With spiritual bodies, there are two main considerations: quality and quantity, or, in other words, how sophisticated the substance and structure are, and how big it is. A computer equivalent of this is estimating a CPU’s power by knowing what technological generation it belongs to, and how fast it’s clocked. The more sophisticated technology gives the greatest advantage, and within that, the greater clock speed the better. Comparing “size” alone, in this case clock speed, doesn’t tell you anything valuable. In spiritual terms, comparing spiritual beings by size gives you an important information only if you first look at the quality of structure, which primarily means the energy level and density of the substance it’s made of. One vajra-jewel might “unzip” into entire universes of astral substance, and yet it might look small, the same way a black hole or a neutron star might look small, yet its structure reveals the truth. It’s like comparing mainframe computers from the 1980s with the smartphones of today; an old mainframe is physically imposing but the smartphone is actually more powerful, because it’s all about structure. However, if you build a mainframe system out of modern building blocks, it will have the same power per litre of volume compared to the smartphone, and greater volume will produce linearly more power. This is what I mean by comparing quality first, and quantity second.

So, let’s imagine that physical volume units can be assigned to astral entities, which is not the case but I don’t know how else to formulate this so that it would make sense. A gaseous-form being with a volume of one litre is lesser than a gaseous-form being with a volume of ten litres, all else being same. However, one millilitre of crystal-form being might be greater than an arbitrarily large gaseous-form – and here I mean planetary sizes, because the quality is different and it’s like comparing ordinary matter which is mostly empty space, and comparing neutronium, which is nucleon-density, zero empty space. My observation, when undergoing initiation into vajra 20 years ago, was that the relation between ordinary astral substance and vajra is even more extreme than the relation between rarified gas and a black hole. So, the thing to have in mind is that when I speak of spiritual jewels, or vajra-stuff, it relates to astral matter like black holes relate to cooky jars. It’s literally mind-boggling density. I had the misfortune to have to deal with some corrupted spiritual jewels (yes, that can happen), and that’s the most wicked and malignant shit you can imagine. I’m not sure what’s the physics behind the corruption, but I do know that the creators of the jewels pledged them to Sanat Kumar, and something happened to them which corrupted their entire mass. Not only is that shit bad, it also caused accidents, when my girls cast a glance with their astral vision to see what the hell was it that wrecked my system so badly, and a few kalapas of that substance transferred into their astral bodies, and I had the opportunity to watch what happens when a trained yogi with years of experience dealing with all sorts of bad shit gets struck by that. It’s like watching microscopic black holes tearing through matter. Nothing they could do with astral spell-casting and shielding had any effect, because the “mass” of that shit was too great, although it looked like only a few particles. I had to intervene and transform those particles myself. Basically, if you can imagine black dust that’s as sharp as diamond dust, and as massive as singularity, and simply shreds through everything due to its mass, you get the idea. One kalapa of this substance expands into entire nightmare-worlds of ordinary astral stuff. The expansion rate is huge. I didn’t measure it, because I don’t have any quantifiable metrics at my disposal, but it’s like that zip-bomb file, which is a few kilobytes large but when you unzip it, it expands into terabytes of data, that was used in the BBS era to break a BBS when it tried to unpack the transmission. In order to deal with this kind of stuff you need to have the capacity to move the particles of this matter, in its compressed form, to “order” them around, to orderly decompose them into constituents of lower magnitude, and absorb and transform them in that state.

