Years ago, I noticed a very strange and ugly aspect of human psychology when I talked to people, especially the Americans.

They are inundated by constant ads attacking them from all sides; everybody seems to want something from them. Everybody who sells anything seems to want their money. Political parties vie for their vote. Religions are competing for their souls. It’s as if there’s a cosmic battle where angels and demons, and in fact God and Satan fight for them as a prize.

As a result, they seem to find themselves in a position similar to that of a teenage girl, who all of the sudden realises she’s the centre of male attention, and it seems that every man in the world wants her. On one side, it’s extremely intoxicating, and one can develop quite an ego, but the smarter ones among them realise that it’s not about them at all, that men would just want to use them for sex and abandon them, and so they develop a defence mechanism against all that predatory attention, and they also develop cynicism and bitterness about the whole thing. The not-so-smart are in more of a pickle, because it’s a dangerous combination to have someone without any particular qualities believe they are ultimately desirable and a centre of everybody’s attention. The very smart ones very quickly understand that they are in fact the ones with a problem, because the apparent abundance of choice only masks the fact that their choices are all bad, and they are in a position where they are dying of thirst, and everybody is offering them a drink, but none of it is water. Those very smart ones are commendable in exact proportion in which the stupid ones are contemptible.

What people don’t seem to understand is that all those who vie for their attention are the analogue of a lion, a hyena and a vulture, arguing over who is going to kill and eat them first, and in what order. It reminds me of a joke about a young mosquito’s first night out in the world; in the morning, her mom asked her how it was, and the daughter replied that it was wonderful: “All the people loved me, everywhere I went they clapped their hands in applause.”

The spiritual reality is in fact so unpleasant it is understandable why people would prefer the ego-trip of the cosmic battleground for their souls, that religions so incessantly try to sell. Satan doesn’t care about you even if he owns you; you are merely a means to an end. You know very little or nothing about God, and what little you think you know is wrong. To paraphrase Buddha’s four truths:

1. You are in very deep shit.
2. The more you stir it, the deeper you sink, and it stinks more.
3. It is possible to get out.
4. However, in order to get out, you’ll have to understand that everything you know is likely wrong, that you’ve been doing everything wrong for far longer than you can remember, that you’ll have to let go when you most want to hold on, that you’ll need to release when you most want to lash out, and so on. Since everything you know about the world is wrong, everything you’ve been doing had the result of furthering your predicament, and if you want things to improve, you’ll have to do things differently, and in a very fundamental way. You’re not an important person, picking between Jesus and Buddha and nitpicking between them because you’re so important you can’t rush your choices. No; you’re a drowning person, and having a vast sea around you doesn’t mean you have many options. You are utterly and profoundly fucked, and you need to understand absolutely everything in your life in this context, and you need to reach for and hold on to everything that can improve your position even a little bit; hold on to a piece of wood if there’s nothing better, but exchange it for a raft if it appears, and exchange the raft for a helicopter later on, if the possibility arises.

