opposing the traditional Christianity, they produced a hellish dystopia. Apparently, getting ethics right isn’t something a rational intellectual can reliably do, and there’s a significant difference between thinking you can do something, and actually pulling it off.

As for the opposing argument from the religious circles, where they argue that it would be dangerous to think independently because of the vast probability of error, stating that it’s much safer to just espouse their respective traditional worldview, what annoys me is the arrogance of assumption that they have the good stuff. Oh really? You are safe from doctrinal error? You are ethically pure, and only the others are in peril? You have God by the balls, so to speak? You have the truth that was revealed from above, and then kept, refined and explained by the tradition of saints? Why, then, if you have it so good, is the light of your truth so incredibly dim? Why is your “truth” always formulated the same way, in almost the same words, if God is the wellspring of creativity and intelligence? When I see most priests, they look stale and boring, like trained actors who fake “inner peace”, “confidence” and “balance”, they try to speak calmly and softly because they know that will make an impression on the impressionable, but anyone who actually experienced something from the direction of God will immediately understand them as poor imitation of a poorly understood phenomenon. Basically, you can’t even fake it properly, because you don’t have even the indirect knowledge of the phenomenon that would help you fake it. Every religious organization I can think of is oozing scandals of the basest kind – scandals that indicate profound spiritual depravity. Don’t you dare talk about ethical purity or safety from ideological error, you conceited buffoons.

What do I recommend then, since those two obviously fallacious alternatives seem to split the world between them? If I argue against trusting yourself and your intellect, and I also argue against putting trust in religious or philosophical traditions, what else is there?

First of all, you need to stop fearing error, as if it were somehow avoidable and, consequently, those committing it are somehow disreputable. The first thing you need to understand is that error is unavoidable, and the second thing is that error can either be a part of the learning process, or something you get stuck in, something akin to getting caught in orbit of a black hole. Error is something that exists as context of every single thought, word and action, where you are either in error, or you just missed it by a hair and you’re on trajectory to overshoot into error on the other side, because “too much” is as bad as “not enough”. There is error in form of insecurity, and error in form of arrogance, and there is the right path somewhere, in missing both Scilla and Charybdis. God is not something you choose once and you’re safe. God is something that has to be found again, and again, when formulating each thought, when you’re trying to linearize thoughts into words, and navigate proper action. That’s probably why Jesus was speaking of the “living God”, because if you’re not in touch with God as a living force of rightness and fullness, you are in error, by default. There’s never a safe haven of infallibility anywhere, regardless of how holy you are. Even if you are so firmly in God that you appear to be perfect and infallible, it means only that you are correcting every deviation from the proper path so quickly, that they are imperceptible by others. In essence, error is nothing to be feared, because the feeling of error allows you to quickly correct yourself until you are back where your inner spiritual compass points back at God.

The next important thing is to trust holy scriptures, persons and traditions, but only to a point. At some point you will have to deviate from traditions and figures of authority and carve your own path, but that won’t be soon, or all at once. I am a very original thinker, if such a thing exists at all, and I followed the recommendations of saints and holy traditions with diligent obedience, until I reached a point where I had to go my own way, which I never did lightly or without profound consideration. Spiritual traditions usually contain wisdom that is far greater than anything a smart, intelligent and educated individual could figure out on their own; in fact, they usually contain wisdom that is beyond what a great saint could do on his/her own. However, there is excess on both ends: in either arrogant assumption that you can do better, or in fear of carving your own path once your personal revelation had matured to the point where it actually exceeds collective historical revelation of others, and either breaks away from it altogether, or merely adds to it. There is a middle path between sinful arrogance and sinful humility, and finding that path is all but easy. If you think you are walking that path of rightness merely by virtue of belonging to a church, you obviously didn’t think about those things enough. There isn’t a trick that can give you safety from the naked blade of reality on which you have to make a choice. Correctness of choice exists only in the state of spirit where God is not only your singular point of focus, but also the way in which you do things. God needs to be the way, truth and life, and you need to be there, in way, truth and life, walking the sharp blade of rightness that separates two wrongs, fearing no error, because in darshan of God, you are that blade. Failing that, everything is error.

There are some things in my previous article that require clarification, because they could create a misapprehension if taken out of context.