Why am I talking about this? Because I sometimes mention the spiritual jewels, and I know beyond doubt that almost everybody routinely misunderstands that, thinking that it’s some “normal” but “prettier” form of astral matter, like diamonds are a prettier form of coal. No, it’s not like that. Those “jewels” are not astral matter, they are supercompressed to the point of being another form of matter entirely. The world “causal” is usually thrown around in this context, because that’s how Vedanta classifies things – matter, astral, causal – but I’m not convinced that it makes much sense. Aurobindo’s term, “supramental”, is definitely more accurate, because this is substance that is superior to the mental plane (or, high astral, as I would more accurately name it). The way a black hole is physical matter compressed to such an extent that it goes beyond what matter is normally supposed to do, compressing a whole star into a mathematical point, while retaining its mass. How that works, nobody really knows. Also, in theory vajra is not supposed to be corruptible, although there are marginal scenarios which make it theoretically possible. For instance, if you have a being whose spiritual body is still astral, but contains spiritual jewels, this being as a whole can incarnate in the physical world, be deceived into thinking that this world was created by God, and pledge its spiritual powers and merits to the world’s creator and his intents with this world. I don’t know the actual process of commitment that ought to have been followed in order for such a claim to hold, but I know the aftermath – such beings appear to have been consumed into powering evil, and the jewels were so corrupted, probably due to the fact that they powered immensely sinful deeds such as deceiving other souls by providing a source of false attraction within this world, they had to be deconstructed and transformed at the kalapa level. Essentially, other than Sanat Kumar himself, those jewels were the nastiest, most dangerous things I have ever seen, and I wish to never have such “opportunity” again.

So, we have now established that spiritual matter can exist in many qualitatively and quantitatively different forms. The next thing to understand is evolution of the soul.

The first thing to understand about this is that majority of the Eastern religions assume there’s only one path, only one goal, and that evolution is basically the process of rubber-stamping, of having a soul conform to a pre-existing template of perfection, which is then called enlightenment. It’s either nirvana, or kaivalya, or moksha, but essentially, there’s an assumption that the sinful and bound souls are all different, but that the enlightened souls are all similar, or that they simply merge into a supra-reality where they lose any kind of personal identity. But really, what would be the point of that? To have the end-point reproduce the origin? Really? I don’t think so. Instead, what seems to be happening is that the souls go through vastly different paths and formative experiences, and as a result they are all vastly different. I don’t say “vastly different” like “they are different because they haven’t evolved yet to the point of perfection”, but exactly the opposite, that they have evolved into their own version of perfection. That’s why I have a problem with religions, because they have a template of sainthood. God doesn’t have one. Spiritual development is possible through imagining complex abstract ideas and acquiring knowledge; it could be sophisticated form of love felt for some other super-being; it could be strength, courage and loyalty shown to the ideals under grave pressures and hardships. It could be observation, empathy, identification, basically samyama on other beings and structures, where one extends his consciousness in order to encompass new things and possibilities. It could be challenging the preexisting notions and limits of the known, by testing new ideas, new practices, doing new things and learning from the results. Basically, you can grow on the path of the flower, the path of the warrior, the path of an angel, the path of a saintly iconoclast, the path of a concubine, the path of a scientist, the path of a sorcerer. You can achieve perfection by growing to be God’s love, or to be God’s sword. As I said, the end-results can be as vastly different as a female beauty-love-kindness-insight, or male strength-truth-justice-brilliance. The end-result can be a saintly scholar, a lover who touched God through sexual worship, or a musician who crystallized God into sound-emotion-insights. Obviously, there is great diversity in the good; it’s the evil ones who are so similar one can’t really tell them apart, because the spiritual structure of evil is usually quite simple and rudimentary. As complexity and sophistication grow, so do the differences between the beings. It’s sad that people usually imagine God as some predictable, simple but “good” being, when God is something utterly and incredibly other. Metaphorically speaking, God is the endless vault of treasures – of beauties, of knowledges, of powers, of unimaginable things that cannot be borne by human mind and emotions, and of which human tongue cannot speak. God is not a sea in which you drown in order to become the sea, nor are you supposed to be a drop of seawater which understands that it’s the sea. No. The better analogy is that there’s an endless landscape of wonders that is God, and you can be either a macro lens to explore and record this beauty by magnification, or a wideangle lens that captures the entirety of the landscape, or a video camera that captures beauty in motion, or a sound recording device that captures the sound in its perfection, or a library that manifests tomes of precious knowledge, or a soldier who protects the precious things with his life and sword when they are endangered, or Shakti listening to Shiva explain the intricacies of Yoga. Poetically speaking, spiritual stuff condenses into crystalline vajra-form once it touches God’s perfection, and becomes a perfect “lens” that holds some of God’s perfection, in shape of an individual point of view.

