I wrote a lengthy email message to someone and decided that a part of it is too broadly useful not to be made public, so I publish a sanitized version here:

If a genuine tantric practice is to be found anywhere in the world, it would be in the West, rather than India. Tantra requires one to break the bondage of tradition, dogma, and was to Hinduism what the sexual revolution of the sixties and onward was to the West. Tantra was a method of provoking enlightenment, as they saw it, by breaking the bondage of seeing oneself as “pure” and “virtuous”. Elements of that can be found even in the ancient texts such as Mahabharata, where Shiva tests a brahmana by offering him the amrita nectar in an apparently “impure” form, by taking form of a hunter from the lowest caste and offering the brahmana to drink his piss. The lesson was that the great gifts of the Gods cannot be obtained if one fails to discard the rigidity of one’s religious customs.

This same principle lead Buddha to enlightenment when he discarded the rigorous self-torture and simply followed calm and serene consciousness to its source; this doesn’t seem radical to us now, but he was instantly despised by his peers and regarded as “fallen”. Tantra is usually associated with spiritualized sexuality, but that is a shallow view. If anything, tantra started as breaking the brahmacarya vows which made the sadhus “pure”, and the spiritualized aspects started as one felt this burden of “purity” drop off, and perceived his liberation from having to maintain all that tiresome pretense, and felt the actual reality of existence.

Sex was in fact the least of the taboos broken: a common tantric initiation was to render oneself, usually a member of brahmana caste in good standing, ritually impure by drinking a mixture of five impure substances (feces, blood, urine, sperm and sweat) from a human skull in a graveyard.

This is a very radical version of something people nowadays don’t even notice as radical: wearing the orange cloth. Orange cloth was something the lepers and outcasts had to wear to warn others not to get close to them lest they be rendered ritually impure. Nowadays the orange robe of swamis and buddhist monks is seen as a symbol of high status, but it was never meant to be seen as such. It was meant as taking upon oneself the status of lepers and outcasts, beggars of the lowest order, permanently and without recourse deprived of any positive social status.

There is a very profound meaning in this, as there is an opposite correlation between one’s investment in social status, and spiritual internalization. In essence, give people smartphones with a connection to social networks and they can kiss meditation goodbye. Also, in order to attain true spirituality, one needs to withdraw his spiritual energy from the world, and “world” is translated primarily as “games of social standing”. Tantra, in essence, understands that “purity” of the brahmana caste is a social game which absorbs one’s energy and inhibits true spirituality. That’s why the point of tantra is not sex with some pure divine being, but sex with a dobi, an “untouchable” laundry woman of lowest caste. The point of tantra is shattering one’s carefully crafted fictional being of social status, while preserving the core of one’s consciousness and realization. That’s what’s called dancing on the edge of the sword, or riding a tiger: this ritual self-destruction can actually destroy you unless you manage to detach yourself fully from your social persona. However, if done properly it can give you freedom by removing fictional restrictions, because it’s realization of God and actions that are performed by a consciousness absorbed in God that are truly pure, and any attempt at achieving purity by avoiding contact with “impure” persons or things is an illusion and a game of social standing – he who is most pure wins. A tantrika strives to achieve a state of correct action which arises from unity of energies that fuel action, and consciousness that is permanently absorbed in God. Thus all his actions are pure. This is the meaning of the symbolism of Kundalini Shakti sexually embracing Shiva seated in the ajna cakra: correct action, correct way of being present in the world.

That was my introduction. Now follows the description of my experience in the Puttaparthi ashram. (note: that was relevant in the context of the original inquiry)

Everybody there lived in some sort of a terrible fear of sexuality, to the point where any kind of contact between men and women was abhorred. And when I say “any kind of contact”, I mean that more literally than you can possibly imagine. The local store had working hours separated for men and women, so that they would never mix. The lines for coconuts were separated into male and female. The mess hall was separated into male and female sections. The darshan hall was separated into male and female sections. Et cetera, ad nauseam.

From what I quickly realized, Sai Baba merely affirmed all the local customs, prejudice and ignorant beliefs and made it grow big and proud of itself. He never did anything to make them question their beliefs and wake them up, he basically told everybody they are doing everything right, that every religion is right, it’s all good. All the vapid Hindu customs were praised and affirmed. He was feeding Hindu narcissism instead of shattering their bullshit with clear words of knowledge. In exchange, he was given the apparent power and wealth, but in fact he was a slave. He sold his soul.

And of course, since everybody was so afraid of sex, of course sex eventually broke out in the nastiest forms. I believe the reports of sexual abuses, they are only expected. Sai Baba himself was karmically poisoned by the compromises he made and all their filth manifested through him. It’s something completely expected if you see it with my eyes. All those brahmanic attempts at achieving purity exploded in the most depraved forms of filth, which was to be expected. The entire experience there was very educational, in a sense a concentration camp is educational: it shows you what must never be allowed to happen.