It is true that the attainment of the highest possible spiritual initiation, or quality of consciousness, is the greatest priority, and all else is secondary to that. However, the problem with this world is that the secondary things can be of greatest importance, to the point where to neglect them is to risk losing all the primary ones, where one needs but take note of the prominent examples of failure to do so, to understand that sometimes it would be better to have one’s head filled with intellectual understanding of things, and not rely solely on spiritual experiences of the highest order, because failure to ground them into material life with proper understanding of theory and its implications to all sorts of things means to have a chasm between experience, understanding and life, and this chasm usually means detachment and loss. Basically, if you don’t ground your spiritual experience into layers such as politics, economy, nutrition, sexuality, and many nuances of social life, it will exist in a detached, ungrounded sphere called “meditation time”, and the steeper the gradient between the two, the greater the chance that everything in your life will basically work on destroying your spirituality with much greater effectiveness than any kind of meditative or spiritual practice could possibly remedy. In simple terms, if you keep destroying your consciousness for 16 hours every day with wrong ideas about practical things, and with wrong actions based on those wrong ideas, it is unlikely that any amount of meditation that you could conceivably fit into your daily schedule could save you.

A great number of supposedly spiritually advanced yogis has insanely stupid ideas about a great number of practical things, which opens the question of actual validity of their “spiritual advancement” in an absolute sense, because it is quite possible that they had a few genuine experiences, which they interpreted through the lens of philosophy and religion they were brought up in, proceeded to suspend their intellectual faculties and replaced them with religious dogma, at which point the entire thing can hardly be called “spiritual advancement”, and rather be seen as a serious deviation from a true spiritual path. You see, if all the yogis keep saying the same things, and they all originate from the ancient scriptures of Yoga and Vedanta, it’s actually more likely that they are all copying the same homework, and not that they are merely channeling the same eternal wisdom that needs no innovations. Sure, I actually bought the latter explanation once, but in the meantime I discovered so many things none of them even mentioned, things of great importance, things that possibly question even the Vedantic interpretation of samadhi, which is the basis of its entire theology and cosmology, that I just no longer find that explanation plausible. It is much more likely that most of the “enlightened masters” are in fact beginner yogis who fell into the same trap: saw their experience as a confirmation of ancient theology, and replaced their personal spiritual research with a pre-recorded database. Sorry, but turning yourself into someone else’s parrot is hardly spiritual advancement, especially since the stuff they are parroting is sometimes completely wrong. For instance Vedantic understanding of karma is completely and irredeemably wrong, to the point where it’s actually opposite to the actual reality of things that can be perceived in yogic practice. The concept of gunas is intellectually cute, but does in fact explain only very high-level phenomena, such as emotions and behavior, not the deep structure of reality. For all intents and purposes, there are no gunas; it’s a weak attempt to counter the Buddhist deep theory of kalapas, which can actually be perceived because, unlike the gunas, they are real. Considering how many of the foundational elements of Vedantic dogma were disproved by my personal experience and experimentation, one must ask how is it possible that everybody else failed to notice those quite obvious issues, and instead they just repeat the dogma verbatim? Sorry, but from my perspective they don’t look like enlightened sages; rather, they resemble beginners who strayed into a typical cultist brain-freeze. The problem is that they don’t see Vedanta, or any other dogmatic system, as a starting point. They see its full acceptance as a symptom of enlightenment and an end-point of the spiritual path, which is why they are extremely resistant to any mental process that could challenge or disprove it. I actually understand the mentality because I was there: if you were taught certain things by people you see as authoritative and beyond reproach on any level, you just don’t question the fundamentals of a theology that no only comes from multiple authoritative sources, but whose cornerstones seem to be proven by your personal experience. The problem is, things a, b and c were proven by your personal experience, and then you just accepted validity of everything from d through z, bliss-drugged by the “fact” that you got it all, finally. You have the final answers to the eternal questions, you understand the core of all religions, of all genuine spirituality. That’s a difficult drug to wean yourself from. The feeling that you don’t understand the meaning of life and universe is painful, and if you get to be convinced that you actually have the answers, you’re basically fucked, because that “knowledge” anchors you into spiritual standstill with almost unbreakable strength. You’d rather eat shit ten times a day for the rest of your life than go back to admitting that you don’t get it. It’s too painful, too defeating, and the arrogance that grew from the “deep knowledge” that you have and others don’t is too intoxicating for you to let go easily. For me, admitting I was wrong about something fundamental is actually easy, because I was never into it for social standing and impressing others with how right I am, I was always in it only because I actually wanted to figure it out. So, when something is disproved, I can easily let go and try out other ideas. However, for those who see spirituality as a game of attaining social status, admitting fundamental errors is absolutely spirit-crushing. Also, the core of who I am was never defined through cult membership or acceptance of dogma. It was always “I practiced things, experienced things, and here’s what it all looks like”. If the layer of “what it looks like” changes, so what; it’s like changing a theme in Windows, not formatting the system drive and reinstalling the OS. I always knew that my interpretations of experience exists on a different spiritual layer than the actual experience, and are thus “false” by definition – the only truth is the experience itself, and interpretations are dime a dozen. I used to say that one should change the interpretative layer through which experience is filtered just for shits and giggles every six months or so, just to avoid taking it too seriously, but, apparently, people don’t take it seriously when I say it, and when I actually do change the interpretative layer, they think nothing I say can be true because I “change my mind all the time”. Well, it’s actually failure to do so that should be highly suspicious, because if someone can’t change the interpretative layer, it probably means there is too little actual experience underneath to survive anything so dramatic. Too much filler, not enough substance.