People argue about the first noble truth, whether it means that suffering exists, or that everything is suffering, or that suffering permeates human condition, but the reality is that they are too stupid to understand the simplicity of it, and it’s in fact the fourth truth that they should be contemplating, the one of counter-intuitive solutions to the problems they don’t even understand they have, and re-shaping their perspective in ways that never even crossed their minds. Your emotions are the energy-whirlpools that perpetually recycle because you re-invest before there could be a chance of release. Your desires are projections of fulfilment into a sphere that is inherently energy-starved and needs you to feed it with your soul, and will promote your desires because that’s how it gets you to give yourself to it as food. You desire, and thus give yourself to the world, by recognizing it as a source of what you want. You are frustrated in your desires, so you strike and lash out, thus giving it more importance and energy. After enough iterations, you forget what is it that you were after in the first place, but you keep struggling against all sorts of things, and striving for all sorts of others, and you think you can’t stop because all of it is so important. It’s not. Also, you are not important, and your survival is not important. Nothing you are doing is important. God is important, but what do you even know about God? Less than nothing, which is to say, no actual knowledge but lots of nonsense, which is why Buddha refused to even talk about God. Talking about God is basically useless if you’re not experiencing God at that moment, and if you are experiencing God at this moment, you will utter words of praise, but they will be a consequence and manifestation of the experience, and they won’t matter. Your thoughts and words are merely a re-hashing of your memories and experience, which means they are useless garbage if you’re not experiencing God, and if you are experiencing God, they are noise that detracts. There’s one thing that could teach people humility in very short order, and that’s to understand how God, saints and angels would perceive them. They would look like clutter, attachments, noise, chaos, weaving of low-order energy in and out of chaotic whirlpools of thought-emotion, illusions of all kinds, ignorance of everything real and important, susceptibility to all kinds of falsehoods and lies, and all of it so far from God, that almost nothing in your entire existence is real and valuable, because God is where everything real and valuable is. You are darkness, ignorance, sin and nonsense dressed up as self-importance and false purpose. To the Gods, you look and feel worse than dog shit looks and feels to you. The best you can hope for is that they will see you and cry tears of compassion for your misery, feeling the pain of your kind of wretched existence, and in seeing their pain you might get some glimpse of its cause and thus have darshan of God. To think that God loves you and fights for your soul is the epitome of conceit and ignorance. No – you would first have to develop a soul by being in God’s presence, because that’s how it’s developed, and it’s developed by surviving the immense blissful joy that is of God, by releasing the non-God from your existence so that only God can be, because nothing else is worth keeping. When you actually develop a soul that way, you will understand how stupid every idea you ever had about reality actually was. No, God is not fighting with the Devil for your soul. You are the one who should be fighting to grasp every tiny aspect of God you can reach, feel and know, and hold on to it as if your survival depends on it, because it does. Without God, you are less than shit, because unlike yourself, shit can actually be useful. It can make roses grow. Being shit would actually be an upgrade for most people, because most of them are like toxic or radioactive waste that creates a zone of death around itself. Spiritual growth is not realizing you’re valuable and everybody wants you, and then giving your super-important soul to God. No, spiritual growth is realizing you’re a barrel of toxic waste on some dump, that needs to be contained in order not to spread death and destruction, and, understanding that, strive to become shit by feeling whatever aspect of love, beauty, purity and knowledge you can touch. When you become shit, strive to be food for the roses, so that there is beauty and purity because of you, and when there is purity and beauty, understand that it is God who is doing his thing, removing the non-God things, and the more you are of God, and less you are non-God, the more you partake in beauty, bliss, knowledge, reality and all other unspeakable forms of magnificence that lie in the direction the lesser beauties and truths point to.

It’s not about you. You don’t matter. God matters.

I had a “pleasant encounter” with a global “script” last night, and I think some of it might be worth sharing because it’s universally relevant.

There’s a list of “spiritually impure” things that are supposed to be forbidden by God and doing them is supposed to represent a sin, which makes a soul impure before God and inadmissible to heaven, or something along those lines. Everybody seems to know the list – don’t steal, murder, fuck outside of wedlock and so on. Looks completely common sense, until you think about it.

Because, you see, you can diligently avoid doing all those prohibited things for your entire life, and be a spiritual midget. Also, you can do all those things at some point in your life, and be a great saint. Take St. Augustine for an example – if I remember correctly, he lived with a woman out of wedlock, even fathered a child with her, but then his family didn’t condone the relationship so she was quietly sent away. This is by no means a good or a moral thing; I mean, sending her away. However, regardless of what one might expect, the man was a great saint. St. Jerome, the translator of the Bible, probably the smartest man of his time alongside St. Augustine, had homosexual encounters in youth, which troubled him greatly later in life, but is remembered as a great saint. St. Paul persecuted the Church in its early days and is likely responsible for many deaths, and is a great saint and the most important person in the history of the Church beside Jesus. Jesus constantly broke this or that silly “commandment”, including stealing wheat from someone’s field during Sabbath; he also instructed his disciples to obtain swords, and as a result one person was injured. Krishna stole, killed and had sex, and yet He was God. Milarepa practised black magic and killed many beings, and yet he was a great saint.