Everything Sai Baba did affirmed exactly that layer of traditionalism and hypocrisy tantra strives to destroy. Sai Baba was a false teacher, not in a sense that he himself was not spiritually powerful, but in a sense that he deliberately chose the easy path of telling people what they want to hear, because he chose the path of least resistance. Everything they taught in the Prashanti Nilayam “ashram” was so profoundly false, that it can be only made right by rejecting it outright and destroying it to the ground. Every single thing they taught people about spirituality is fully and profoundly wrong, to the point where doing the opposite would be awesome. To repeat myself, visiting that place can teach you many things about spirituality, the way visiting Auschwitz can teach you things about spirituality. Such a profound example of doing everything wrong can actually point out all your mistakes and set you on a correct path. If you are so inclined, of course, but most people don’t really have a habit of turning their brains on at any point in time.

There’s an interesting question I’ve been asking myself lately: would people be able to recognize an incarnation of God, if this incarnation failed to conform to their expectations?

I always find it funny how people just assume they have an infallible sense for detecting God, assuming you just can’t go wrong with something as big, and yet Jesus was crucified for “pretending to be God”, Milarepa was poisoned for “pretending to be enlightened”, Buddha had a sworn enemy, Devadatta, who tried to discredit him in all possible ways and tried to kill him, and Krishna was routinely maligned and insulted by his enemies, who tried to kill him almost on a daily basis. So, you will forgive me if I don’t just accept it as a fact that people will automatically and trivially detect an incarnation of God, and, even if they did, that they would react positively to one.

The implicit assumption is, of course, that an incarnation of God will have lightning bolts coming from his arse and there would be so much obvious power and omniscience demonstrated that all doubt would be automatically removed. That is basically the argument under which Jesus was crucified: he didn’t have lightning bolts coming out of his arse and claimed to be God. Let’s kill him.

People seem to concentrate on the “God” part, and not the “incarnation” part. They expect God to simply break the world by manifesting in it, because He’s so powerful He’ll simply crush every obstacle in His path. But that’s not how the “incarnation” part works. The incarnation thing means you are human, with human properties and constraints. If you’re God, it only means your soul is bigger and made of higher substance. However, unless someone can verifiably demonstrate his ability to detect the type and size of a soul incarnate in any specific body, I will reserve the right to doubt his ability to recognize an incarnate God.

People can’t even reliably discern between authentic and fake gurus, if evidence is to be believed. It’s quite a subjective thing. People expect some help in form of a manifestation of some superpower which will remove all doubt, but, again, that’s not how this works. Even if someone manifests some spiritual power, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t also fondle little boys’ genitals in the back room. Also, people have rules for detecting a disciplined, diligent monk by listing behavioural traits, and expect a spiritual master to be an obviously stronger signal on the radar, and from this they expect God to be recognizable beyond a shadow of doubt.  However, that’s not how things work.

Hindus are much more experienced than Westerners in this regard. They know that Gods, gurus and sadhus can be incredibly hard to detect, and if you fail you can get seriously burned. There is ample scriptural and anecdotal evidence of people being rude to saints and gods because they mistook them for some ordinary person, and were punished. As a result, they prefer treating a fake sadhu with respect, because treating a genuine sadhu with disrespect can be karmically very expensive. It’s much safer to treat everybody as if they are God or a saintly person, than to risk treating God or a saint as an impostor, or with disrespect. It’s essentially a variation of the Pascal matrix: something can be God or not, and I can either identify it correctly or not. The only solution in which I really get burned is if something is God and I treat it poorly.

So, again, incarnate God has the “incarnate” part in common with every other human. This is a given. He can manifest some properties and abilities that are out of the ordinary, but those are not in the order of magnitude that would immediately remove all doubt. In fact, I would say that the only thing I would expect an incarnate God to do better than an incarnation of an average soul-type, if there is such a thing at all, is the desire to seek God and the ability to detect Him when present. Yes, this means it takes one to know one, and that’s why an incarnation of God is positively identified by saints and negatively identified by the worst people living at the time. He has all the incarnate angels as followers and all the incarnate demons as enemies. The Bhagavata-purana is all about this. This fact is reiterated again and again, and that is something the Hindus are quite familiar with, at least in theory.

