Considering what I wrote about human genetic predispositions in the previous article, one might conclude that I think male approach to spirituality is inherently better than female and that women are therefore disadvantaged.

What I actually have a problem with is women teaching men their female kind of spirituality, with the end result of men not achieving anything. This female approach to spirituality became so widespread that men are seriously disadvantaged unless they see it for what it is and understand that a masculine approach s not a set of flaws that need to be corrected in order to turn them into a proper version of a human, which just accidentally happens to have ovaries. There’s no inherent problem with either female or male approach to spirituality as long as you have a correct understanding what they are, how they work, what is their realistic purpose, and what’s the realistic chance of success if you apply them with the intended goal of attaining liberation.

The male approach to spirituality is to correctly diagnose the situation, to figure out how it would best be approached, and then to improvise methods in order to achieve the goal.

The female approach to spirituality is to be likable in order to gain favor from the entity in charge, assuming the entity in charge reacts positive to cute and lovable females.

Let’s model the problem first, in two possible ways. First model is impersonal, according to Vedanta. This place is what it is, there’s no-one in charge, there’s no lock on the door, but ignorance, desires and past karma bind souls to this place and the only way out is to gain proper understanding and realization, to shed desires and cultivate detachment, and to patiently work through past karma.

The second model is the common denominator of Christianity and Buddhism. You did something that got you attached to this place. This place is the domain of its King, whom Jesus calls Satan the prince of this world, and Buddha calls him Mara, the lord of illusion and binding. The King is completely immune to empathy, he doesn’t react to any form of manipulation, and he couldn’t care less about females, cute or otherwise. What he cares about is keeping everyone bound to this place in order to achieve his goals, whatever they may be.

Let’s now see how a competent, intelligent male would approach the problem according to both possibilities.

In both cases, he would read all the literature and consult all the experts. According to the available options, he would attempt to source all possible help. He would then assess what has the greatest probability of working, and would try that first, and if it fails, he would reassess and work down the list through other options. There’s essentially no difference in his approach regardless of whether there’s a “boss” at the gates or not. If the problem is impersonal, he will attempt to attain all the spiritual qualities that will liberate him from this mess. If the problem is personal, he will also attempt to attain all the spiritual qualities that will liberate him from this mess, and he will also study possible approaches that will help against the King. If that means accepting Jesus as his savior, he’ll do that. If that means emulating Buddha’s dialogue with Mara, he’ll do that. In any case, his approach will be coherent, practical and appropriate for the circumstances. It might still fail, but you can see how it’s rational and straightforward.

Let’s now see how a woman would approach the problem.

A woman would instinctively assume that she needs to influence the person in charge and that this person would have a known emotional response to her actions. She will first try to make herself look good and acceptable. Then she’ll try to see if she did something wrong and try to fix it so that the person in charge will see that she’s trying to be a good person and she deserves credit for trying. She will either cry and act remorseful, in order to gain sympathy, or she will attempt to be loving and radiant, non-judgmental and sweet. She will read all the spiritual books, with the purpose of making an effect on the person in charge, so that he sees that she’s trying and that her heart is in the right place. She will try to adopt all the recommended modes of action and fit in the group that seems to be spiritual.

If the problem is impersonal, meaning that there’s no gatekeeper and the only thing keeping us in bondage are our personal beliefs and investments of energy, the female approach won’t achieve anything. In case there is a gatekeeper, he is completely impervious to this form of influence and manipulation and will use the energy of all those attempts to keep the person in bondage and illusion. She will be submissive to him and he will accept submission and use it to increase bondage. She will be remorseful and he will use that as admission of guilt which strengthens bondage. She will try to make herself fit into a stereotype or a group, and he will use that to increase bondage.

So in both cases, the female approach to solving the problem, which works for manipulating powerful men into sharing their status, resources and sperm with you, will completely and utterly fail. The male approach, which works for dealing with problems in the real world, which works with actual forces, actual enemies and isn’t a social networking strategy, has a much better chance of working.