So, if having “sinned” doesn’t seem to preclude spiritual greatness, and being “sinless” doesn’t create holiness, there’s something seriously wrong with the very concept, and I think I might know what.

You see, this list is the concept of sin that is created and maintained by Satan, and is specifically enforced by the laws inherent to the very structure of this world. In the real world, sin is s different thing; sin is a state of consciousness that resists and rejects God. This state of rejecting God can result in evil actions, but the opposite is in fact possible – a person aligned with the will of God can perform actions that could be qualified as sinful, but this is not in fact the case, because it doesn’t matter what something looks like, it matters what it actually is, in its true nature. If something results in holiness and manifestation of God, it is obviously not sinful. If something results in spiritual vacuum and boredom, it can obviously not be aligned with God, and is thus sinful by definition.

Interestingly, some of the worst people I know didn’t murder anyone, didn’t steal anything as far as I know, and you wouldn’t find any items from the “black list” on their record, yet they hated God wherever He was present, and they are sin incarnate. On the other hand, all the greatest people I know did all kinds of shit at one point. I’m not saying one should see all actions as permissible, but there’s obviously more to holiness than keeping score against some list of prohibited actions. That’s why I called my spiritual system “darshana yoga”. Find God first, then align your actions with That, and keep the goal present on the path. Notice the conspicuous absence of any detailed instructions, and lists of prohibited and recommended specific actions. Basically, if you’re a living presence of God, as long as you are able to maintain that during any action, I don’t care what you do.

I think I can now properly explain why I think my old approach to spirituality was flawed, and why I replaced energy work and “shaktipat initiations” with theoretical explanations across several fields.

To quote myself:

“When I think about the limits of quantitative growth, the necessary conditions are in the ability to extend one’s ability to feel others, and the “cracks” and “discontinuities” in one’s spiritual body are usually due to faulty ideas and beliefs that basically limit what you feel you’re allowed to do, and what is “right”. Also, there is a real possibility of having your mind so open your brain falls out, so to speak, and by feeling compassion with someone who is wrong, you lose your own correct perspective and adopt the wrong one, and if you’re not skilled at juggling multiple viewpoints, you might actually degrade your spiritual body instead of expanding it, so that would be counterproductive. “

Basically, if one is close to actually being able to need and use spiritual help, the problems they would be having are of the kind that can be solved by abandoning faulty ideas and learning how to think, feel and let go of things properly. The energy part usually takes care of itself, but the increase in energy puts pressure on the “fault lines” within one’s spiritual body, and this creates the need to change one’s worldview and intellectual framework, and it’s useful if you’re shown how to do it. The worst cases of energy-related problems were in fact caused by refusing to let go of ideas that formed energetic blockages, and things can get really bad if you’re that stubborn – not letting go of Christ, Bible, Vedanta, materialism, Buddhism, your sinfulness or whatever it is you think you know for certain. One needs to allow God to rebuild his knowledge and beliefs, instead of having fixed points that anchor you to a certain place, creating energy blockages that are, fundamentally, opposition to allowing reality to sink in, because you love your placeholders too much. Allowing God to rebuild you means letting go of everything you think you know about God, because all of this is quite obviously false, because a non-enlightened person can by definition have no good ideas about God, because good ideas are all “pointers” to directly perceived realities, and a non-enlightened person has only the “plastic placeholders” in places where God should be, and those placeholders need to be removed in order for reality to sink in. God is infinitely better and more sophisticated than your religious ideas, and that is true regardless of your religion, so you need to become spiritually flexible, but not to the point of being an idiot. It’s a skill one needs to learn, and bad ideas in this area are great hindrances to spiritual growth. So, there you go.