Also, people expect an incarnation of God to manifest super-saintly behaviour, and I see no reason why that would be so, or, at least, why true holiness of an incarnate God’s behaviour would be recognized as such. People are trained to recognize holiness in its apollonic form – for instance, practicing a religion and praying devoutly, but is that really what you would do if you were God, trapped in flesh, separated from your true form, unable to think clearly, with memory wiped, unable to use your powers, surrounded by, well, mostly demons? If you were God born as a human, and if you saw religious people, would they look like someone who practices something that leads to what you instinctively perceive as your true being, your “home”? No, they would look deluded and empty and their actions obviously worthless. You would appear to be more crazy than normal, in your wild attempts to figure things out, to break free, to go back to somewhere you forgot but know that it exists. You wouldn’t know what it is, just that it is great, awesome, that it is in the direction of knowledge and blissful power and peace and knowing your true nature and being safe and invulnerable and separate from all evil, ignorance and filth. You would perhaps try sex, drugs, alcohol, music, books, movies, calm peace of the sunset, breath control, hypnosis, study of science, fast driving… you get the picture, you would try all sorts of things that feel extreme, trying out things because it is not obvious what will bring you closer to that feeling that you can’t explain, but which is everything.

You would not look like a stereotypical saint, or a spiritual person, let alone God. Most likely, people would think you’re a weird person that experiments with all sorts of weird things, doesn’t mix nicely with normal people and is best left alone. The very idea that someone like that is a super-soul (a much more correct and appropriate term than God) is something that would never cross people’s minds, because they would expect a super-soul to be someone super-successful in the ordinary things. However, a super-soul is not likely to be interested in the ordinary things. One like that is likely to be in super amounts of pain from simply existing in this limited form, because the most “super” part of his existence is the ability to feel the loss of what he or she can no longer access, but can feel that it existed. It’s a clear case of missing what you appear never to have had, and this feeling of loss is something so strong and painful, it will motivate one to try with incredible persistency to get it back, or, if it doesn’t seem possible, it will cause such devastating feeling of loss, one would be inclined to drown it in quite extreme and desperate ways. So, yes, if an incarnate God finds the Ariadne’s thread that seems to lead him or her back home, you will occasionally get a great saint, an expert in meditation and sophisticated spiritual practices. However, if one doesn’t manage to find it, you will get a struggling person in incredible spiritual pain, lashing out, acting strangely, and being everything but what you would expect.

I find it funny when some people think they “recognized me”. I would like to show them what I looked like before I got my shit together and practiced very advanced forms of yogi energetics for years. They would most likely look at me with pity or scorn, and I am absolutely certain they would not recognize a tulku in the process of self-organization. What they “recognized” is that I used my spiritual power to focus their mind, open their vertical, enhance the “Kundalini” flow through their system, essentially smash their body and soul together by sheer force, and then create a way for their awakened form towards what I myself strive towards. Essentially, I spiritually fist-fucked them, and the fact that they “recognized me” isn’t some great feat. Recognizing me doesn’t make you a saint, it’s more like not-recognizing me makes you a complete fuckwit, because I used such overpowering force you can’t fucking miss that. Even Romana didn’t recognize worth a damn. She mailed me about some stupid bullshit, I recognized that she might be “something”, and when we met I “recognized” her as the mother of my children, and she told me she doesn’t hug strangers. Sure, half an hour later when I had pushed her energetic system to its maximum limits it turned out that it responds to the highest energies that I could invoke, which is quite rare since most people usually have minimal response and only on the anahata spectrum, then she “recognized” me, but what did she really do? “Oh, this guy here has immense spiritual superpowers, he must be God or something”? No shit, Einstein. Had you figured that out half an hour before, that is something I would have found impressive, but now, it only means you’re not a complete fucking retard.

I’ll tell you what’s impressive. Biljana went into a library, and in a pile of returned books she found one of mine, and she saw my picture on the back. It hit her so hard, her whole life reassembled around it. She found a contact e-mail address and messaged me with something inconspicuous, and when I read it she was in my fucking mind, like, her presence was in my inner space. I immediately invited her to come and meet me, and you know what I did then? Nothing. I didn’t ram her system with force, not then, not ever, because I felt it was not only unnecessary but actually counterproductive. She did every single fucking thing herself, her system completely awoke and reassembled just because I was there and she felt me, not the energies I directed, but me. She was the only person besides me who could feel on the soul level, not on the energy level. And you know what my “students” perceived of her, and of what just happened? Two things: “jack” and “shit”. I felt they wouldn’t even believe me if I told them, because there wasn’t an energy exchange, which is the only thing they could feel. To them, she was just a very beautiful young girl who was freaked out to the point of not being able to talk. To me, she was my true wife, the one person in the world who could recognize me with my power off, because she actually saw me.