However, there’s a way in which the female approach to things might work excellently, and most women who managed to attain a high spiritual status used exactly that method. What a woman has to do is to find a concrete, actual person who is either a God or a yogi, and marry that person. How do you marry a God, well it’s simple, the nuns do it all the time. You just dedicate your entire life and your entire focus to that person that embodies God to you, you contemplate, meditate, feel the sublime spiritual states and qualities of that person and completely absorb them into yourself and model your entire personality around satisfying that person. That’s the natural female instinct, and if they target it right and follow this approach with unyielding tenacity that females genetically possess and use when they want to get something of supreme value, their approach has an incredibly high chance of producing high states of consciousness in which they can receive actual Divine guidance and instructions, which they can follow and attain liberation. Of course, they are highly vulnerable to all sorts of deceptions from Satan, so it’s a a weapon that cuts both ways. However, this form of bhakti-yoga and puja is actually designed to utilize all the female instincts and genetic makeup and that’s the primary technique of yoga a woman should use. For men, such techniques are not nearly as appropriate, and things that emulate a crisis, combat and admiration of a great, noble personality full of virtues, that would work better. For men, ishta devata is someone you emulate. For women, ishta devata is someone you surrender to and who becomes your spiritual husband. It’s a gender thing – men want to do great things, and women want to fuck men who are doing great things, and to obey them diligently.

So that’s all there is to it. Both male and female approach work if you know what they are, who you are, what you want to achieve and what will be the easiest way of doing it, for you personally. But there’s no one single method that always works, just as there is no one superior gender. However, the sure way to mess things up for yourself is to try to do things in a way that is appropriate for the opposite genetic and spiritual makeup.

But let me make this clear: all of this makes sense and works only in the initial phase of spiritual work, before you attain actual spiritual guidance and before you have to actually do things. When you receive guidance and make progress on your path, the way you need to approach things is not gender-specific, it is completely and utterly identical to the male approach, because you’re dealing with real world problems and not social networking problems. If you need to practice vipassana or the inner space technique, it doesn’t mean anything whether you’re male or female, everything you need to do is identical. If you need to have a verbal duel with Sanat Kumara, it doesn’t mean absolutely anything whether you’re male or female. Both Romana and Biljana had such duels with him, and they did it in the most male way possible; Romana gave him a retort worthy of Buddha (“All sins belong to you”), and Biljana immediately remembered one of my personal idiosyncratic weapons and struck him with it, to great effect.

So yes, female stuff is all nice and cute and cuddly, but if you’re a woman and you need to kill some shit, you need a male weapon, like a sniper rifle or an RPG. You don’t want a female weapon, like high heels or a mini skirt. 🙂

Let me tell you why I lost my patience with Vedanta some decades ago.

To Vedanta, the state of realization of essential unity of atman and brahman, the first-person realization of the true nature of Self as one with brahman, is the fundamental metric of emancipation and spiritual success.

This state is acknowledged as identical to the state described in Patanjali’s Yoga as samadhi, union of the observed, observer and the process of observation. Samadhi exists as savikalpa and nirvikalpa, which are usually described as partial and full attainment of Self-realization. When nothing remains outside the “I Am” realization, samadhi is nirvikalpa, without remainder.

The problem is how to differentiate between a hippy who entered samadhi on LSD and was drastically changed by the experience, and a yogi who entered a samadhi as a result of a process of spiritual transformation. If the end result is the same, it’s the same, right? Also, the problem is that the experience of samadhi doesn’t necessarily produce an enlightened personality. I’ve seen genuinely insane people who had an experience of samadhi. The experience itself was authentic. According to Shankaracharya, this is not supposed to happen. Such an experience is knowledge that erases ignorance. All seeds of past karma are roasted in the heat of knowledge. The clouds have been blown away and the sun shines in all its glory. This is the ultimate end-result of all spirituality, all there is, non plus ultra.

Except that it isn’t.