(continuation from the previous article)

There are several important issues that need to be addressed regarding soul-growth and spiritual evolution.

The first is why some soul-types cannot be saved. There’s one interesting thing about astral substance, and that is its non-linear behavior in the low-energy spectrum. In high energy spectrum, when you expose an astral entity to “light”, basically to aspects of God, it absorbs them and “glows”, it is enhanced. When you expose a low-energy astral entity to the same kind of “light”, it disintegrates and “dies”. One would expect the astral particles, or kalapas, to use the proper term, to respond linearly to the influx of energy, in some predictable thermodynamic pattern, and on the level of individual kalapas, I think this is actually true, but apparently the larger structure seems to be destroyed when its constituents are exposed to the light of God that they need, and the larger structure rejects and avoids. Apparently, the individual astral kalapas refuse to put up with that shit anymore and go their own way, refusing to be bound into the darkness that is the choice of the dark entity to which they belong. As a result, when a dark spiritual entity is exposed to God’s light that is stronger than its own dark will that holds it together, the tangential momentum of the individual kalapas exceeds the already weak cohesive force of the structure, and it goes poof. Essentially, this shows that the existence of spiritual darkness is so against the basic laws of nature, that it is opposed on the kalapa level.

This law apparently holds even on the higher levels of reality, because if the level of God’s light a soul is exposed to significantly exceeds the power of its internal energy bonds, essentially if the level of love, truth and consciousness one is exposed to from the outside exceeds the level of love, truth and consciousness that bind his individual ego-structure together, he is at the risk of breaking up at the seams, metaphorically speaking, where “seams” are the weakest energy-points of his spiritual body, similar to the inclusions of weak material in a stronger rock. Those “seams” therefore limit the amount of spiritual energy one is able to take, and in order for that limit to be raised, the inclusions need to be transformed into higher-energy substance, and the disjointed fragments of the spiritual body need to be integrated. So, how does one do that?

If you’ve read the reports of the spiritual experiences of the saints, as well as the NDE experiences, which I hope you did, you will remember that the experience is usually a combination of joy and pain. Joy is because of God, and pain is because of one’s sins and flaws that light up in the consciousness as the overall energy level rises, and the soul instinctively tries to handle those weaknesses by either remorse or understanding. Both approaches work, depending on the specifics. Healing of the inner spiritual fractures and inclusions is usually done by a combination of remorse, acceptance of forgiveness, release of resent and blame, and understanding of truth. The low-energy substance is not released, it is absorbed into the rest of the spiritual body, which temporarily lowers the energy of the entire structure in the same way absorbing ice would cool down your physical body. This means your entire soul will feel pain of some kind during the process of absorption of the inclusions. The process is similar to the absorption of traumatic content encapsulated within a “larva”, where low-energy substance one was unwilling or unable to deal with was encapsulated within a membrane that isolates it from the rest of the spiritual body. Those membranes are inherently impermanent, and when they burst, the content is released into the spiritual body, creating trauma. If this trauma is absorbed and suffered through, the structure recovers and reintegrates on a higher level of functionality, because now there is no fragmentation and isolation of parts of one’s being into inaccessible regions. However, if trauma is unbearable, and one tries to shield oneself from it, another larva is formed in order to block the undesirable things from one’s consciousness. So, essentially, by accepting spiritual pain, living through it, with a combination of acceptance, remorse and understanding, one regains parts of oneself and is released from the necessity of existing in the energy spectrum that is lower than one’s maximum, because of the fact that higher energy would stress the larvas and inclusions to one’s breaking point. When those breaking points at the lower energy levels are removed, the entire structure can experience and absorb much higher levels of God’s light than was previously possible. Essentially, this reintegration and removal of low-energy inclusions, and raising the energy level of the entire spiritual body to the level of the highest-energy structures within the body, is what takes place in the process of evolution of the higher parts of the astral world, inhabited by the beings who already possess significant sophistication, complexity and purity. When the entire astral body attains uniformity at the highest energy level of the astral substance, apparently the entire structure crystallizes, it compresses into crystalline vajra form as it transcends the limitations of the astral world and goes beyond. This is basically the point I tried to lead my students towards, because once they get there, they are essentially out of the woods. Sure, there is spiritual growth even beyond that, but after that point one’s position is no longer precarious.

