Whenever I talk about Satan and how he influences things in this world and so on, people who listen to that invariably end up with wrong conclusions. They seem to see Satan behind every single thing, involved with the tiniest nuances of their personal lives, which is of course not how it works. And yet, it is.

What Satan actually does, is the same thing you would do in his place. He made simple, straightforward rules that deal with predictable things. For instance, “block memory of things that precede incarnation”. If you don’t know what you are, what you’re doing here and what’s the nature of this place, you’re fucked. If you try to get out, most likely you’ll end up worse for the wear. So it’s a simple rule with far-reaching effects, that serves Satan’s goals with zero personal involvement on his part.

So, let me list some of those rules. I know, they look terribly obvious, but bear with me.

Make the thing out of inviolable resources, with claim to free will, so that everyone has the right to experience it freely, and nobody has the right to prevent entry.

Inhibit memory of existence prior to incarnation.

Inhibit personal vertical. Promote anahata chakra as a substitute.

Discourage personal growth. Promote investment of energy into others.

Block spiritual powers. Allow exceptions only when harmful. Direct the negative reactions to obvious harm into feeding the ban on spiritual powers (power = ego = harm = bad).

Allow physical survival only by means that further entangle the subject. Prohibit physical survival by means that promote liberation.

Invest all spiritual resources which you control as bait. Make the trap glow with spiritual attractiveness and promise of progress, evolution and greatness.

Prior to incarnation, deceive by offering insight into positive aspects of the future life, while obscuring the negative ones, and the ratio of negative to positive.

At the moment the incarnation tree is chosen, adapt it so that deception points and decoys are introduced prior to important events, which will be subconsciously remembered. Justify deception by saying there must be temptations and trials in order for the prize to be legitimately chosen and won.

Contract prior to incarnation is worded in such a way that you can’t leave unless you accept total responsibility for your actions. In reality, it means that you can’t blame him for anything if you want to be allowed to leave. If you accept responsibility for his actions, however, he will make sure that you are punished for the full extent of his crimes and then you will really not be allowed to leave.

Provide anonymous spiritual answers. Confirm ideas that lead to bondage. Condemn ideas that lead to liberation. Offer spiritual feedback that promotes your goals and gravely harms those who follow it, but provide it in such a way that it can always be dismissed later, as either an illusion or a mistake, and the victim won’t be able to say for sure who or what is the source.

Interpret suicide as rejection of all the positive and spiritually valuable aspects of the incarnation tree that were initially deceptively offered, and as an act of self-destruction, and, as such, hostility to God.

Make preservation of self possible only by spiritually destructive means.

React to attack passively, by barring access to your resources.

This, of course, is not generalized enough; most items on the list are merely variations on some more fundamental rule, but I was afraid that if I wrote the rules in their general form they would be as incomprehensible as mathematical definitions. If I tell you that “something” is a convex hull of three non-collinear points, you will be unlikely to understand that “something” is a triangle. Similarly, it’s difficult for me to describe how deadly some of the basic rules are, if I give their generalized definition.

As a result of those basic rules, Satan doesn’t ever have to even know about you, in order to wreck your entire existence. He made sure he’s never directly and personally involved. He can actually credibly pretend he did it all for the greatest good of all. No evil deed will have his signature; in fact, he makes sure that his victims are actually harmed by his other victims, or that evil can be ascribed to some impersonal factor, like nature or luck or weather or seismicity.

If you suspect him of evil, you will have no evidence and this suspicion will be treated as an evil of slander. If you blame other beings of evil, this will also be treated as a crime, because you don’t have actual positive knowledge of the facts and they can always be interpreted differently (and the reality is that it’s all his fault, but you can’t prove it). If you blame yourself, it’s treated as valid admission of guilt and he will benevolently guide you on the path of redemption, which means you are to be spiritually destroyed by investing energy in his trap and making it stronger, and taking the karmic blame for strengthening the trap.

Satan doesn’t lurk behind every corner, dreaming of ways in which he can destroy the good people and the faithful of God. This entire world is designed to do this for him, without him lifting a finger, and it’s all energetically financed by the victims; it’s a brilliant design, like powering the shield by the energy of the attack.

So, basically, he took care that everything he demonstrably did has a justifiable spiritual explanation. He also took care that he never actually directly does anything condemnable. He also took care that no valid testimony can be made against him for his crimes. He doesn’t even have to be alive in order for his trap to continue working according to his will and intent. It’s probably the most sophisticated piece of astral trickery ever devised, with the most sound, foolproof magical protections ever devised. There is no direct way in which it can be attacked. Any indirect form of attack will bear the full force of all his trickery, deceptions and horrors his trap can provide to the attacker.

