I’ve heard people praising persistence in the face of difficulty and failure in so many places, from business lectures to spiritual advice, it’s making me sick, because my experience is quite different. In my experience, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. If something you have been doing has fucked you up, maybe, just maybe, doing more of it and harder isn’t the brightest idea. Instead, how about stopping to think and change your approach, maybe even revise your goals? Because if things are not working, you have several possibilities, and you can present them in simplified form as a 2×2 matrix, where the possibilities are that you are doing either a right thing or a wrong thing, and you are doing too much or not enough. So, the troublesome possibilities are that you’re either doing too much of a wrong thing, or not enough of a good thing. At the point of failure, assuming that you are doing the right thing, and only failing because you’re not doing enough of it is simply stupid.

Let’s put it this way. Life is a process of learning, from the point where you’re pissing into diapers to the point where you are reading articles such as this one. You had to go through certain steps in order to get where you are now. You didn’t get here by doing more of the things you did when you were 5. So, assuming that the first thing you will try will also be the last thing you will ever need is to assume you will die failing there. If not, you’ll outgrow it. You will either try it and see it’s not working, in which case you’ll find something more useful for attaining your goals, or you will try it, succeed and progress to the next level, of both understanding and methodology, and, quite possibly, of goals, because if your goals are still the same you had as when you were 5, you’re retarded. Your goals need to change with your growth in understanding.

The next issue is not that of right or wrong, but of approaching the problem adequately. If you don’t have a hammer at hand, it’s probably ok to hammer a nail or two with pilers, but if you didn’t get up to find a hammer after the second nail, you’re a lazy fuck. You need to change your approach as you do things; you need to adapt, learn, think. If your problem is something simple, such as unloading a truck full of cement bags, it is completely solvable by linearly scaling work. The more you work, the more gets done, and the more bodies you throw at the problem, it gets done faster. However, such problems are usually solved so quickly you can’t really call them “problems”. The stuff where you are likely to get stuck or fail is usually the stuff that requires a change in approach, basically you need to do things with your brain turned on and with your eyes open, observe what’s going on and focus on accomplishing your goals, and not necessarily on keeping your methods the same.

In spirituality, this is the most frequent reason for failure, and reason why failure is the norm and success is the exception. The way it works is that religions and cults assume their way is the right way, that more of it gives better results and all kinds of failure are due to not doing it enough or in the right way. Essentially, their basic assumption is that there’s nothing wrong with them.

Really?

Islam, for instance, thinks that solution to all problems is more islam. It doesn’t understand that the problem of islamic countries is that they are islamic. Ataturk understood that and worked on removing Islam from the position of Turkey’s solution-seeking paradigm. The result was that Turkey became the most advanced “islamic” country, but that’s a misnomer because it became advanced exactly because of not being islamic. Of course, there are always those who don’t understand that, and who think that the way to solve the remaining problems would be to introduce more islam, because that would make it better; of course it would, since there’s nothing wrong with it. Right. Also, in order to survive in the modern world, religions adapted by stating that you can take just the spiritual and ethical part of them, and for the rest you can have science and modern technology. However, if a religion fails at science and technology, if its approach is a dead-end there, what reason is there for you to think that its approach to God and ethics is any different? Most likely, its’s the same kind of failure, only more difficult to demonstrate because people were taught to accept bad assumptions as axioms.

Every stupid cult in the world thinks like that, and that’s why they are all dead ends. They are not solutions, they are problems. If you start from the premise that you already have all the important answers, you’re deluded. Spirituality is a process of transformation, and if you stick to all the ideas you initially brought with you, there’s no transformation, and doing more of that same shit will just waste more time.

No, the way to get somewhere is to assume you are on the starting point and you don’t have all the answers. When you get stuck somewhere, you can’t just assume that you need persistence. What you need is to stop and think, to see if you’re doing something wrong and that’s causing the difficulties, or you are in fact doing everything right and it’s just hard.

Persistence, of course, is essential when you need to do something that is difficult, takes a lot of time and effort, and you can’t just stop every now and then and check if 2+2 is still 4. Sometimes you indeed do have to persist and just grind the problem away. However, to assume that all problems are like that, that’s going to put you in a world of fail.

