I had a walk this evening and took the camera with me in case I find some interesting motives.

I found a thin log that used to be there to mark someone’s private property, but it was there for so long without anyone actually maintaining it, that it rotted away and collapsed. I found that to be a very good visual metaphor for things that I see everywhere lately. Aspects of society that were put there centuries ago when they were important, but since everyone caring about them died, it all crumbled away into something derelict, something so far removed from practicality that nobody even knows why it was there in the first place.

It’s not just that, either. I found things in my memory that were there, just waiting for me to make some sense of them while they were crumbling away, because I no longer cared enough to even pay them a thought. Things related to my native family, that got somewhat revisited when my mother died. I let the last connections to those people rot away almost two decades ago, when it became clear that those people are so perpendicular to my path that keeping any contact with them is pointless. My mother was always a pathological narcissist who destroyed all lives she touched; I broke all contact, and didn’t even come to her funeral (was it this year, or the last…?) because I believed she was truly dead and didn’t feel the need to check. My father was concerned that maintaining connections with a scandalous son who has two wives and believes in things that are very non-Christian will cause him issues with his Catholic friends and patrons, so he basically gave me a phone number that went straight to voicemail, but he could call me from it when he needed me. I shrugged and stopped trying to keep in touch. I was recently “pinged” from above to inspect some things regarding my brother. I used to think that when I started on my spiritual path in 1993, he did so as well, but I was recently given access to astral prints created by him in this period, and that was a shock, because he did nothing but maintain impression that he did, and remained the product of our parents’ upbringing in every way. What he actually did was electronics, and he became very good at that. Spirituality-wise, he basically picked up the lingo form me, but no transcendental experiences, nothing. At some point he basically invented some fake buddhist nonsense, proclaimed himself a Buddha, proclaimed himself immune to karma, and is currently a fake guru to the cult of one; himself. I didn’t know that 20 years ago when I broke all contact with him – because he was an egotistical, jealous, snarky bastard without any sense of respect or propriety – but I didn’t realise he was a completely fake person, not just a weak and nasty back-stabber. What I did know was that I was done with his shit and no longer had time for this. He was always an energetic chameleon; when he was around me, he adopted my patterns, and when he was around total assholes, he adopted total asshole patterns. Also, he thought he’d boost his ego by being rude and arrogant with me, especially in front of my students, which confused and disturbed people without any good reason, and he would do his Muttley snicker of glee, happy that he made a mess which means he exists. After a few of those, I simply let him go his own way, not giving him much of a thought. I hear he’s slandering me behind my back, but since he has negative charisma, the only effect of this is destruction of what was left of his reputation among the people unfortunate enough to have to deal with him, or who had the misfortune of taking him seriously at any point.

So, all of that is in about the same condition as that piece of wood, that was once a ramp that performed a function, but since nobody cared for decades, it rotted away from lack of energy and care invested in its maintenance. That’s how many things in my life ended – I just no longer cared whether they are there or not, and eventually they just stopped being there, and I still didn’t care enough to check. I simply had more important things to do.

I swear, people who know little are so much more annoying than people who know nothing. This is the case everywhere – you have people who dabble in psychology and go around sharing their oversimplified, mostly wrong ideas about people and society. You have beginner photographers who heard something about the rule of the thirds or sharpness across the frame and now they endlessly annoy people thinking how every photo has to be composed according to the concepts they heard of in order to be good. Or you have people who just discovered the Bible and go around preaching about this or that sin and how you need Jesus. Or people who discovered spirituality and now they can’t shut up about karma, reincarnation and vegetarianism. Or people who developed some inkling of energetic/spiritual insight and now they annoy people about how impure their aura or chakras are. You know those people. The “saved Christians”, the Hare Krishnas who discovered the “truth” about reality and now they have to preach in order to save the rest of you unwashed masses. The astrology chick who’s all about Mars entering Virgo. The vegan who’s saving the world from cow farts.

The people with simple solutions to complex problems who annoy others to no end with their ego tripping of having an imagined higher ground over others. We all know them, we all sigh deeply, roll our eyes and pray to God to give us patience.