So yeah, I went to India and saw Sai Baba who was supposedly an avatar, and whom Sanat Kumar even presented to me as my guru, using super sophisticated trickery, and I saw everything he is and does, and he wasn’t able to detect me when I shut my power down. I once went to an “Esoterica Croatica” New Age meeting of all kinds of charlatans, and not only that nobody detected me when I had my power down, I actually did an experiment and turned it to “full on” at one moment, and only a single person saw it, who obviously was the only true psychic there and not a charlatan. Her name was Neda Bolić, I think. She looked right at me, but I intentionally avoided eye contact and since I looked very understated, she thought she must have made a mistake. I saw Makaja in person once and I put so much power through the entire room that my two students there started doing kriyas to release the overload, and he detected nought but my two friends, Jack and Shit. I saw a “prophet” Vera Čudina with one of my students, I did a passive scan of everything in her context, and she didn’t figure out who she was dealing with. So yes, some people “recognize me” when I fry their brains with spiritual power, and some don’t even have the spiritual receptors for that; no response for spiritual power whatsoever, and some of those people pose as gurus and psychics. Only one person was able to have a complete spiritual experience with me in the passive mode, and later on all those “students” who “recognized me” and had “deep spiritual connection” with me basically conspired to ruin her life and keep her away from me, which was one of the worst fucking nightmares I endured in this less-than-fluffy life, and was karmically devastating for those involved.

So yeah, will people recognize God. It’s been tried, and the results are in.

YouTube is a weird place. You watch something, they start recommending you “similar videos”, and after a few clicks you start asking yourself how the hell you ended up here, wasting your life watching cat videos, top ten “facts” and “did you know”, car crashes of drunken Russian idiots, and people trying to do stunts and landing on their balls. Or lighting fireworks in their assholes. You get the picture.

So, at one point it recommended the TV series “Supernatural”, so I naturally started watching to see what it’s about because it looked weird, and I’m into weird. It was kinda fun but ultimately “meh”. However, then the algorithm started recommending another TV series, “Lucifer”, which initially looked like a generic high budget TV series, less pretentious than “Supernatural” but more fun, so I kept watching. Eventually I pulled the entire thing off of torrent, before figuring out I can now actually buy it (don’t ask, there were problems with purchasing downloadable media legally in Croatia because reasons; I still have to buy the Adobe subscription through an account I set up in Ireland) and got a premium Netflix account.

It is a matter of perverse curiosity for me to learn how people perceive the Devil, from the perspective of someone who knows him personally. Lucifer from this TV series is no exception to the general rule: he’s nothing like the actual Devil. However, once you get past that, it’s still interesting in many ways; for instance, I initially dissected the theology involved and it’s apparently a combination of the Old Testament understanding, some Kabbalah, and lots of Greek mythology; for instance, Lucifer is more like Hades, or Yama in the Hindu version. He’s the Lord of Hell, the punisher of the wicked and the guardian of the underworld. His “personal assistant” feels more like one of the Furies of Hades, who torture the wicked in the fields of punishment, than anything like the Christian demons, although nominally being the latter; they could have called her Alecto and not Mazikeen, for all the similarity. Their Lucifer is not evil; he has superficial characteristics one would attribute to evil, such as having a devil-face, and enjoying the suffering of the wicked, but that’s only skin deep, as a saying goes. He doesn’t try to seduce or trick people into evil; it actually appears to be the opposite. For instance, he warns and threatens a little bully girl in order to change her ways from evil. He mocks people whom he sees as hypocrites, and mischievously plays with all sorts of “sinful” behavior such as sex, drugs and alcohol, but it’s clearly visible how he cannot stand the actual evil – for instance, vicious people hurting the innocent. He has a very elaborate way of hiding his true nature under a mask of mischief and superficial fun, but even in the first episode you can see what he really is, when a messed up friend whom he’s trying to help get her shit together gets killed; he will literally follow the trail of the murderers till the end of the Earth until he finds and punishes them. He looks unfocused and unreliable, but he is absolutely and unflinchingly loyal to his friends. He’s the kind of person who would literally die for you, but will be offended if you call him good or altruistic. That makes sense, I guess: people who pose as good or altruistic are mostly psychopaths, so it makes sense for a truly altruistic, good person to pose as the Devil. This actually plays out in the third season of the series, when a true psychopath, Kain, the first murderer from the Bible, made immortal as punishment from God, a criminal mastermind who managed to infiltrate himself as a police station chief, manages to sell himself as a calm, reliable good guy. An example of the difference is that Kain apparently saves Chloe’s life (she’s Lucifer’s love interest) and she’s grateful, but in reality Kain actually intentionally put her life in danger because he wanted to test whether she will magically make him vulnerable, as she does Lucifer. On the other hand, Lucifer saved her life so many times it’s ridiculous, at a huge price to himself – he actually killed his own angelic brother Uriel protecting her, and he never even told her about it, in fact he just looked weird and unreliable to her during his grieving period, because he would rather look like a crazy person than claim credit and make her feel indebted to him. And yes, he actually died several times in order to save her, not knowing whether he would be able to return. And most difficult of all, he prayed to God to save her life, which is a terrible thing for him because he resents God bitterly. But apparently Lucifer is perceived as the frivolous, unreliable one, and Chloe almost married Kain at one point, because he’s reliable, predictable, and everything Lucifer isn’t. The last part is actually true. Lucifer does the “deal with the Devil” thing, where he grants people favors in exchange for later payment, and Kain imitates this, being a criminal overlord. However, people who make a deal with Lucifer get a genuine benefit, and his “later payment” is usually symbolic, like “get yourself together, please”. Kain, however, gives you something that only appears to be of benefit, and his repayment actually costs you your soul, because he wants you to do something inherently evil, under threat of violence. From my perspective, Kain is much closer to the actual Devil than this cinematic Lucifer. Kain portrays himself as the “angel of light”, a “good and honest man”, while being cruel, indifferent to others’ suffering, manipulative and truly and genuinely evil. Lucifer, on the other hand, portrays himself as a frivolous playboy, up to his eyebrows in sex, booze and drugs, openly calling himself the Devil, under the name of Lucifer Morningstar, of all things, and he is in fact a saintly, angelic being, with deep emotional conflicts and issues. Essentially, he’s the angel of light portraying himself as the Devil.