There’s been much confusion caused by my latest articles, so I’d better make it worse by explaining the complicated underlying mechanisms. 🙂

There are some schools of thought, most of them contemporary, that advocate building up the pranic layer which they see as a bridge-level between physical and astral, the theory being that as this bridge thickens, solidifies by the increased amount of energy, the connection between spirit and body will become better. Furthermore, they attempt to then “raise the frequency of vibration” essentially by stimulating the emotional context that is consistent with this thickening of the pranic body. A typical way to do this is by stimulating emotions in the high sexual spectrum – love, adoration, infatuation, that kind of thing. The theory is, if you connect this type of energy with transcendence, you form a bridge that brings spirit into the matter. An alternative to sexual emotions is a semi-ecstatic lovingkindness, embraced by other schools of thought that prefer to stay away from sex. I won’t name names but if you’re reading this you probably know who they are.

In reality, it doesn’t work. The method doesn’t produce people of high sophistication and spirituality; rather, it produces happy zombies, who all look like rubber-stamped generic template of a cult member. To me, this is anything but surprising, and now I’m going to explain why. Be warned: the explanation might be involved.

The first thing I need to explain is the difference between plant life and animal life. Apparently, the way spiritual entities incarnate is very different between the two. With animals, you get a central, integrated consciousness that seems to have a single-point incarnation interface; you have a nervous system that connects to the senses and muscles and, apparently, this central nervous system is what makes all the difference. My working theory is that it’s about the cytoskeleton consisting of microtubules, which seem to be “the secret of life”, because DNA is merely a “storage drive”, and the microtubules actually do everything. They are the reason why a single-cell organism can evade obstacles, gather food etc., without actually having a nervous system. Those microtubules exhibit properties that are very strange, and there’s a theory of them exhibiting quantum computing properties, essentially they interface matter with information. As I would put it, they seem to be the primary instrument of connecting matter and astral, by creating the intermediary dimension (non-integer Hausdorff value) also known as prana, or vital energy in some circles. I can’t actually know if it works exactly like that, but I do know that there’s some property on a cellular level that performs that function. That part I could verify personally, and the rest is a hypothesis. But let me go on. This cellular property of connectivity to the astral substance seems to be concentrated in the neural tissue and the fact that microtubules seem to perform all the computational functions of a neuron and there’s much more of them in neurons than in other cell types seems to lend credence to the hypothesis of the microtubules providing the fractal-dimension connectivity which makes it possible for the physical matter to interconnect with a spiritual higher-dimension reality. The molecular biology of it all is a bit over my head but I came very close to all this simply by observation of how prana behaves.

Unlike the animals, the plants don’t have a nervous system, but they exhibit certain awareness and responsiveness, which seems to exist on a completely different level than anything you can witness in the animal world; although, it’s not completely true. The basic sensation experienced by a “happy” plant that’s been watered is very similar to the basic sensation a human feels when removing tight shoes. There is a certain degree of non-neural sensations that we experience simply on the tissue level, and that kind of sensation is what plants seem to have. They don’t seem to have a central, unified consciousness that incarnates in them, but rather their individual cells create individual connections to astral kalapas that are inherently conscious and this creates the basic ability to experience sensations.

So, with animals, including humans, things function on two basic levels. We have tissue-level primitive connections to the astral, and we have neural-level connections to the astral, which are much stronger, centralized and organized. The combination of the two creates our experience of spirit that is aware and active in matter.

So, finally I come to the point. When you build up the physical excitement level with hormones and what not, you can increase the non-neural interfacing to the astral, essentially whirling up the connection between matter and astral, and you get more prana in your system, but the kind of prana that you get is parallel to your neural-astral connection, and not only that it doesn’t contribute to the bridge between body and spirit, it raises the noise floor and actually interferes with your vertical. But that’s not the only problem; those exercises for building up prana by increasing the sexual emotions actually modify the activity in the central nervous system in such a way that the lowest parts of the brain are kept active and their interfacing with the spiritual matter is increased, while the activity of the higher brain centers is suppressed. The chakras that are usually perceived in the body seem to have more to do with the parts of the brain that are active, and the chakra-sensations in the body seem to be merely a reflection. So essentially, those exercises aren’t bridging spirit and matter and creating a thicker bridge to the higher levels; what they are actually doing is suppressing connectivity to the higher aspects of reality by artificially increasing the lower brain functionality. Some will try to tell you that heart-centered emotions are really high functionality, but from where I stand it’s merely mammalian biologic emotionality and is about as spiritual as any other animal emotion. True, it will all light up when you’re having a spiritual experience, but that doesn’t mean much. If you piss your pants with fear it doesn’t mean that pissing is the way to re-create fear.