I recently read about something called Matrons’ revolt; essentially, it’s a psychological phenomenon first described in the ancient Rome, where women in their 40s or 50s, basically women whose children grew up and left home, have some sort of an identity crisis because some biological switch flips, and they no longer see themselves as mothers, and start figuring out who they actually are. They first look at their husband, and if his role was merely to provide and protect as part of bringing up children, she decides she has no use for him any more and divorces him. Then they start looking for the meaning of their lives and get into activism, politics, religion, spirituality, philosophy; essentially, they are having a female version of the mid-life crisis, and it seems to be a biological thing. Also, it seems to trigger only if a woman is financially in a position to be independent, which usually means the upper societal classes. Poor people can’t afford the luxury of that kind; they need to stick together and figure out how to pay the bills and get food on the table.

The reason why this was so interesting to me is that it provided an elegant explanation for a phenomenon I encountered – older women, always some kind of upper middle class, who think of themselves as accomplished, esteemed, basically better than others and occupying a higher societal tier, who for some reason got into spirituality, and of course, since they are so awesome, they automatically assume they have a good understanding of it all. They eventually intersect with me, I see that they are a vacuous non-person with a super inflated sense of self-worth, and I summarily dismiss them. Then they have an ego inflammation and proceed to tell all who would listen to them how I’m no good, which suits me just fine, because if anyone would believe them, they’re an idiot and I don’t want them to have a good opinion of me anyway.

It’s kind of funny – I found an algorithm for “spiritual” Karens. 🙂

How do you determine someone’s choice?

The obvious answer is to ask them. However, this implies that they know what they are being asked. Ask an atheist whether he wants God, and he’ll say “hell no”. On the other hand, ask that same person what they want and they’ll start to talk about happiness, love, fulfilment, knowledge and so on, basically lesser manifestations of God. Basically, such a person suffers from avidya, which is a very useful term from Vedanta, which poorly translates as “ignorance”, or “lack of knowledge”. In fact, a better translation would be “anti-knowledge”, things you think you know and you hold on to them as if they are important and you would be diminished by their absence, and they are merely nonsense that would have to be removed in order to make place for real knowledge. Basically, there’s too much shit occupying space in your head for reality to compete. So, how do you know what a person suffering from avidya actually wants and chooses?

Ask a woman what kind of a man she wants and she will start about all kinds of nonsense – he needs to be tall, good looking, fit, wealthy and powerful and so on. Then you make an online dating service that allows women to choose men that fit that profile, and they will all compete for the same 1% of arrogant whoremongers who will fuck and dump them, after which those women will complain that there are no good men left and all men are trash. No; you just created a superficial criterion that selects for good looking trash.

The problem those women have is that they are checking their instincts and they seemingly tell them what will trigger the feeling of safety and fulfilment. The problem is, they don’t know themselves and their true nature enough to predict. For instance, they can’t predict what will happen when they sit at a table across a person who is of average height, casually dressed, doesn’t have much money, but her soul clicks to him because he’s her actual partner. What she thought would be triggered by a tall, muscular guy driving a Lamborghini is literally nothing compared to what would happen when she meets her matching Lego brick. Also, when she would imagine a romantic evening with her partner, she would imagine nonsense such as a dinner in a fancy restaurant, or a bubble bath with candles and roses, and if she had all of that with a wrong person she would feel the wrongness, as if she were a caged animal. With the right person, she’d be doing absolutely anything, and she would have the feeling she expected from a romantic bubble bath with candles and hundreds of roses. The thing is, people have stupid, superficial, materialistic ideas about how happiness is caused; they think it comes when all the physical stuff is set up just the right way, as if the matter will cause them to be happy. In fact, that’s the exact opposite of how things actually work, which is why people predictably fail in their search for happiness. No, happiness doesn’t happen when you meet a tall, muscular, rich guy who buys you flowers and takes you out for dinner. It’s the opposite – when you meet the right person, you are so happy you don’t even perceive the physical matter, it can be whatever and it doesn’t matter in the slighest.