Another important issue is the motivator and mechanism of evolution in the astral plane. Incarnated human souls usually assume that without motivators present in the physical world, the souls would stagnate indefinitely in the astral world, and so the physical is useful as means for accelerating spiritual evolution. That, however, is not only false, but is in fact the direct opposite to the truth.

The logic goes like this: one feels comfort and is disinclined to change anything. At some point, discomforts and dangers of the physical world make him think and do things to avoid dangers and to assure his survival. The problem is, the most effective way to assure your survival in the physical world is to be the worst kind of a Darwinistic satanic animal, which by the way is also an excellent way of assuring your spiritual degradation and destruction. So, the only way to spiritually evolve in this world is to do all the wrong things, judged by the worldly criteria, because if you do all the “right” things, you’ll end up a spiritual abomination. In the astral world, however, the motivation isn’t negative. Theoretically, an astral “vegetable” can sit in the light all day and feel good, and this could theoretically go on for millennia without interruption. However, this astral “plant”, a simple aggregation of kalapas without much structure, which is able to experience only the basic, primal emotions, can also experience the existence of more sophisticated beings, who are able to interact, communicate, merge, share ideas, and eventually experiences discomfort due to its inability to do the same. This discomfort with one’s limitations is the main motivator of spiritual growth. It begins with perception, proceeds into empathy, and then into emulation, and with practice one acquires new abilities. Also, although God’s light is perceived by the simple spiritual beings as primal emotions – joy, pleasure, gratitude, fulfillment etc., it’s never just that. This light is also reason and intelligence and promise of greatness if you know more of it, and it is inherently motivating, it sort of pulls your toward and into itself, so basically the more you have it the more you desire it, and by “more” I don’t mean more of the same, but primarily the expansion of quality. There is pain, but its origin is in the awareness of one’s limitations in knowing more of God. So yes, this pain is also a motivation, because a spiritual being feels a special kind of pain when it sees that others can take from God something he’s yet unable to grasp, but it isn’t jealousy (defined as a desire for someone not to have more than you do) but its opposite (defined as a desire to be as good as those who are now better than yourself). You don’t want to allow others to be better than you, but not by limiting them, but by growing to match their high standards, and possibly even more, to be the shining example of God’s beauty and wonder for others to aspire to. So yes, there is a competition of a sort, between the spiritual beings – who will know more, who will do better, who will say the greater truth, do a greater deed, feel the purer emotion, and when one excels, others rejoice and applaud, and strive to do one better.

There’s a thing in the last article that I think was not understood by most: “You become good, actually good, by appropriating aspects of God’s spirit, and thus participating in eternity”. What do I mean by that?

Let’s first clarify what is usually believed about the soul, and then I will specify points of contention.

People either believe there’s a soul, or not. If they believe in it, they usually believe that all humans, and in some cases all beings, have an immortal soul, whose destiny after physical death is influenced by its choices and actions during life. This destiny can be either temporary or permanent; essentially, those who advocate impermanence of soul’s destiny believe in some form of reincarnation, where conditions of the soul constantly change depending on its spiritual qualities and choices. Those who advocate a permanent destiny essentially believe in a heaven/hell dichotomy, where good souls go to a good destination, and evil souls go to a bad destination, where both destinations are permanent and eternal.

The main point of contention that I see is in generalization. For instance, I don’t believe in a soul as a Boolean (either exists or not, and if exists, it’s eternal), I believe in a soul as a range of possibilities, because I have a very empirical position based on personal observation of souls of various qualities in various conditions, which happens to match the Buddhist understanding of the subject matter very closely. You have spiritual substance which can be aggregated into structures of varying complexity, size and something you can call the difference in energy, similar to the difference between photons of infrared light and gamma radiation, or the difference between a rock and a black hole, where both are matter, formally speaking, but the differences in structure, density and behaviour are enormous. Well, in the spiritual sphere the differences between spiritual entities or beings, you can call them souls if you want, are comparable to the differences between material entities, such as for instance between a cloud of water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere, a cloud of plasma on the Sun, a cloud of dust on Mars, and a cloud of methane on Titan. Then you have the next order of magnitude of difference, between clouds, liquids, solids, and even denser things like protons pressured into fusion, neutronium and singularity. Finally, there is a difference in complexity, such as the difference between a super-simple things like clouds of hydrogen, or a lattice of carbon atoms, and super-complex things like human brain, or the newest microprocessor.