The various schools of yoga came up with an inflation of terms that are supposed to deal with the obvious perceived difference in spiritual attainment between people who have had a first-person experience of brahman. First it was savikalpa and nirvikalpa. Then it was nitya nirvikalpa, the authentic nirvikalpa samadhi, no fucking around there. Then it was kevala nirvikalpa samadhi. Then it was sahaja samadhi. No, really, this is the real thing, the stuff before was not really it, but this is, we’re not shitting you.

One interesting thing I figured out when I entered samadhi in 1994 was that staying in that state would not suffice to make my spiritual position closer to that of Babaji or some similar spiritual superpower. Something else needed to happen, some kind of transformation that doesn’t exist in the metric of Vedanta, and which I therefore couldn’t put into words. Not knowing what that was, I put my faith into higher guidance which led me thus far.

I had a significant breakthrough when I was reading Bhagavata-purana, the part where the Kumaras are visiting Vaikuntha loka in order to see Krishna. The Kumaras are constantly in the state of samadhi, they are basically the end-result of all aspirations of yoga and advaita-Vedanta. However, when they actually see Krishna, they are so overwhelmed by the immense spiritual differential that they start crying and understand that there is more than samadhi, more than atma-brahma-advaita, more than the “I Am That”. Similarly, you have Shiva, the all-powerful Lord of all yoga, embodiment of supreme transcendence, possessor of ultimate power over all Creation, the sole being who could swallow the poison of Maya without being harmed, as he walks with his wife Sati and encounters Vishnu, and tells her, “this is my Guru, he is way greater than me”.

How is that possible? On what metric, by what criteria?

It took me a while to chew on this. The result, however, is unexpected. The result is that Vedanta simply doesn’t provide a valid metric for spiritual progress or evolution, that it lacks proper understanding of human makeup, it lacks proper understanding of the world and it provides almost no guidance. The single most obvious claim to veracity that Vedanta possesses stems from the fact that various beings, yogis et al., enter the state of self-realization of brahman. If not for that, it would have absolutely no merit, because every other claim that it makes can be quite simply falsified by evidence. Karma doesn’t follow predictions of Vedanta. The gunas don’t exist in any way other than as useful high-level behavioral approximations; they are obviously an impromptu invention that was supposed to supplant the Buddhist theory of elements (which BTW is confirmed by observational evidence in the advanced practice of yoga). The structure of soul doesn’t follow Vedanta‘s predictions, because the difference between the less and more evolved beings is not that the less evolved beings have more bad karma; they have barely any karma, which is why they are unevolved. The more karma a soul has, the more evolved it is; exactly opposite to the claims of Vedanta, but exactly following the Buddhist theory of kalapas and elements. Essentially, Vedanta is wrong on so many essential counts, it is useless for all practical purposes.

And here goes my radical statement: what if Vedanta is also wrong about samadhi? What if it’s not what Vedanta claims? What if Vedanta only provided a close-enough explanation of the phenomenon that everyone parrots the same cliches, and the reality is in fact something entirely different?

Let me provide an alternative explanation for samadhi. In samadhi, the limiting effect of the physical brain stops being the primary filter of reality onto consciousness, and that role is taken by the astral substance, which is inherently self-aware, it is of the nature of asmita, self-ness. In the astral mahat-tattva, God-presence and God-awareness are inherent in every kalapa, and you have to really work in order to mess with that, it’s that obvious. Beyond the astral, there exist the increasingly higher substances, whose kalapas carry a more essential quality of God, not just joy, awareness, clarity, consciousness and bliss, but deep, hard reality that’s different from the astral plane in ways similar to those in which a black hole is different from water vapor. If you concentrate an enormous number of astral kalapas, condense their essence, the way you would condense hydrogen in order to produce a star, and then collapse the star into a point in order to produce singularity, well, that point of singularity is of the quality of vajra, and its spiritual gravity is immense, it’s the difference between soul-stuff and God-stuff. There are also kalapas of increasingly higher order, and they make the spiritual essence of the Gods. So yeah, there’s your explanation of the difference between a hippy on LSD and Vivekananda, and difference between Vivekananda and Ramakrishna, difference between a disciple who had an experience of samadhi and a guru who could grant those experiences to others. There’s the difference between the Kumaras and Krishna. It’s not about how deep an experience of samadhi one had, or how long did it last, or how much without remainder it was; those concepts are merely attempts to fix a rotten boat by applying increasingly bigger layers of duct tape to the increasingly larger holes. The problem isn’t fixed by inventing increasingly “better” kinds of samadhi; the problem is fixed by abandoning Vedanta and adopting a better explanation of spiritual realities.