Another interesting thing is how his two brothers, Amenadiel and Uriel, both try to force his hand, believing they are doing God’s will, while it’s actually the “sinful” Lucifer whose actions turn out to be most in sync with God’s will, although he keeps bitterly berating God at every turn, resenting Him for all kinds of imaginary slights, and trying to do the exact opposite of everything he perceives as the will of God. Lucifer is far from perfect. However, he is profoundly honest, outspoken to a fault, and with an unflinchingly accurate moral compass. He will tell you that he only follows his desires and that he’s the most selfish person in the world, but what he does is much more telling than what he says.

The characters are unexpectedly interesting, layered and non-stereotypical for a TV show; I was genuinely surprised. You expect something to be written in a certain way, because it usually is (yawn), but the authors keep surprising me by showing the third, non-obvious way out of a black or white situation. For instance, when Lucifer is tasked by God to deal with his Mom who escaped from hell while he was away, Amenadiel and Uriel try to pressure him into obeying what appears to them as the obvious will of God. Also, he feels pressured to honor the deal he made with God in order to save Chloe. However, he also doesn’t want to harm his mother, who, although unhinged and dangerous, seems to be well meaning. He finds the third way, something his brothers didn’t see, just because he was willing to postpone acting and suffer everybody’s wrath in the process, because he felt that the options before him were not something he could live with. When he is confronted by the arrogantly self-confident Uriel, who acts as if he’s the hand of God, and has no problem killing people to realize his goals, it’s really heartbreaking to see Lucifer who is insecure about the right way to approach things, but protects his mother and Chloe until he figures out a way to deal with things correctly. Lucifer isn’t written like a typical cardboard character; he’s deeply conflicted, flawed, prone to misunderstandings and errors, and yet he is morally and spiritually the most straight, perfect character I ever saw in a movie. In comparison, the cinematic portrayals of Jesus look like ridiculous cardboard cut-outs. He’s a genuine saint who venomously berates God through his tears while mourning the death of his friend, all the while actually understanding God, at an instinctual decision-level, better than all the outwardly pious ones, who act confident of knowing God’s will. He’s that son from the Bible, whom the father tells to go do something, and who tells his father “no”, and later changes his mind and does it, while the other son says “yes father”, and does the opposite. I found this TV show more emotionally moving than probably anything I watched in years, on a very genuine, archetypal level, where flawed characters make decisions based primarily on the inner core of their being, forced to act on an existential level, without knowledge or intellect to provide them with a safety net. You have a character who is forced to make a literally split-second decision whether to kill his brother, or allow his mother to be sent to hell, and the woman he cares for to be killed. No time to think, the decision needs to be based on pure instinct, and the consequences tear him apart. I think I find it moving because real life is like that. You don’t have the time to think, and you need to pick a tragedy that is less unbearable.

There’s something quite interesting regarding expectations about spiritual practice, that I didn’t write about yet.

In yoga specifically, there’s an expectation that a very radical degree of asceticism is required in order to attain results. Essentially, the archetypal motive is that of Jetsun Milarepa living in a cave for seven years eating nothing but nettle brew and meditating. Is this really a requirement?