So, what I understood, decades ago, is that souls don’t actually appear to be some point-like abstract eternal entities, and that they don’t appear to be all of the same kind, and I mean that in a sense more radical than you can probably imagine. There’s spiritual substance which exists in a spectrum of, well, energy, if you can call it that, but this “energy” is also self-awareness, mentality, joy, beauty, and other things. Low energy of spiritual “particles” makes them feel “evil”, for the lack of another word. Evil, hatred, anger, spite, arrogance, cynicism, roughness, malice, stupidity, ugliness, that’s what I sense from observing the spiritual substance of low energy. Another thing about it is that low-energy particles don’t bond well with each other, because apparently an aspect of low energy is that there’s not enough power in them to form bonds that would allow creation of large and complex structures. So, when you have a being that’s made primarily of low-energy spiritual matter, it’s very unlikely to hold together for long, like ephemeral phenomena such as the dust devils in the desert. The low energy entities can attempt to prolong their existence by trying to steal energy from somewhere, but it’s always a losing game, and eventually they all disperse into basic constituents. In fact, it appears that spiritual matter behaves the opposite of physical matter: when energy of the physical atoms is sufficiently raised, the connections between them become looser and eventually impossible. With spiritual matter, the particles behave that way when they lose energy.

The higher-energy spiritual particles behave differently; they have more color, brightness, cohesiveness and ability to form complex structures, but we are still dealing with something that looks like a gas; a collection of particles that are held together in a larger structure due to some mutually attracting force, and they don’t tend to dissociate on their own, but their density and solidity is still low. This range, between low-energy gas, and high-energy gas, is mostly how I perceive the lower part of the astral spectrum. It’s all low density, and simple structure, comparable to clouds of various kinds. On the higher astral spectrum, things get very interesting, because the higher, more complex beings display much greater complexity and diversity of structure, comparable to the difference between, let’s say, some colloidal suspension or aerosol on one hand, and a computer, or a living being on the other hand. Lower astral entities are capable of simple energetic emotions, where the lower spectrum of entities are capable only of the low-energy states such as hate, fear, anger, spite etc., and the higher-energy entities are capable of higher-energy states such as joy, admiration, love, pleasure, fun and acceptance, but they are still in both cases only very simple emotions, and compared to the higher astral spectrum, they look like the difference between happiness of a mouse who is happy when he has enough food and there aren’t predators around, and happiness of a man who listens to subtle and beautiful music and thinks about some wonderful character in a book that he had read recently, and wonders what it would be like to fly without physical limitations and absorb sunlight as food. Essentially, it’s like a difference between a pocket calculator and an iPhone, where both can be the same size and general shape, but they are vastly different phenomena. Because of this vast difference in complexity and structure, you can somewhat understand my take on good and evil, where I perceive lack of development, sophistication and structure as the greatest evil, where spiritually speaking it’s much better to be the worst man than it is to be the best cloud of generalized emotion. Spiritual evolution, therefore, means greater structure, complexity, cohesion, density and each spiritual particle carries within itself some form of self-awareness, mentality and other forms of “spiritual energy”. Greater and more sophisticated structures have more permanence, and they have greater capability of capturing the qualities of the Absolute, of God. It’s like transistors, where each on its own is little more than a switch, but several of them together form logical circuits, like AND, OR, NOT etc.; put thousands or millions of them together and you get a CPU. Increase complexity and sophistication of the structure, and you increase their capability to process instructions in increasingly smaller slices of time. You can say that each transistor has some small inherent capacity to do something with information, which increases when they are intelligently aggregated in greater structures, and when the structure grows large and sophisticated enough, you get a kind of magic, with entire synthetic worlds simulated within the machine.

