It seems that the issue of asceticism periodically comes up whenever the issues of God and the world are discussed; this time in the comment section:

Perhaps the key to success in practice is absolute dedication of the soul and the willingness to endure everything on the path? Is some kind of ascetic life necessary for that?

I thought about it and I think it’s not a simple matter, in a sense that asceticism isn’t a singular thing, or the same thing to everyone. So, this is going to get somewhat involved.

Asceticism can be a very useful tool – putting limitations on spending money, on obtaining or replacing things, on thinking that things will solve your problems, on projecting into things and social status and so on. So, this kind of asceticism means that you don’t replace your car until it becomes unsafe and expensive to keep running due to malfunctions and servicing costs. It means you live well beneath your means, not trying to increase your apparent social status by increasing expenses to match or exceed your income. Basically, it means controlling the animal – keep it fed, but don’t allow it to get fat.

Then there’s the religious idea that you need to renounce things of the world in order to make room in your life for God. Especially, one should renounce the pleasurable things, as if everything is a God-vs-thing contention, and to not renounce a thing x supposedly means that you favour it over God. Honestly, I think this is a spiritual fallacy that can only lead one to start resenting God, and I can see nothing good in the entire concept. It doesn’t work like that at all, because one could say, with equal or better justification, that God is the origin and foundation of all things, and especially the good things are those through which we can sense God’s nature and presence more, and so the good things in our life can be seen as the medium of our personal idiosyncratic communion with God. To renounce those can be seen not as making place for God or choosing God over a thing, but as rejecting God in that one form in which He is revealed to us, however slightly and partially.

No, I think the entire concept needs to be revised. I think the central question is whether you want God to be a part of your world, or do you want to be a part of God’s world? Is God your Lord, or do you wish Him as a powerful servant to fulfil your wishes? Do you want to be a tool in God’s garden, or do you want God to be a tool in yours? That’s what the crux of the matter seems to be. People who reject God usually do it by wishing to accept God, but at their own terms, to be a part of their world, to make things better for them, to make them greater – basically, who wouldn’t want an all-powerful servant who caters to your every need? But to accept God in such a manner is to reject Him. There’s a good Star Wars analogy to this; the Sith see the Force as a tool, as a beast of burden that obeys their commands and realises their wishes. That’s called the Dark Side, and I would say the darkness is in the approach and the attitude, not the Force.

The other approach is to understand that, in order to be able to grow, you need to stop seeing yourself as the frame of reference, and accept that God is the frame of reference. Basically, God defines the coordinate system in which you are currently placed, and in which you wish to be better, according to the terms set by God. You’re not the one defining the coordinate system of rules, values and principles according to which God should act in order to be accepted by you as good and useful. You need to listen, observe, learn, outgrow your limitations and stupid ideas, and here’s where we arrive at my personal definition of asceticism: it is to renounce every wrong and limiting idea that stands between you and God. Yes, that’s somewhat abstract and hard, much harder than renouncing coffee. It is, however, far more beneficial. How about, renounce the idea that being in the presence of God depends on your personal awareness thereof? Basically, what if you are constantly in the presence of God even if you don’t know it? Would you act differently? Would your cares and priorities be affected?

Also, if you accept yourself as someone who is in service of God, or in a frame of reference that is defined by God, and your spiritual attitude, choices, thoughts, flows of energy into action, are all in God’s frame of reference, meaning they are more or less aligned with God’s nature and intent, renunciation and asceticism is to renounce resistance to God in your consciousness and actions. Asceticism is to be the presence of God in the world, ultimately, because that means that any kind of “you” that wished to make God into a tool or a servant in your personal playground is long gone.

The last articles about photography were not (just) about photography, of course. There’s a more profound message in there.