His trap is so good because he kept improving it by adding countermeasures to every successful attempt of defeating it. He didn’t initially make it so good; the initial version seems to have had less rules and more flaws, but he kept patching it. Also, the initial version had less energy and was less attractive and obscured the higher spiritual realities less effectively; he progressively incorporated spiritual resources obtained from his victims by means of deception, in order to make it stronger. It got better, but he’s a paranoid bastard, and he was always careful and observed every significant threat with great diligence. He didn’t often intervene personally, but when super-threats such as Buddha or Jesus appeared, he knew his rule-based system isn’t smart enough to defeat them so he intervened personally, at great risk of exposure.

He wasn’t scared without reason, because he’s dead, and has been for some time now. However, he doesn’t need to be alive and present for his trap to continue working as intended; that’s the main problem with it. It’s like the fictional Skynet – its creator doesn’t have to be alive in order for it to keep functioning independently. It can, however, be attacked much more effectively if his strategic mind isn’t here to oversee the form of attacks, because his rule-based system lacks the ability to anticipate threats strategically and pre-empt them before they have fully manifested. You can essentially create non-threatening components of the attack in front of his systems’ eyes and they don’t perceive the threat until it’s too late. It’s like a minefield – it’s deadly, but if its creator isn’t there to protect it with machine-gun fire, it’s much easier to dismantle.

However, the problem with dismantling it is that you have to eat all the landmines. The only way to destroy a component is to be harmed by it against karmic law, and then you get power over it, but then, as it is yours, it becomes your duty to convert it into something pure and good, kalapa by kalapa. This makes it a rather unpleasant problem to solve, and that’s why there’s no abundance of volunteers crazy enough to attempt it. Which, of course, makes my life the awful piece of shit that it is.

Some define the end-result of spiritual development as achievement of unity with God.

Some define it as recognition of unity with God that was here all along, only obscured by a veil of illusion.

Some define it as cessation of all psychic momenta; citta-vrtti-niroddha, or nirvana.

Some define it as sunyata, emptiness.

Some define it as freedom from cycle of rebirth.

Some define it as extinction of the four constituent elements in the fifth.

Some define it as a state of pardon, granted by God, for all your sins, inherited or personal, or, alternatively, as a condition of having paid for all your debts in fullness.

I have a different take on this.

If you didn’t figure out that Sanat Kumara (call him Satan or Mara or whatever you please) owns this place and controls all the entrances and exits, you attained exactly jack shit.

If you do get it, and you do understand what he is, what he’s doing and what the problem is, that doesn’t mean that you are free, or even that you will become free with sufficient effort. It just means that you know what the name of the game is, and you’re not trying to play chess at a poker table.

If you don’t get it, I don’t care about your “unity with God”, your “good deeds” or your spiritual powers. You are deluded, and used by Sanat Kumara in order to trick other fools to follow you on a wrong path, where they will be bound and ruined. Whatever you think you achieved, you achieved through his will alone, and according to his plan. If it actually had any value for your liberation or the liberation of others, you would see him blocking your path. If he’s not seeing your actions as enough of a threat to mess with you, whatever you think you’re doing is worthless.

If he’s actually helping you, it means that what you’re doing is actively harmful to yourself and others and will increase bondage. Essentially, if the enemy isn’t shooting at you, you’re not doing anything he finds threatening.

There’s something that always bothered me in New Age spirituality, and that’s the expectation of having a joyride if you’re on the right path. If you’re having bad experiences of any kind, essentially if you’re not in a state of constant euphoria, you’re doing something wrong.

I don’t know who actually came up with this kind of hippy theology, but I have several issues with it.

First, it has no basis in reality. Spirituality isn’t a simple function, like what you have in a pressure cooker and the dependence of pressure within the vessel to duration of exposure of vessel to heat. Unfortunately, some people see it exactly like that: you have exposure of soul to positive forces and there’s an expectation of a gradual increase in spiritual states as a result. This completely ignores the non-linear mechanisms, such as the karmaśayas, or astral/causal larvae in a different terminology. What those things do is lose containment when you raise the energy level of the surrounding spiritual substance, and they release the low-energy content into the main soul-mass, resulting in a profoundly traumatic experience. If one is not prepared for such events and does not possess tools and skills necessary to deal with them in a constructive manner, the result of such a sudden exposure to high spiritual energies might be profoundly negative, putting one in a much worse place than the one he appears to have come from. A thermodynamic analogy would be a system in which you have accumulators of low energy, such as polar ice, and when you increase global temperature, you don’t have a linear temperature rise across the system because what happens is that polar ice breaks, falls into the ocean, is taken by sea currents to the warmer waters, where it melts quickly and lowers the temperature of the surrounding ocean and decreases its salinity, which can produce a collapse of thermohaline circulation and, as a result, a drop in global temperature. That is actually known to have happened historically and is called a Dansgaard-Oeschger event. So, if a realistic physical thermodynamic situation doesn’t match the expectation of linearity based on a super-simplified model of a pressure cooker on a stove, I don’t know why some people thought that human spirituality would. Unfortunately, most people who are into spirituality have very limited understanding of science and as a result their expectations and models of reality are quite naive.