Most humans have souls that are no more than astral clouds, of some complexity to be sure, but of little permanence. You can call them souls, but it’s really an insult to the concept. Impermanent, ephemeral, contradictory, inconclusive, they amount to nothing and usually decay into basic constituents, which rearrange chaotically like atoms of gas. Unfortunately, when I say “most humans”, I mean a rather large majority. This majority was created when the world was populated by the extreme number of humans, far greater than the number of complex and sophisticated souls that could merge with the bodies and experience physical matter. Essentially, they are either the lesser souls that would normally be unworthy of a human incarnation, or merely whirlpools of astral substance created by the astral interface in the human brain, creating “something” in the place where a soul is supposed to be, trying to form connections and communicate information. Those clouds or whirlpools don’t persist long after the physical death. The minority are what I would call the normal human souls – complex high-astral beings with a differentiated, solid structure, with abstract ideas, sophisticated longings, deeper awareness and desires for great, beautiful things, attempting to form connections of love and companionship with other souls, and attempting to know more about reality in its various aspects. They admire things that are good, hate things that are bad, and they try to learn and grow. Essentially, they are self-aware, intelligent beings of complex emotions, frequently conflicted within themselves due to their various, often incompatible choices and ideas, and their structure has both strong points and weak inclusions, of substance of lesser energy and quality, and they either manage to gain understanding that turns weaknesses into solidity, or they, in some cases, break apart into lesser entities. I would assume that in some cases several souls can merge in order to form a larger, exponentially more sophisticated and powerful entity, but from my experience, the best path towards growth is that which both includes more spiritual substance, and compresses it into increasingly smaller space, at the same time purifying the structure, raising its “energy”, in an analogy to the processes that take place in the stars. This compression and exponential growth in sophistication can be partial or complete. An example of partial transformation are the astral beings whose parts have been transformed into spiritual “crystals”, or “jewels”, which are essentially parts of one’s personality that became much more pure, powerful and participating in God’s various perfections than the rest of their beings. In the beginning you have a sophisticated higher-astral soul that looks like an angelic being decorated by one small jewel which is even more beautiful than the rest of the soul. The next degree of progression is when more parts of the soul transform and it looks like it’s decorated with many spiritual jewels, who each tell a story about God, perfection and eternity. The final degree is when the entire soul is transformed into jewel-stuff, “vajra”, and since this vajra carries within itself the aspects of God’s greatness, it is impervious, permanent, pure and a state of salvation. There are of course higher levels of participation in God’s nature, states of Godhood where spiritual jewels are merely ornaments, weapons and “clothes” of Gods, whose nature is more-less indescribable, except by very weak analogy.

So, you can imagine why I cannot limit my understanding of the subject matter to the simplistic concepts of heaven and hell, or reincarnation. Sure, reincarnation exists, but it’s not an eternal process, and is often very messy. Beings can appear to evolve for a while, but then they break apart and dissolve. In other cases, they fail to form any kind of structure and dissipate quickly. In rare cases, they grow in complexity, but only up to a point, where they reach equilibrium, and then stagnate. In exceedingly rare cases they grow in sophistication to such an extent, that the results appear to be magical, and followers of most religions would consider it blasphemous to even consider the possibility of such fate for themselves, for such things are supposedly reserved for Gods. I, however, see it as some kind of physics, not unlike the thermodynamic laws of matter. It’s just that spiritual matter has spiritual characteristics that influence its behaviour; the particles interact based on how they “feel” and, lacking other terms, “react to the truth of God”.

So, that’s the very literal meaning of my original sentence. If you fail to know God, you fail to attain permanence and eternity. If you fail to know God, there’s no eternal hell for you, because hell isn’t the state of eternal suffering, it’s the absence of eternity, or, as Jesus aptly put it, the eternal death, death without resurrection. Entropy, decay into chaos, disorganization of a spiritual entity due to lack of internal cohesion, because only the longing for God, for eternity itself, creates cohesion and structure and solidity and, eventually, eternity of the soul. When I say there is no possibility of salvation outside of God, I mean it so fucking literally you couldn’t believe. It’s the actual, literal truth of the matter. Only God is eternal, and you’re either of God, or you are not at all. Eventually, only those two outcomes are stable, and everything else is just a temporary phase that precedes collapse into either of those permanent outcomes.