That’s a good observation, and I would have to think about it for some time before coming up with a solid answer. At this moment I’m half-sick (Biljana is really sick, down with high fever and something that looks like flu, but I can’t exclude some covid mutation, and I seem to have the same virus but asymptomatic; either incubation or my immune system is dealing with it) so my brain isn’t in top form, but let’s see…

Things usually follow a pattern of quantitative growth, followed by a qualitative breakthrough, such as initiation into vajra; it doesn’t feel arbitrary, so there must be some kind of underlying physics involved – for instance, in order for a spiritual body to grow to a certain size, measured in number of kalapas, the structure needs to be pure/homogenous, or it will collapse/fragment. However, if you get to a certain size, meaning that you maintained sufficient purity, a process of qualitative transformation begins, the way a liquid would turn into a solid, or very highly compressed hydrogen plasma would undergo fusion in order to form helium. Subjectively, this transforms your spiritual states from the expectation of greater/purer love that would follow if the present conditions were extended quantitatively, to states of consciousness that exist on a fundamentally different coordinate system, to the point where human language barely has any words to express them, due to the fact that almost no humans ever entered those states of consciousness and verbalized them. Most of it is metaphor and imagery that works if one is “there” so he can see what you’re talking about, but it’s nothing human, and nothing one would expect, but it is the “universe” in which god-stuff exists, and you can finally get how some things are possible. But, I must admit I don’t have a strong theory explaining the conditions defining the limits of quantitative spiritual growth. Also, I don’t yet understand how the process maps onto physical incarnation; I seem to have passed through phases of spiritual growth in this life, such as initiation into this and that, and yet all it seemed to do is create bridges and interfaces between this body and the pre-existing spiritual entity that had all this and more. The mahayana explanation of bodhisattvas and their process of “incarnation”, in fact spawning tulpas, is the best I have so far; basically, a bodhisattva looks at this world, feels a need to do something, and the motivation takes form of a tulpa that is a physical being that has a very strong motivation to grow back to the original spiritual entity that spawned it into existence. The more I got initiated, the closer I became to being the full physical incarnation of my true being. The corollary, of course, is that you can have failed tulpas, beings that failed to close the circle and attain higher initiation.

As an addition, when I think about the limits of quantitative growth, the necessary conditions are in the ability to extend one’s ability to feel others, and the “cracks” and “discontinuities” in one’s spiritual body are usually due to faulty ideas and beliefs that basically limit what you feel you’re allowed to do, and what is “right”. Also, there is a real possibility of having your mind so open your brain falls out, so to speak, and by feeling compassion with someone who is wrong, you lose your own correct perspective and adopt the wrong one, and if you’re not skilled at juggling multiple viewpoints, you might actually degrade your spiritual body instead of expanding it, so that would be counterproductive. The underlying assumption is that growing your spiritual body after a certain “normal” point requires additional skill on multiple dimensions – more detachment, more ability to shift perspectives, more mental and emotional agility, where your emotions are not “sticky” and you can get in and out of them quickly, and you need to be able to let go of your worldview/religion if it is restrictive. Considering how people usually think their religion will take them all the way to perfection, being able to let it go after it proves restrictive and doesn’t allow you to go further is quite an obstacle. Basically, the extension of quantity even a little bit after the “normal” point introduces quite a bit of additional spiritual demands, and it is definitely not “business as usual”, or a monotonous grind until some arbitrary point where you converge with the requirements for a qualitative initiation. Also, at least parts of the experiences preceding vajra initiation seem to be caused by the processes taking place in your astral body as it converges towards the limits and its inner weaknesses are “compressed” by the physics of the situation, like you would expect gravity to compress matter towards the limit where a “hot Jupiter” becomes a star, or something becomes a neutron star. Basically, shit gets increasingly weird, and people usually experience lots of assistance from above during this period – there are tests you must pass, there are temptations, there are things you must face and overcome, and so on. I’m not sure it’s not just the physics of extreme pressure creating “dakinis“, to be honest, but the result is the same – there are tests, and one can fail; I’ve seen that happen, too.

Then you get my failed students. 🙂