In order to answer this question, I need to split what’s usually known as the spiritual practice into several levels. The first level is that of initial, preparatory practice, which is the equivalent of listening very hard for a pattern in sound. When you’re trying to do that, you need to remove all the distractions. You can’t eat foods that will focus your attention to themselves, or to the effects they have on your body – eating ghost peppers is out of the question, as are drugs, alcohol or in fact anything that might be distracting, because if you try to listen very attentively for long periods of time, you will try to minimize things like other people wanting to talk to you, being influenced by substances, or whatever. So, in this phase asceticism not only makes sense, but it’s actually an absolute requirement. You can’t attempt to make a breakthrough in meditation if you’re in any kind of a demanding human relationship. You can’t do it if you have a job that requires that you dedicate the most productive part of your day to things that actively interfere with your meditative efforts. You can’t afford to have your mind disrupted by all kinds of bad influences when driving to work and back, eating junk food, getting drunk or being in a sexual relationship that will demand your full attention in order to work. So, how realistic is it for a normal person to live in such a way for a long enough period of time in order to attain success in this initial breakthrough phase of yoga?

Fortunately, you can rest assured that there is a big difference between the ideal situation, and the necessary minimum. I didn’t have an ideal situation; in fact, it was almost as far from the ideal as you can imagine. I was constantly interrupted, lived in what any traditionalist would rightly call an impure environment, and I didn’t meditate anywhere near the amount of time one would expect to be necessary in order to make a breakthrough. However, I made certain discoveries during the process, which I am about to share with you now.

First, the way meditation works is not linear. It’s not unloading sacks of beans from a truck, where you keep working in a linear fashion, and the more gets done the more you work. With spiritual practice, you need to have a high baseline of thought and emotion in your normal activity, which essentially means things that go through your mind as you do your daily chores, and I cannot stress this highly enough. This determines your outcome more than anything. You need to maintain a certain level of subtlety of thoughts and emotions throughout your day. If you drop the ball, you need to pick it up quickly; for instance, you cannot allow anger to last long, you cannot allow yourself to get depressed for long, and you cannot allow yourself to get caught in some self-perpetuated loop of low emotion. This requires that you learn to control your thoughts and emotions, and not in some radical way, where you would brutally prune your thoughtstream, but in a very basic way, similar to that of a physicist who keeps working on the superstring problem while he’s stuck in traffic, and doesn’t allow himself to get distracted – in fact, doesn’t perceive enough to actually be distracted – and when he arrives at work, he switches from his baseline level of working the problem, to the full engagement mode, where he is at his 100% concentration and capacity for some 15 minutes or half an hour, and then he needs a break, because that level of concentration is unsustainable for a longer period of time. He then gets something to eat, talks to colleagues, allows his mind to go blank and recover from the strain, and then after finishing his coffee, focuses back to work to recover the baseline, stay there enough to pick up the pieces, and give it another 15 minutes of full effort.

That’s how it needs to be done. And now the fun part: if you actually manage to keep your baseline spiritual contemplation throughout most of the day, meaning you don’t get lost in your chores, but you manage to keep the high level of thinking and feeling throughout, it means you kept your mind at the state of what would show up as alpha and theta waves on the EEG, along with the beta waves of normal thought. And those few and far between bursts of deeper meditation, they will then have a wide base of the pyramid to rely on, and your peaks will be much higher than would otherwise be possible, had you allowed your mind to go to shit for the most part of the day, and rely on meditation to fix you. It might fix you, but you will not make any actual progress. Can it be done, yes. I did it. If you think you have a complicated situation where my method wouldn’t work, I assure you, you don’t. Most people have situations that are actually less problematic than what I had to work with, and they don’t manage to do anything because they waste their time complaining instead of actually figuring out how to get things done within the constraints that are available. If you think it was easier for Milarepa to meditate in a cold cave with no food, than it is for you to meditate in a warm apartment, abundant resources, half a day of slack time and two hours available for full bursts of focus, you’re deluding yourselves. You have it easy, you’re just not disciplined enough and you don’t desire the goal strongly enough. If this desire is present, you will make swift progress.

So, essentially, once you understand that you don’t need to actually keep the full meditative state for hours, but for seconds at first, and no longer than half an hour at maximum, but you need to keep yourself in a reasonably good state that can easily be switched to breakthrough-meditation mode at will. You don’t need to be at your best 100% of the day. You just have to watch yourself so that you don’t go fully to shit for more than 10% of the day, be at your normal high-thinking mode for at least 50% of the time, and have two bursts of 15 minutes to half an hour in the day, where you will touch and try to exceed your highest peaks of achievement. It’s by no means a trivial thing to do, but I can guarantee you that it’s doable, because I’ve been there and had done it.