What’s the difference between heaven and hell? That’s another thing I was teaching my kids, because the common understanding is that hell is a place of eternal suffering in darkness, some kind of a maximum security prison for evil souls, and heaven is a place of eternal happiness and light.

What I told them is that heaven and hell started off as identical places, sort of like a monastery and a prison being almost identical in most ways – in both you have people who are removed from the rest of the world and have their individual cells. Also, there are no doors on hell, that prevent exit. So, what is it that keeps the demons and evil souls inside?

An illustration: take two identical rooms. In one you put 10 evil people, who enjoy humiliating others and causing suffering, who hate God, despise spirituality, and feel most at home in the most materialistic existence possible, where God seemingly cannot disturb them in their evil. In the second room you put 10 good people, who enjoy spreading truth and knowledge, who enjoy making others feel good and empowered, who spend their free time meditating and praying for God’s guidance in everything they do, who aspire to always be better, and who see everyone who is better than themselves as a positive challenge, as an example of something they can achieve if they work harder.

Now guess what is going to happen in each room. In the one with evil people, you will get hell, and in the one with good people, you will get heaven. The thing is, the inhabitants of each room will think they are in heaven, and hell is in the other room. To each group, the way of life of the other group is painful and intolerable. Since the doorway between the groups works in such a way that it only lets you through if you truly change your consciousness in such a way as to become a member of the other group, everyone could theoretically leave, but the inhabitants of heaven have no wish to leave, and the inhabitants of hell could leave, but they would have to repent, exhibit sincere remorse, ask God for forgiveness and adopt true goodness. And if you live in hell, it’s difficult to see heaven as a good place. The others tell you that heaven is inhabited by stupid boring sheep who blindly worship God, who is a tyrant that doesn’t allow anyone to have any fun. To them, heaven is a place of restrictions, fear, slavery and weakness, because they wish to be able to ridicule God, tell lies and laugh cruelly at the stupid victims who believe them and are ruined, they wish to be able to humiliate, beat up, torture and murder others. In heaven, you can’t do any of those things, because it’s so restrictive, and only those who are pathetic enough to be subservient to God can live there. So, basically, if you live in hell, you first need to face the hard truth: that you are in hell, that hell is not the other place, but the place where you are. You need to accept the fact that you are evil, that you are vicious slanderous scum, that all the evil that is happening to you is the result of your choices, and that everything you considered to be good is the result of your evil choices, and of the evil company that you kept because you, essentially, are a worthless piece of trash. You also need to accept the fact that your enemies are neither pathetic nor stupid nor evil, that they are and always were right, and that you slandered them because you were evil. You need to accept all those things only to be able to even conceive leaving hell. Hell doesn’t need doors. The fact that the inhabitants can see heaven and are so disgusted by what they see that they feel the need to crawl to the darkest corner of hell in response and re-affirm their choice for evil, is the true reason why hell isn’t empty. The dark souls see the light of heaven as a destructive force, a deadly evil that wants to destroy everything that they are, and they are in fact right – the light of God is destructive to all evil. In order to leave hell and enter the light of God, an evil being needs to basically die, by ceasing to be everything that it is. Accepting that you are evil and that all your former choices were wrong is hard, and the evil ones are weaklings, because all their choices were in fact those of weakness, because it is always easier to destroy than to create, it’s easier to lie than to tell the truth and accept the consequences, it’s easier to use sarcasm and cynicism to ridicule, than to use valid arguments and to explain your position clearly. Essentially, hell is not only full of evil ones, it is also full of weaklings and idiots, and all of them believe they are strong, good and smart. The problem is, when you are a weak evil fool who believes he’s a righteous intellectual powerhouse, you stay where you are because you think it’s the bright center of the Universe. Hell is where the others are. Your prison is that of your nature. There need not be steel bars on doors and windows if you think you inhabit the best of all possible places.