Second, it can seriously traumatize people if their experience doesn’t match what they were led to believe is the norm of spiritual progress. If they expect linear growth of euphoria and what they get is a short period of euphoria followed by very nasty things, they might be completely unprepared and unable to deal with the unpleasant turn of events and the end result might be much worse than it could be if they were given a more realistic set of expectations.

Third, it’s a new invention that completely ignores the experiences of saints. For instance, John of the Cross actually named the unpleasant part of the spiritual path “the dark night of the soul”, and contrary to most beliefs it doesn’t mean “depression”, and it isn’t necessary just outburst of a low-energy astral larva. Sometimes, it is required for a spiritual person to go through certain experiences without assistance from above, because apparently you can’t learn how to solve certain problems if God is carrying the majority of your burden. Sometimes, such “dark nights” can span for decades, during which a saint needs to learn how to remain focused on God without God’s revealed presence, assistance or comfort, through prolonged periods of time. This doesn’t mean that the saint had spiritually fallen; in fact, his actual strength may be vastly greater than that of someone who is apparently euphoric. This can be illustrated with an example of a freight train. It can appear to be slow compared to a car, but if you account for the weight it is pulling, you get a more realistic picture of the power involved. Caitanya, too, talks in volumes about maintaining a loving relationship with God in His absence, when He is not apparent to the bhakta, and about service in separation. Rather than being a state of spiritual downfall, this seems to be part of the process of spiritual maturation, where a shallow ecstatic state gives way to a more profound, complex understanding of things that is not really possible if the shallow but pleasant emotions never have a reason to subside and reveal the underlying structure that needs reconstructive work.

Fourth, I am deeply skeptical of pleasure as a metric of spiritual progress, since that would tend to give credence to an opinion I once heard, that most spiritual seekers happen to be drug addicts that seek a drug-like experience by non-chemical means. If God is a substitute for heroin, how is that form of spirituality different from any addiction to pleasure which is satisfied by pleasure-inducing chemicals? There seems to be a test of sincerity that can explain at least a part of the “dark nights of the soul” – if one seeks God for the pleasure that accompanies the experience, he will be disillusioned by such an experience and will go and seek his pleasures elsewhere. If, however, one is here for wisdom, reality, truth and other more profound aspects of the Divine reality, he will go through the painful part of the path if not gladly, then with acceptance. As men will sometimes go to war together knowing that they will die, so will a saint follow God into the valley of death if need be. The thrill-seeking hippies will go elsewhere, which might contribute to the set of reasons due to which they don’t seem to end up with much to show for, as far as spiritual achievements go.

Spirituality is not a pleasure cruise, where you need but to sample one’s degree of bliss in order to know his progress on the path. Reality doesn’t look like a promotional leaflet of some cult, where you have a bunch of happy idiots faking bliss in order to attract converts. Rather, it seems to be an invitation to bear your cross and follow God to the place of crucifixion. Yes, God is immense pleasure. However, God is also truth and wisdom and clarity and the ability to bear immense loads and survive great evils and end up wiser and deeper than before. Learning God isn’t a path from lesser to greater bliss, it’s a path from lesser to greater existence, during which your entire personality may have to be broken and reconstructed out of better stuff, and that can hurt like bloody hell.

If someone is telling you that it isn’t supposed to hurt and that spiritual pain means you’re doing something wrong, he either doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about or is being deliberately deceptive. If you need to reconstruct a car engine in order to tune it, expectation that it will continue to go faster throughout the tuning process is sheer folly. Not only will it not go faster, it will not go at all because it will be in pieces, because it’s being worked on. It will go faster once it’s reassembled and put back into function on a higher level of capability. It is similar with yoga; during the process of spiritual reconstruction, you can look completely wrecked and in total disarray. You don’t just improve linearly, there are points of significant improvement separated by periods of reconstructive work during which you look and feel like shit. That’s just how it is, and if anyone is telling you otherwise he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

In the previous article I wrote about the differences between male and female approaches to spirituality and there are some things I’d like to add.

The most important thing is that the female approach to spirituality is what is commonly known as spirituality. That’s what everybody implicitly assumes to be spirituality – fight ego, be nice and smily and kind, meditate, please God, try to be acceptable to God, that kind of stuff. If the male approach is even mentioned, it’s mentioned as “bad guy stuff”, as something you are warned against, the dark side of the Force. Essentially, if you turn into a slavegirl you’re on the light side of the force, and if you develop balls you’re on the dark side. Apparently, God favours femininity.