Now, I know why people thought it would be a good idea. They had a high spiritual experience that made their entire system active, and they thought that by reproducing the parts of the heightened activity that they can access from below, they will be able to re-create the spiritual experience. I don’t know, that might have actually worked here or there but from where I stand, it’s a cargo cult and it so incredibly doesn’t work. The fact that your heart is pumping when you’re running doesn’t mean that you can artificially make your heart pump stronger and that will automatically make you run fast. The fact that your cock was hard when you saw some girl doesn’t mean you can make the girl re-appear by making your cock hard. It doesn’t work that way.

And the thing is, the yogic traditions for the most part know that. True, they do include some cargo cult aspects but for the most part they understand that reproducing symptoms won’t reproduce the experience, and instead they are working on building up the basic resources and working on the spirit-side of things. Rajayoga, for instance, builds up mental faculties and the ability to focus will, and bhaktiyoga tries to create the intellectual anchors for attaching to God by telling stories that intend to form connection-points in the human brain, and then, if connection is established even partially when a student receives initiation and has a spiritual experience, mantras are used to re-iterate on that and keep the connection working and make it stronger. It’s all much smarter than it can sound when it’s explained by someone who doesn’t have an idea about the underlying mechanics of things, but the concept of an enlightened guru who is a living presence of God, and can initiate the experience in a student who can then iterate and expand on that, it’s very old and it very much works.

So, now that I explained why force-building prana by re-iterating some emotion doesn’t work, let’s see what actually does work. In my experience, all traditional yogic techniques teach some part of the necessary skillset. Rajayoga teaches the stability, strength and reach of mind; learning mathematics and science is actually more effective for accomplishing the same goal. Hathayoga tries to purify and steady the basic, low-level biological interface to the astral, in order to minimize interference and create a steady, calm flow of energy that will not interfere with attempts at meditation and the higher aspects of yoga. Jñanayoga activates the high cognitive aspects of consciousness and simply aims to activate the maximum and extend it. This won’t work when there’s too much interference from the lower sources, but when combined with the techniques that calm the system it works great. The same goes for the initiation-based mantrayoga. It won’t work if the system is too messed up, but if you make good preparations with other techniques first, and then light up a spiritual experience inside a recipient’s mind, he can then re-iterate and expand on that. There’s endless variety of ways in which those basic components can be combined in order to produce specific effects, which is why there’s such an abundance of various yogas.

So yeah. It’s all rather complicated, but there are actually good reasons why some methods work while others fail, and it’s not merely accidental. Do have in mind, though, that everything that can actually be described in this manner is essentially baby-yoga, the beginners’ stuff that is very quickly surpassed once you get to understand how those things work, gather enough spiritual experience and improvise your own specific combination of techniques that work the best for you. At a certain point you no longer practice yogic techniques, you simply shift the focus of consciousness and wield power.

I’ve seen a recurring error in some yogic and pseudoyogic groups, which basically sounds like this: spiritual growth means to raise the specific energy of your soul, therefore we’re going to teach people how to “raise their energy level” by feeling some kind of euphoria, reconstructing the feeling of love and elation, and this is going to have permanent beneficial consequences as long as they manage to persistently keep their energy at a high level and avoid the dips into depression that seem to happen invariably, probably due to some karma or another.

The energetic dips are not the result of any kind of problem with the practitioner. They are a perfectly normal result of having spent your energy reserves and having your depleted system function on a lower energetic level. The problem is with this entire approach, which is false, misguided and basically devised by idiots.

Don’t tell me it’s originally devised by Jesus or Yogananda or whomever. I don’t care how famous the idiot was, I just want to tell you he didn’t know shit about how human energy system actually works and what’s the difference between having a subjective perception of high energy, and having your soul built from actually high substances.

I know where the idea came from. When you have a strong spiritual experience, it leaves a residual charge in the lower energetic bodies, spinning them up to the highest capacity they can possibly take, making you feel almost as if you could walk on air and glow in the dark. So of course the first thing the first stupid fool thought of was “oh great, if we could re-create that glowing energetic feeling that accompanied the spiritual experience, maybe we’ll re-create the spiritual experience itself”.

Yeah, maybe we’ll re-create the feeling of flying in a plane by making airplane noises with our mouth and spreading our hands like wings when we run across a meadow like damn fools. That’s how cargo-cults are made. A stupid ape thinks he’ll re-create a thing by re-creating as much of the phenomena that accompanied the thing as possible. It can’t hurt, right? Except it can.