I guess I should say more about things that make people go crazy in the context of Kundalini work and spirituality, since I already mentioned it in passing. Also, the stuff that is protective against that might be useful so I’ll mention that, too.

So, the stuff that’s closely related with what one could be called Kundalini psychosis:

• Entitlement. If you think you have rights, you’re fucked, because the first thing you do when things get unpleasant, and they invariably do, is to feel victimized and whine. This essentially collapses your energy system and you get caught up in a vicious circle of hurt-whine. Immature whiners with rights are a very nasty sight in the context of Kundalini.

• Egomania. In this context it’s usually spiritual egomania, sounding very much like advaita-vedanta, and it sounds either like “I am God, I am the Divine Self, there is no higher authority above me, I’m on top of the world”, or, in milder cases, “I don’t need to respect anyone because you are all just persons, and I bow only before the Self”. Tough shit, because in advaita-vedanta brahman is the Self in all beings, regardless of their enlightenment, and a true jñani of vedanta bows before all. The difference between jñana and egomania is that a jñani, who sees one atman in all beings, bows before all beings, and an egomaniac wants all beings to bow before him because he fails to understand the true nature of atman. Egomania is actually a symptom of a wrecked vertical and usually accompanies serious energetic starvation; it doesn’t mean Kundalini is rampant, it means Kundalini is blocked, or at least constrained at some level.

• Feeling of invulnerability. This was the bane of my failed students. They learned powerful techniques of cleansing astral and pranic bodies, and felt as if all their actions are reversible; they could experiment with anything and simply use kriya to remove the adverse consequences. The problem is, they didn’t understand how kriya works, and why I, who taught them, am so careful about avoiding sinful activities. You see, sinful deeds have two main consequences: they mess up your energy system and they restructure your karmic body, because you made a choice of a certain kind and you literally became the person who made that choice. The first part can be cleansed and repaired trivially with my technique. The second part, not so much. In order to fix damage to your spiritual makeup inflicted by sinful deeds, you need to recant, you need to “undo” the choice, make another, different choice, and make amends. Unfortunately, once people start feeling invulnerable, they get addicted to the feeling of power, and then → egomania and → fail. When people talk about the dangers of Kundalini this aspect is almost never mentioned; usually people talk about overheating, too much energy coursing through the chakras and nadis, things breaking and blah, but in my experience, the worst danger comes not from improper handling of Kundalini and the physical damage to mind and body, but from the feeling of invulnerability and invincibility because the techniques you learned work exceptionally well, and you think you can fix anything, you are up to any challenge, God loves you and wouldn’t allow you to fail, you will always be protected and safe, and you can experiment with all sorts of shit, cast morality aside, treat the world and beings in it as if they are your playground and toys, and it’s all about you. This is a major hazard and a point of failure. No, the technique is not omnipotent, and no, you are not safe. You are vulnerable, you are at risk, and God will not save you if you make choices that reject him.