You see, people like to excuse their poor behaviour in this life with bad circumstances- it’s either “I had an unhappy childhood”, “I was of the wrong species, race, gender, or social status”, “this world sucks” or “the Devil made me do it” in general. What I want to say is that this argument amounts to “my photos would have turned out better if I had a better camera”. Yes, they probably would – by 5%. Everything else is you. I mean, sure, there are circumstances where you literally can’t do anything, but I assume that people reading this weren’t born fatally retarded or crippled, or so poor they died in infancy. I also assume they aren’t Gypsies who were forced into a life of begging on the streets with no education or prospects. So yes, I understand there are circumstances where you literally can’t do anything regardless of who you are as a soul. I also understand that this doesn’t describe the normal population in the West, especially the subset that reads blog posts on the Internet. The analogue to that would be trying to do photography with some kind of a toy camera that produces only one type of picture, with very little variability or flexibility to accommodate creative efforts by the user. Yes, some people are born or have been put into a position of passive victimhood with no agency. But that’s not you.

I’ll tell you a story. When I energetically connect with students, I am basically limited by the common denominator of abilities of the energetic system – basically, the state of the spiritual-physical interface in the physical body. In most cases, when I “enter” such a person’s physical energetics, I am limited to what they can do. However, in several instances I felt no limitations whatsoever. One of those was a female student who is known for her clinical lack of self esteem and ability to feel and project power and self-confidence, and usually feels she’s a victim of this or that; basically, the kind of person who lives on the leftist forums on the Internet where everybody is a victim of some shit, and they all applaud each other for being courageous and overcoming their circumstances and what not, when it’s all of course a lie. None of them overcame jack shit, they are there because they want to wallow in raw sewage of zero-agency. But I digress; anyway, I connected with her system, and if one were to ask me what I would expect, knowing how she acts, I’d probably say I expected all kinds of limitations and problems. What I experienced was my full unbridled power without any limitations whatsoever. It felt like jumping into a formula one car and instantly qualifying for a pole position. No limitations, no restrictions, no debuffs, instant full power that matched my own body that’s been trained for it by gradually extending its limits for years, and she had that by default. If someone put me in her body, I’d be able to manifest my full unrestricted spiritual power. That makes you think what she would do if you put her inside my body? Yeah, the same things she’s doing inside hers. It’s not the body that’s restricting her; if anything, her soul is under-utilising the body, as if the body was built for someone extremely demanding and competent, a formula one car built for the world champion, so to speak, and it’s being driven by someone’s grandma who keeps stalling it and crashing it into trees. Intelligence and mental abilities? The same as mine. Transparency and capacity of the nadis? The same, to the limits tested. Chakras? Identical capacity and transparency, to the limits tested; it drives high spiritual substances without any effort. Kundalini flow? Tested to my normal capacity with no issues. Reaching inner space with high energetics? No issues whatsoever. Even the idiosyncrasies of the system were adjusted for my type of energetics, which means I don’t have to adjust the yogic technique to the specific properties of the body, because everything just works; essentially, I could be in her body and instantly give spiritual initiations, or wield my Shivaratri whip across multiple mahat-tattvas. One may ask how is it possible for someone to just have a body like that without any kind of yogic practice? Well, some people are just born lucky, I guess, or she had a super beneficial karmic contract. She was given a body of a super-yogi avatar or something, and I just had to make myself one, because mine didn’t work anywhere near as well as hers by default. I had to stretch and extend its abilities. She could just Thanos-snap her fingers and draw the kind of power that took me decades to slowly build.

But yeah, she thinks she had terrible circumstances and bravely fought against them. I disconnected from her, and she was the limp sock again, the body waiting for orders that never came from her soul.

Yes, maybe if you had better circumstances you’d do better. Then again, maybe you’d do the same, and the better circumstances would serve as evidence of your incompetence and unworthiness as a soul. Sure, blame Satan, or Canada for all it matters. Otherwise, shut the fuck up and get good.

I had a very interesting private conversation recently, about what happens to the sinful souls that would be expected to end up in hell. I’m going to share the conversation here because it’s universally relevant:

Honestly, your description of hell as ceasing to exist actually sounds pretty good. I mean what’s so good about existence anyway? If all these souls commit all sorts of evil actions and their only punishment is non existence, that sounds like peace and cessation of suffering, while all the good souls are kept alive to suffer and be tortured. It doesn’t make much sense.

It’s funny that it always does sound good to people, but it’s really not. It must be a matter of semantics, or direct insight.