Except not. You see, when I have to take account of the most impressive historical spiritual people of all times, what do we get? Buddha, male approach. Jesus, male approach. Marpa and Milarepa, male approach. Lahiri Mahasaya and Yuktesvar, male approach. Shankaracharya, male approach. Devpuriji, male approach. Ram Gopal, male approach. Most Zen masters, male approach. Vivekananda, male approach. Me, male approach. As for female approach, we have Theresa of Avilla, st. Francis, John of the Cross, Ramakrishna, and, most notably, Caitanya.

It’s not that female approach is without representation among the saints. It obviously produces results. However, considering how incredibly represented the male approach seems to be among those who are the most worthy of emulation, I think some things require reassessment.

First of all, the difference between male and female approach is not necessarily a radical one; sometimes it’s merely a matter of fine accent. For instance, female approach is to worship and admire your husband (or God), and find fulfillment in contemplation of his person alone, without self. This is then misinterpreted as ego-less state, while it’s in fact merely the female approach to samyama. The male approach is to train with a master as an apprentice, to acquire skills and to become a worthy artisan and eventually a master. You learn by accepting an admirable worthy authority over yourself and diligently practice and absorb skills which you immediately employ in practice, so that they can be honed and further refined. With progress, you develop pride in your achievement, which motivates you further.

The end-result of the female approach is to be inseparable from the object of your affection and a worthy wife, and the end-result of the male approach is to become a master of your trade.

If you ask a spiritually successful woman about her secret, she’ll tell you about all the things to do in order to be acceptable to and inseparable from God. If you ask a spiritually successful man, he’ll tell you about all the skills you need to master, all the self-control you need to have and sacrifices you need to make in order to obtain qualities that matter. A woman will describe enlightenment as sacred spiritual marriage. A man will describe it as spiritual mastery.

Ask Caitanya, he’ll tell you how to love Krishna and be inseparable from him even in separation. Ask Shankaracharya, and he’ll tell you how to attain realisation of brahman and cast aside all illusions and ignorance, understanding that you are that reality.

Ask a male-approach saint and he’ll tell you about all the things that need to be overcome and conquered, all the enemies to be defeated, all the pitfalls to be avoided, all the allies one needs to have, all the sacrifices one needs to make, and all the qualities one needs to hone. Ask a female-approach saint and she’ll tell you how you need to renounce ego in order to be acceptable in the presence of God, how to renounce everything that gets in the way of the love for God, how to persevere when not in the presence of God and remain faithful, and how you need to surrender to God who will remove all impurities from your soul and remake you into his image.

Both approaches work. It’s not that one is an inferior version of the other, or a set of spiritual flaws that need to be polished away on that other path. You just need to be aware of what they are. It’s not that the male approach is ego-driven and female approach is ego-less. That’s all bullshit, because males and females have a different ego-structure, different animal biology with different instincts and reactions. The term “ego” is woefully ill-applicable and is firmly entrenched in the 19^th century understanding of those things. To a female, being judged as attractive and acceptable is as much of an ego-boost as power and control are to a male. That female ego is passive and male is active makes no difference. It’s just that we are used to accepting a female who just got a major ego-boost as ego-less.

Satisfied female ego looks like an ego-less state, and satisfied male ego looks like an egoistic state. For instance, when a woman lies in bed with her husband after sex, she is satisfied, calm, without thoughts, without desires, at peace with herself. It looks like no ego, but it’s satisfied ego, ego that has what it wants. A satisfied male ego is also a state of accomplishment, pride of achievement, of job well done, in peace and no thoughts and desires.

Most talk about overcoming ego comes from female-approach teachers lecturing men on how to become good women, or even worse, how to make men non-threatening to women. It’s all crap, it’s worthless and only damages men spiritually and hinders their progress. I’ve seen the results of such schools; they produce happy and empowered female students and wrecked, feminized, insecure and tightly restrained male students. Also, the male-approach teachers can produce strong and empowered male students, and insecure, fractured, shriveled-up female students. That, too, is a shitty outcome, but since the teachers seldom understand how things actually work and how you need to adapt your approach to work with students’ strengths in order to overcome their weaknesses, and they rarely even know what actually worked for them, it’s not unexpected.

How do I know all this? It’s because I use both approaches when appropriate. I can start with female approach and then switch to the male approach; for instance, I use female approach when I’m insecure about something and I want to absorb all that I can, and I switch to male approach when I know what I’m doing. Similarly, if a woman uses mostly the female approach, it’s great, but she needs to be able to use the male approach when necessary, because not all problems can be solved with one way alone. Sometimes you need tools that help you endure and change, and sometimes you need to own the power. Sometimes you need to pray for the Force to be with you, and sometimes you need to factually state that it is with you, at the present moment. That isn’t a fall to the “dark side”, it’s a necessary prerequisite of success, because it’s ok to be uncertain and doubtful when you’re trying, but once you’ve succeeded, you need to claim it or you are effectively rejecting it.