And now let’s talk about the protective things, things that keep you safe:

• Faith. You need to understand that your life is not under your control. You were born here with suppressed memories, suppressed powers and in a situation you have no control of. Your true nature is not known to you, but it is known to God. God knows who you truly are, and knows what you truly need for your greatest good. The only way for you to not end up wrecked is to put your faith in God and to listen, cooperate and obey. Which brings us to…

• Obedience. If you want to learn how to be God, first learn how to kneel before God, and pray. In your faith, be obedient, be diligent, be mindful of your duties and don’t ever do anything that would desecrate things that are holy. The only way to achieve true power is to allow the flow of power through your being, and that is achieved through faith, obedience and

• Love. However, love without clarity is blinding and dangerous, because it is vulnerable to illusions. So through faith and obedience you absorb insight and knowledge from God, and you are mindful of your situation, you are mindful to the reality of the world and this manifests as the greatest benefit to your surroundings, whatever that may look like. But in order to correctly balance your actions you need

• Surrender. Sometimes God will decide to do things you don’t understand, and for reasons you cannot see. You need to accept that you are in a valley and your horizon is limited. Since you don’t know what’s truly going on, you need to accept the fact that God knows more than you do, he can do better, and in order for you to learn better you need to surrender to his guidance and simply be aware and awake to what’s going on, without passing judgements. This means

• Detachment. It doesn’t mean giving zero fucks, it means caring deeply, but not binding yourself to interpretations of what’s going on, and being in a position of learning, not judging. Thinking you understand what’s going on is a form of attachment. The proper attitude is to take in what’s going on in all of its aspects, but not pass judgement. Rather, allow the truth to come to you gradually. To be detached is to be receptive, and not to close oneself off in the conceit of assumption. It is the position of a true scientist, who mindfully observes, but never passes definite judgement. However, you need

• Responsibility. When you decide to do something, be aware of what you decided. Don’t feel victimized by your choices, and don’t be remorseful. If you did something right, nod and proceed. If you did something wrong, figure out what was the nature of the mistake, understand it fully, then correct it and proceed wiser for the experience. Agonizing over failure is useless and creates an energetic state that tends to perpetuate errors. Instead, you need to be not nonchalant, but relaxed about your fallibility. Yes, you will make mistakes. It’s the part of the process of figuring things out. It’s important to figure out what was wrong, and to fix it. If you can’t fix it, do better next time, wiser for the experience; pay it forward. The best approach to mistakes is not to get crippled by them, but to be enriched and wisened by them. When you make mistakes, think of yourself not as a sinner, but as a Jedi Padawan in training. Yes, you can make mistakes. You can make a wrong call. You can be deluded, you can be deceived, you can be led astray, but you are still powerful, worthy, good and with a great destiny ahead of you if you keep learning from your mistakes.

• Trust your instincts. As you get wiser, your instincts get better. Initially, they are shit, but later on, they become close to infallible. Initially, you need to suppress all negativity, because it is bound with ignorance and contaminated by low-energy structures within your energetic bodies. However, as you progress on the path of spiritual evolution and purification, you need to trust your anger, trust your hatred, trust your cynicism, and you must trust your love, desire and compassion. As you incorporate aspects of God into your being, you must learn to trust them. This is a difficult lesson for people to learn, because initially they learn to doubt themselves and their instincts and desires, and to trust only God, but as things progress, God gets closer and closer, and difference between what you feel and what God feels is vague. Opposite of egomania, this is the state of sublimation of ego, of its perfect attunement to God, in will, character and essence. As much as it is dangerous for a beginner to trust his instincts, because his instincts are filth, it is even more dangerous for an advanced yogi not to trust his instincts, because they become the will of God.

• Renounce self. This means also renouncing self-criticism, self-doubt, and self-control. After you’ve been kneeling before God for years, being an obedient servant, being mindful and listening to His will for so long, you need to renounce the last vestiges of self that define you as non-God. As you completely renounce yourself and your identity as a limited being, you understand your nature as that of a limited vehicle for God. This is a humbling and transformational event, after which you see it as your duty to keep refining the vehicle you inhabit in order to be able to use it for the greatest possible good.

So, basically, when a beginner-yogi thinks he’s God, he’s deluded and has a serious problem, but he likes the idea a lot and it makes him feel powerful. When an advanced yogi thinks he’s not God, he’s deluded and has a serious problem, but he likes the idea a lot and it makes him feel powerful.

🙂