Another important thing that needs to be said, and which apparently contradicts everything I said up until now, is that intellectual anchoring of spiritual concepts and experiences is of utmost importance. If you lack a coherent intellectual framework for your spirituality, it will remain detached from your intellectual and practical layers, and that isn’t good. Our civilization is, for all intents and purposes, insane. It is devoid of true spiritual purpose and identity, and therefore prone to all sorts of idiocy. It rejected Christianity, but failed to replace it with anything better. If you don’t have an intellectual framework that will encompass not only spiritual realities and experiences thereof, but also practical things such as politics, economy etc., you will depend on the unworthy people to provide you with opinions, and that won’t end well. This is the reason why I write about all sorts of things, because this writing is not unrelated or separate from my spiritual understanding; rather, it’s a manifestation of said understanding, applied to different things. For people who can’t meditate directly, those are the stepping-stones, and are in fact more useful than any super-advanced text about energetic yoga that I could think of. When you understand why something is wrong, your mind follows a thread out of the labyrinth, and you gradually pick up things. It’s not “red pill” or some other arrogant bullshit that’s talked about on the Net, because truth is never a switch you turn on or off. Rather, it’s sunlight that is slowly absorbed by a plant and is gradually transformed into fruit. You need exposure, and you need to absorb, work with it, wrestle with it a bit, test it, think about it, and as it applies pressure to your mind, your mind changes its nature. You don’t just “get it”.

This means that spiritual progress isn’t merely something that exists in the context of energetic Yoga or spiritual practice in the narrowest sense; it’s also something that happens when you’re exposed to ideas, when you think about things, when you’re in contact with something subtle and sophisticated and it touches you, and you are changed. People who think about subtle and sophisticated ideas tend to get more subtle and sophisticated, because mind appropriates the qualities of that which it dwells on. Also, people who solve actual problems tend to be more resistant to bullshit than people who just sit in their parents’ basement and check reddit all day.

Perhaps the most controversial of all the things I am about to say here is that, contrary to what you might have assumed from my previous writing, I actually think that cults and social connections are quite useful. No, they are not useful for the purpose of attainment of genuine spirituality, but there’s much more to one’s life than genuine spirituality, as blasphemous as people might find this statement. For instance, brushing your teeth regularly has nothing to do with genuine spirituality, and yet if you neglect it, you will suffer consequences at the hands of dentists. Association with like-minded people is not useful for attaining genuine spirituality, and is in fact detrimental, but if you are in trouble of some kind, it is essential to be able to rely on people who like you and are willing to help you, either by pooling resources or otherwise, and without such aid you will be forced to rely on very general and diluted resources of your state and civilization, which will be useless if not outright harmful. Also, if you’re trying to find a sexual partner, finding them in a pre-selected pool of people who share your general worldview gives you an almost certainty of a good match, compared to trying to find someone in the unfiltered general population where likelihood of finding someone compatible is minimal. Basically, if you’re trying to find someone to marry, your church meeting is a much better place than a dating site. That’s why those social games are so prominent in human genetic makeup: they work. They improve your chances to survive and thrive significantly, and of course I’m aware of their usefulness. The problem is, those connections “attack” the same spiritual resources that need to be focused inwards in order to attain a vertical spiritual connection, like a WiFi card that can be connected to only one SSID, and if it’s connected to Facebook, it’s not connected to God. That’s the main reason why I hate those social networking sites so much – those connections are a replacement for genuine spirituality, and they saturate the essential “connectivity layer” to the point where you are so hooked into this garbage, you stop being a true person, because you saturate the link that’s essential for Soul/God/Reality/Meaning connection with human social bullshit that’s not just inconsequential and useless, but actively harmful. That’s another reason why I write: I basically work with your connectivity layer and reprogram it. I slowly modify your thinking and expose you to content that not only repairs the damage, but enhances the vertical connection. I think that everybody who’s here long enough is aware of some of that.