You see, the fact that a plane makes a noise while it flies doesn’t mean that you’ll come close to flying by making noises. You’ll probably just strip your throat raw. The fact that spiritual experiences are accompanied by bliss doesn’t mean that you’ll re-create a spiritual experience by re-creating bliss. You’ll just pump your personal energy into a futile effort, drain your system and cause depression. Read my lips: it doesn’t fucking work.

What those bliss-provoking techniques are trying to do is increase the energy level of the pranic body, and then stimulate the heart center, the anahata cakra, on that high energy octave. The theory is, since the heart center is supposed be very spiritual, this will produce a spiritual experience. The rationale for this is that the heart center is exploding with love and bliss during and immediately after the spiritual experience, so this center must be very spiritual. The problem is, during the spiritual experience your cock also gets hard, or your pussy wet, depending on what you have. It doesn’t mean those parts are abnormally spiritual. It just means they did what they are supposed to do when extreme energy is flowing through them. Everything just lights up, which is what it’s supposed to do when connected to a very powerful energy source. However, the immensely bad state of heroin addicts should suffice to convince you of the futility of the approach of chasing perfection through pleasure. Heroin activates extreme levels of pleasure, and the spiritual result of this is your destruction. Also, raising the energy level of the pranic body isn’t the best idea on how to approach spirituality, because the teenagers bursting with vital energy that forcefully manifests through the heart center and sexuality aren’t really what you would call spiritually inspiring people. More likely, they are very energetic animals, and if anything their increased animal energy stands in the way of actual spirituality, in a way similar to which strong light pointed into your eyes wouldn’t actually help you see better.

If anything, old people seem to have a better connection to spirituality because their vital, animal energy has been depleted, their spiritual connection to the world has weakened, and as a result you can almost feel the otherworldly presence in them, because they are more there than here. It is especially the case immediately before death.

So, essentially, building up the animal energy layer, also known as the pranic layer of the heart center, will in the best case scenario return you to the spiritual state of an infatuated teenager bursting with sexual hormones, and then drop you into depression once your energy has been depleted.

Another flaw of the approach is that it assumes that raising the amount of prana that flows through your system will increase your spiritual level. It won’t. It doesn’t actually influence your soul in any way, it affects only the part between your soul and your body, and it does it in such a way that it actually blinds you spiritually. It’s literally like trying to see better in the dark by pointing a flashlight into your eyes. It’s worse than useless.

If you want to increase your fundamental spiritual level, this is not the way to approach things. You have to approach it directly, on the spirit level, not on the prana level or emotion-level, essentially the lower astral. To put it bluntly, if you want to get your cock hard, the best approach is to talk to the woman you really like. You don’t approach things from your cock, you approach them from your head. If your head is in the right place your cock will know what to do without any assistance from you. Conversely, for women the right way to get your pussy wet is to see the right man. There’s absolutely nothing on the pussy-level that you need to do.

It’s about spirit. It needs to be in touch with God, and then the energy will normally flow through the right places. Your head needs to be in the right place. You don’t approach it from your genitals or from your heart; those things are secondary organs, that manifest the spirit when it’s in the right place, but the only thing you will get by trying to stimulate the lower centers such as the heart, is spiritual emptiness and depression. It’s actually worse than masturbation, because masturbation at least works, and this doesn’t. This is more like an addiction to destructive drugs – same concept, but less effective at inducing a temporary high. It’s about as spiritual as injecting yourself with heroin.

I don’t know if you can believe it, but I actually prefer having my pranic levels on a low baseline when I try to see extremely high and sophisticated things, at the utmost limits of my capacity. A heightened pranic or emotional level is merely a distraction, it doesn’t mean a high spiritual level, it means a high level of physical interference and noise and it just gets in the way, like strong noise or light, or like sexual arousal would get in the way if you were trying to understand how quarks change colors. “High” is not a universal metric; strong emotions and strong mind are independent and usually mutually exclusive things. The same goes for animal vitality and spirituality; they just don’t go well together. There’s an exception, though – an orgasm can be accompanied by a very deep spiritual surge in the right circumstances, because it’s more about discharging the vital energy than accumulating it, and it’s more about peace than excitement.

So, instead of trying to go “high”, try going deep, into calm and depth and clarity, and just feel the deepest aspects of God without trying to masturbate the lower energies into reproducing anything, because this entire approach is so fucking useless.