The death of the soul feels like that worst emotional pain you can feel here, but caused by the direct realisation of how completely you fucked up, committing the worst offence, making the worst choices that resulted in terrible suffering of others, basically knowing that you were the instrument of Satan that made this world a hell. Emotional suffering of this karmic actualisation is unbearable and causes the soul to break apart into multiple components, that either continue to break apart or form a stable remainder that is always of a significantly lower “mass” than the original soul, basically it’s comparable to a degradation from a human-type soul to a cockroach-type soul, and it’s not the end of existence, it’s just the end of continuity of existence. It’s like watching your friends graduate, get married, have successful careers, while you are lobotomised and degraded into being someone’s chicken; losing all the connections you had in a long spiritual lifetime, and hoping to eventually evolve, in untold eons, to where you’ve already been, and where you fucked up.
No, it’s not good. It’s worse than any imaginable kind of loss, with more ability to perceive the extent of it all.

Now that you put it that way, it does sound pretty shitty 🙂 Thanks for clarifying, I was thinking it would feel like taking a general anaesthetic or something, just go blank, but that sounds horrible.

There’s another thing. The way I actually observed it working is different from what I described. I described the internal mechanism – karmaśayas break, it destabilises the karmic structure, it loses cohesion and breaks apart. From this description, one would expect a soul to suffer from some kind of agony of conscience that eventually kills it. I never saw anything like that happen. What does happen, in my experience, is that the worst sinners have absolutely no problems with conscience. Especially after they discarnate, they feel completely blissed out, living their best life, and sin, that’s a formality, they are never bothered with something that would reduce their personal happiness (which is probably why they happened to be such terrible humans). Also, Sanat Kumar is an excellent example, because he did absolutely horrible things for a very long time, and he had absolutely no issues with conscience or karmaśayas decaying naturally. So, what kills them isn’t some internal physics of karma, but a result of an external judgment. In 100% of perceived cases, an authorised judge evaluated them and made a verdict which was instantly actualised. Apparently, a lot about karma is very vague until someone looks at it and makes a determination, basically opening the Schroedinger cat’s box. Once the verdict has been made, everything is instant, or almost instant; it happens so quickly that my human brain is really an obstacle in perceiving things that take place so quickly. One moment, you have an evil soul that’s completely blissed out in its self-absorption because it’s now in the astral plane and everything is wonderful, then the verdict is made, and instantly that soul no longer exists, but when I seek out remainders, there usually is something, much smaller, a vague sense of existence, and it’s a painful one, some kind of an agony and deep humiliation and a nasty environment, because apparently conscience and realisation of sin works much better once judgment of God is passed. I feel there is much more to it than that, though. When I try to slow memories down and take a very careful look at it, it seems that the verdict closes the horizon of perception and time, which normally seems to leave things open and undetermined; this verdict creates determination of karmic consequence, which matures and actualises instantly, unlike what happens with encapsulated trauma (aka “larva”), which is wholly dependent on your subjective perception. In this case, it’s about objective judgment of action and its transformation from undetermined into determined form, similar to how the wave function collapses from probability into certainty at the time of detection. When karma becomes determined and actualises, I think only then does my description of what happens become relevant – the cohesive forces that bind soul-particles into soul are overpowered by the repulsive forces, similar to what happens in an explosion, and only if a part of the soul is unaffected by the verdict, ie. not sinful, does it continue existence in some way, but it doesn’t look like a happy kind of existence, more like a nightmarish hell, where one is incredibly diminished, cast out of heaven, and feels spiritual pain for probably all kinds of reasons – remorse (because that part of the soul is healthy enough to actually have conscience that would hurt when showed one’s sinfulness), loss, and so on. So, unlike what the religions imagine, where a soul remains whole but is cast into hell, either eternally or temporarily, it seems that the soul first “explodes” and all of its “fatally unhealthy” parts are completely disintegrated to kalapa level, and only parts that are healthy enough to retain cohesion survive the event, but it’s not a happy kind of survival, because the context of their existence was some kind of a hellish nightmare in every instance I perceived.