Also, don’t be afraid to admit that you don’t truly understand or accept some of the things I’m talking about. Of course I’m aware of that, and it would actually piss me off more if you pretended to understand everything I’m saying about Sanat Kumar, higher planes of existence or “jewels” that are a “root ssh” interface to the “world engine”. I don’t care if you don’t get it, and I don’t expect you to pretend that it makes sense to you. Some of the things I write took me decades of very hard work and breakthroughs that were few and far apart to formulate, and of course you’re not just going to read it and get it. The purpose of me writing it is akin to that of Bardo Thodol: it’s not meant for the narrow consciousness of the living, but for the expanded consciousness in the afterlife, where things will just snap into place and you’ll have some intellectual framework to make some sense of it all. Just look at the NDE experiences: they always utilize the mental concepts that you already have in place, as vessels for knowledge of a higher order. I’m creating the vessel, I don’t expect you to put anything in it, and in fact, I will be annoyed if you do and it’s garbage.

People fail because they don’t actually want to succeed.

That sounds weirdly counter-intuitive, and they will forever protest against that statement, citing this or that reason or obstacle – either the spiritual technique isn’t working, or the guru isn’t “authentic” enough, or something else. Basically, they will change philosophies, religions, gurus and techniques ad nauseam, and the only things they will “improve” at are arrogance and cynicism.

When I say they don’t actually want to succeed, I mean that the professed goal of their practice is often different from the actual one. The professed goal is to “attain enlightenment” or “find God”. The actual goal might be to feel like you’re better than other people, so you’re creating a system of values that places you at or close to the top, with little effort. That’s why religious cults are famous for being a refuge for losers; outside, you’re nothing, but inside, you’re a bhakta of the Lord, or one of the “saved ones”, or whatever they think of themselves. It’s always easy: modify behaviour, change language, sometimes change outward appearance, eat vegetarian food, believe in the official doctrine, and you can pretend to be spiritual. It’s something that is easily done, provides great ego-boost, and the reason why people continue this charade often for decades is, basically, because they leave only when the price of continuing becomes greater than the price of letting go. Everything is measured in ego-stimulation or ego-trauma; what will people think or say, how will they perceive you, what will be your perceived social status. It’s probably wrong to say that those people don’t attain spiritual goals – it’s more accurate to say that they define spiritual goals in different terms than one would normally expect. If your goal is to feel great because your community thinks highly of you, and you mistake that feeling of ego-affirmation for spiritual bliss or something, and you genuinely have no goals other than to attain an even greater degree of this feeling, you won’t see this either as a spiritual wrong turn, or as a costly mistake. Someone like me might see it that way, but from your perspective, you’re doing great and I’m just jealous of your great success at spirituality. Only when the degree of ego-stimulation wanes will you actually start using your intellectual faculties to re-assess your situation, because if it feels good, you’ll just continue doing it. But when you’re on the bliss-high, the only “spiritual work” you’re doing has the function of increasing your stature within your community. The concept of actually deconstructing your desire-structure and other self-perpetuating patterns, of seeing how you use your energy to power ideas, to test moving your mental energy to different things, withdrawing it, increasing the strength just to test control, that’s not something you actually do. If spirituality is “a thing” in your social network, the social network is the primary interest, and “spirituality” could be cars, computers, guns, or breeding exotic animals, for all it matters. So, if you’re failing, you need to really honestly think about what you are actually trying to do. When people don’t make progress at something, it usually means they are quite content with their present situation, and they don’t see anything that’s so bad that it would require great sacrifice and effort to change. If they wanted to join a religious organization for the feeling of community, belonging to a group and having a common purpose, and they attained that, I’m not necessarily going to perceive their situation as “failure”. I would perceive it as failure only if their goal was to actually gain experience of the transcendental reality, to gain insight into their own spiritual momenta and attain power over themselves and spiritual states and energies in general. But if that’s not the goal, then not attaining it is not failure, it’s Tuesday.