So, that’s how hell works. You can find ample evidence for this on Earth. Most people live in a hell of their own making, imprisoned within the boundary of their own choices and nature. After a while, they become not only unwilling, but unable to leave. But don’t be fooled into thinking that you understand the reason why people stay in heaven. In fact, if an evil being were to experience even a glimpse of heaven, he would run away screaming. Heaven is not some hedonistic paradise where fanatics get to fuck their virgins and where you get to listen to angels playing lyre on cloud nine. Heaven can be painful. You see, when you experience the light of God, the light is so strong that it makes almost every difference from its nature feel dark. Every imperfection within your soul looks like a dark stain, a source of shame and remorse, something you feel the need to deal with immediately, because it’s intolerable to see the difference between your spiritual structure and God’s light. That’s the reason why there is stratification in the spiritual world – in fact, the real, actual world. Not all beings can take it all, and certainly not at once. So, how to explain the motivating factor?

In the physical world, you have people you admire. When you admire someone, you feel the need to live up to certain standards, in order not to disappoint the one you admire and respect. You are not forced to live up to the standards, but you still do it, because failure to do so would be intolerable – you would feel ashamed and terrible if you made those people feel disappointed in you. However, if you made them feel proud of you, if they react to you with pleasure that you did so well, that is the greatest reward. You earn being in the company of great people by living up to the standards of being a great person yourself. That is the motivation and the ethics of heaven – you don’t want to disappoint God, who is the light in all that is true, brilliant, beautiful and great. You don’t want to disappoint your friends, who worship the same light. You want God’s light to shine brightly in you, and you want your friends to smile at you and feel great joy at your wonderful accomplishment and purity. That’s why you are ready and willing to suffer through all hardships, why you are willing to endure any kind of pain, why saints are willing to endure everything to the point of death and not betray God – because God is all that matters. For the same reason, they are able to resist temptation of lesser pleasures that wish to lead them astray; because God is all that matters. If a great dinner awaits you at home, you will easily resist the temptation of a McDonald’s drive-in on the way. If one is tempted by lesser things, one doesn’t really know God. If one is afraid to do evil because he’s afraid of God’s punishment, he’s a fucking idiot. God is not the one who punishes evil, evil is a choice that leaves you without God.

And that is the tragedy of this place – it’s a trap, that attempts to lure you into accepting the lesser things by blocking your access to God. It’s not an instrument of spiritual evolution, but its opposite – it’s something that wants to lure you into accepting the lesser choices and binding yourself to things other than God. It’s vicious, evil and dangerous almost beyond measure, because it projects mirages upon sand in order to lure you into the desert where you are to die and be consumed by the vultures who control the mirage projector. It offers pleasure and fulfillment from things that are inherently empty. It threatens with dire consequences if you don’t obey, and you don’t know whether its threats are empty. All you have that could offer you any kind of immunity to its lures is memory of God, and your memory was blocked upon entry, so you cannot rely on it. All that remains is your nature, the very structure of your being that guides your choices, and it needs to have great strength in order to offer even mild and moderate guidance. In heaven, it’s relatively easy to choose God, because He is obvious. You will choose against Him if you are outright evil. Here, it’s much harder, because it’s a place designed by God’s enemy, in order to prove some evil, twisted, perverse idea, to destroy as many good souls as possible and to produce as many evil demons as possible, by turning God’s ideas about evolution upside down. The irony is that some of the greatest spiritual teachers are those with the strongest intuitive memory of the actual spiritual world, and their teachings reflect that. On the other hand, the teachings that reflect the nature of this world most correctly, and give the best guidance for success here, are the most spiritually corruptive forms of godless satanism and evil. For instance, if you follow the instructions of Jesus in this world, you’re fucked, but you will fare great after death. On the other hand, if you practice some form of Machiavellian satanism, you’ll do much better here, but you’ll have to make spiritually corruptive choices and your long-term prospects are not good.

But if it comforts you, you can be an angel here. You can be a saint here. You can be a presence of God’s light here. You just have to endure the ridicule of demons, and your flesh is exposed to their weapons. They can do to you everything they wish they could do to God. The choice for goodness here will expose you to much suffering. The real question is, how much is God’s smile worth to you? How much is the pride of other angels in your success and purity worth to you? That’s the crux of the matter.