The second thing to have in mind is that there’s a huge difference between trying to achieve initiation, and the requirements on purity and focus in this initial state, and the state you’re in after having achieved the breakthrough. Once you attained it, either darshan or samadhi or some similarly high state, it stays with you forever. It’s burned into the pathways of your brain, it’s burned into the structure of your spiritual bodies, and it doesn’t just go away because you had too much coffee or not enough sleep. This is why a beginner yogi can look more like a yogi than a master, because a beginner needs to observe all kinds of rules and restrictions to keep himself from going to shit, and to keep his meditative baseline throughout the day. Once mastery is achieved, it’s a completely different set of rules. A beginner cannot even imagine trying to meditate in a smoke-filled bar, and I gave spiritual initiations in such an environment. A beginner cannot even think about combining sex with meditation, because distractions are too great, and my wife, an initiated master herself, learned how to wield Shivaratri, the black Vajra, by feeling the state to which I go when I orgasm, when we had sex. She orgasmed together with me in that state, and achieved initiation into this spiritual state and energy level, and could wield it later at will. What I’m trying to say is, when you are an initiated master, things get weird, and the way you learn things no longer conforms to the limitations you had prior to initiation. A master will be able to attain higher initiation through practices that would preclude any kind of spiritual activity in a beginner. Also, it no longer matters how high your baseline Kundalini level is, what brainwave pattern can you maintain and for how long, in what condition your physical body is – essentially, you can be crucified like Jesus, be in dire agony, experience pain to the point where your consciousness is so blurred that you can’t really see straight, and still write articles like this one; essentially, for decades already nobody could figure out in what state I was looking only at the output I produce, and I produced some of my best work with unbearable headaches, high fever or worse, and in retrospect, looking at the work from a much more pleasant physical state, I understood that there are no corrections to be made; the quality of the output is the same as I would produce at my peak. Also, some things seem to defy logic: for instance, I can have a very low baseline Kundalini level, and at the same time be able to access the highest states, and invoke them in others. That’s because a high Kundalini level is important when you’re attempting the initial breakthrough, but once the pathways and spiritual organs of a higher order have been formed and activated, they work regardless of the state of the physical body, and in fact, if those achievements could be lost in sickness or death, could they be said to be of any permanence and value? A beginner’s spiritual baseline can be lost quite easily, by a lapse of concentration, drinking alcohol, eating bad or spicy food, or any combination of causes, but you can basically cook a master alive and his core of mastery remains untouched. One would expect one such master to have to return to the beginner-level of asceticism in order to attain a higher level of initiation, but that doesn’t seem to work that way. This is why Marpa Lotsawa could drink alcohol, have violent moods, and still be able to guide Milarepa through necessary karmic purifications and toward initiation. How did Marpa attain higher initiation? By doing his thing, by functioning in such a way as to be able to guide an advanced student with absolute precision through a completely unorthodox and ad-hoc invented set of hoops, while drunk and chastising his wife, a saintly person, for being stupid, and chasing her around the house in order to beat her up.

As I said, shit gets very weird.

I’ve been thinking about the book of Job.

It was never one of my favourite parts of the Bible, because I always thought it portrays God as an unjust and cruel asshole, who gives more value to Satan’s desire to test a good man, than to this man’s wellbeing – essentially, God allows Satan to turn Job’s life into a living hell just to test whether he’ll spiritually crack under pressure and turn to evil.

But lately I’ve been thinking if maybe I got it wrong. Of course it’s an allegory, and I always understood it as such, but maybe it’s a different kind of allegory. Maybe it’s not about the superficial moralizing message, but a more profound one, with mythical power, in a sense where a myth is something that never happened, and yet it happens daily. Maybe the message is that we, here, incarnated on Earth, are Job. Not in a sense that we are surrendered to Satan to be cruelly tested, but in a more profound sense, where this world in its entirety was devised by Satan as a form of a wager with God, where he publicly claimed to have created a test that only the truly virtuous and noble souls can pass, and secretly hoped that nobody, even God were he to accept the same human limitations, could. Essentially, he hoped to create such hopeless darkness laced with deceptions and lures, at the same time separating the souls from their memory, from their powers, from the ability to leave, and he blocked their personal access to God, so that he could envelope them in darkness so completely, that the only pieces of light they can see are his own lures, set in such ways as to burden them with sin, attach them to this world, separate them further from God and essentially kill them. As they died, deceived into sin, drowning in filth they were convinced to embrace, Satan could always claim that they failed to remain faithful to God, that their spiritual virtue, so obvious in heaven, was but a reflection of the heavenly light and not their own nature, and when they were separated from what was not truly their own, they showed their true, base and lowly nature, and sinned against God.

The deception, of course, is in the fact that a saintly soul is not such due to the light of its own. Everybody shines but with the light of God, and if this light is taken from us, we are truly doomed. So this is essentially a trap for the arrogant ones, who can believe that their virtue and achievement are their own, and not merely the result of acceptance of God into their lives. I cannot claim this with certainty, but what I do know is that not all came here with the same intent. Some came here to show how their powerful spiritual being can shine with God’s light even in deepest darkness. Some were lured here with promise of spiritual evolution under pressure, which supposedly isn’t possible elsewhere. Some wanted to teach and help others who were trapped here, in essence displaying a trait of arrogance, thinking themselves above those who were ensnared and deceived, and those who already attempted to help them, and failed. Some came here because they wanted to hide from God, whom they hated. Some wanted to do evil deeds. Some were just stupid. There doesn’t seem to be a singular motive; however, the common thing is that they all perceived this place completely differently and did not understand what actually happens here, which includes the concepts of time, and process.

The error in my analysis of the book of Job is, perhaps, in the assumption that the situation was portrayed correctly. What if the wager wasn’t between Satan and God, but between Satan and Job? What if Satan told Job that he has a test for him, that only a true devotee of God can pass? What if Job was eager to show his devotion to and faith in God by accepting the challenge? What if God advised him against it, but Job was either ignorant or arrogant enough to dismiss it?

So, we are Job. Deceived, bound, stripped of our memory, separated from the light and certainty of God, surrounded with pain, darkness and evil, tempted with deadly lures that promise to ease our pain at the price of our soul, with no certainty in our hope that it will ever be better.

The book itself offers the unobvious way out: don’t assume you did something very bad to deserve your fate. Don’t repent. Don’t “curse God and die”, as his wife advised the protagonist. Accept that your condition just is. It’s not certain why it is here. Maybe it’s a punishment for your sins, and maybe you’re so perfectly pure that Satan wagered with God that he can break you, and God agreed. Maybe you wagered with Satan that he can expose you to all the rage and darkness of hell, and you will not lose faith in God. Many things are possible, and it is unwise to claim responsibility for your situation just because someone told you it’s a constructive approach. It’s not constructive to accept guilt and punishment if you are completely innocent. It is also not constructive to pass judgment and blame God for your situation, under the assumption that God created this place and He is omnipotent. The thing is, creation of this place seems to be a very complicated thing, and involved many parties, none of which seems to be God directly. Also, the parameters of this place seem to be such that God is very limited in what He can do here.

So, how can I say that God didn’t create this world? Does this detract from God’s greatness?

First of all, this place is such a nightmarish hellhole, that claiming that God created it detracts from His greatness.

Second, if you think that God needs to be attributed with the creation of everything lest his greatness be diminished, what about the computer I’m presently using to write this article? Was it created directly by God? OK, so you have to concede that God didn’t directly create some things, even very sophisticated and valuable ones. If we extend this further, did God create humans directly, or were they a product of natural evolution? It is much more rational to accept that God didn’t necessarily create most things directly, and that in most cases things that exist are the result of actions of either sentient beings lesser than God, or a result of natural forces in action, such as lightning, which wasn’t created by anyone, but is merely a result of an electrostatic discharge in the atmosphere. If lightning can exist without being created by God, why should this world have to be created by God? Why should it not be of the order of being similar to my computer, which can also maintain a simulated reality, or, should I say, reality of an inferior order? It is much wiser to say that God is the deepest reality, and that everything else in existence has reality inferior to God’s; things can exist that simulate virtual universes, and I hold one such device in my lap as I use it to write this, and the text on the screen is of reality that is less than the reality of the laptop itself, and yet it is quite real, in a sense that I write it, I can read it from the screen, I can post it on the web and then you can read it and know that it is real; and yet, is it more real than merely ones and zeros, represented by the voltage in the memory cells, mapped onto characters, and displayed on some physical device that conveys the information to your brain. Things can obviously exist in weird ways, once you accept the reality of computers, and differences in reality between hardware and software. Someone, who is not God, created a computer. Someone else, who is also not God, uses this computer, as well as the software which is on that computer, to modify the software for some nefarious purpose. So, what if this entire Universe runs on what is the equivalent of a smartphone in some higher-reality Universe, and only when you follow this rabbit hole of realities to its end do you reach God. I’m formulating this hypothetically, but to me it is much more than a hypothesis. It’s a theory, in a scientific sense, where a theory is a set of hypotheses that were experimentally verified, and form the intellectual framework for explaining the evidence.

And the most interesting thing is that, although this can all lead you to conclude that God is so very far away, hidden under a palimpsest of superimposed illusions, nothing is farther from the truth. Because, if we use the analogy of God as the computer, and various recursively nested illusions as software entities running on this computer, such as the BIOS, OS, applications, windows within the applications, and nested structures within the windows, how far is all of this from the computer? It is all the computer. It’s right here, and the entirety of software has any existence only within it, and it is given reality by having its instructions executed directly by the hardware. You are as far from God as any of applications on your computer is from its CPU and RAM. Not only does it mean that God is truly the closest to your being, it means that envisioning your existence as detached from God, or even in opposition to God, is madness – because, in the end, only God Is; only I Am.