Biljana recently asked me how I felt about the new lens that I bought, the FE 135mm f/1.8 GM. I told her that I start caring about lenses once I make great images with them, the ones that make me feel great about the equipment that allowed me to take them. Until then, a lens is merely glass, plastic and metal, a piece of gear that means nothing to me regardless of how expensive and optically perfect it might be. Then I take a few nice pictures and start feeling good about the lens, or I take great pictures with it and have a feeling that it set me free and allowed me to create exactly what I meant to, and I start really loving it. I used to have lenses that were absolutely inferior to my modern gear, but I loved them because they allowed me to take pictures that were exactly what I wanted to create. On the other hand, the modern GM lenses are absolute optical jewels, but I hardly even started using them. I did create some nice pictures with them, but nowhere near what I made with Minolta MC 50mm f/1.4, MD 35-70mm f/3.5, or Canon EF 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5.

Emotional and spiritual significance has nothing to do with nominal material metrics, it’s like comparing the person you love to a better looking person you don’t care for. The better looking person is just a nice looking piece of furniture to you, a bag of meat with no significance. Sure, if you ask someone what they want, those objective material metrics will for the most part be what they are talking about, or they will talk about intangibles without knowing what they are talking about or how realistic those expectations are.

So, how does God know what you actually want, when you yourself can’t tell? Well, first of all you need to have options to choose from. If you choose God and heaven because they are all you know, is it a real, informed choice? If you choose hell because it’s all you know, is it an informed choice? If you choose men or women based on how certain physical attributes trigger your sexual instincts, are you making an informed choice, or are you merely manifesting ignorance of what you actually need? You can look at pictures of women all day and pick parts from each that look best thinking you could merge them all into one person and get the ideal woman, or as a woman you can look at pictures of men and think how tall and muscular your ideal man should be, but in reality, what will actually make you click is a soul connection, and you can’t get that by putting all the superficial stuff into one person and magically expect to get something ideal.

Also, people who have no knowledge of God will talk about how God needs to be this or that – omnipotent, omniscient, the only one etc., and they never understand and expect the most important thing that makes everything else irrelevant – how God makes you feel. They expect to see something great or magnificent, but they don’t expect their sense of self and reality to change in his presence. They don’t expect that God makes you realize your true self when you’re in his presence, they don’t expect to not care at all whether he’s omniscient and omnipotent once they see him, because the what happens to them is something they never expected, something they never knew to expect, and something completely different from anything they would describe beforehand. You expect to be awed from the outside, and instead the cage for your soul shatters, and you are no longer small, limited, afraid, ignorant and alone. The presence of God isn’t about how you perceive God, it’s what presence of God does to your sense of self. It’s like living your life like a black and white photo and then not only growing colours, but photo shatters completely and you are the reality of the captured moment, not only visual but emotional, perceptual, everything.

How do you know whether you want that beforehand? You couldn’t know enough to say anything meaningful about it. However, once you have such an experience, how do you know whether you chose it? Let’s say you can’t just repeat it at will. But you can choose it by choosing to make it precious to you, by choosing to make other people feel like that, making them feel that the chains around their soul shattered, that they are no longer in a small dark room but in a wide, endless space within. You can choose to give light, love, happiness and knowledge to others. That’s how you choose God – by being to others what God’s presence is to you. You don’t become happy by wanting to be happy and collecting all the things you associate with happiness. You become happy by removing limitations from others the way God would remove limitations from you, were you in his holy presence. You truly choose things by doing them to others.

I would continue the last article with several stories, of the kind that never happened and yet keeps happening daily.

Story one. “Friends” hanging out, slightly drunk, telling embarrassing stories about each other in front of third parties. “Remember how he was simping over that slut like a damn idiot, it was terrible, he was buying her flowers and writing her love letters like a total beta NPC. She was stringing him along for months while sucking off Chad and Tyrone, and we all knew it but we didn’t tell him because it was funny to see him make a fool of himself in front of everybody”.

Story two. Heroic warriors hanging out, slightly drunk, telling stories about each other’s adventures. “Remember how we barged into a jungle where a gang of armed robbers were camping, while we were just hanging out aimlessly. They jumped us, and he just instantly snapped into warrior mode, took out his weapon and started weeding them out like they’re nothing, and they were seriously hardened bastards and murderers. It was so awesome to look at, I’m getting chills now remembering how much he kicked their ass.” “He’s not telling it right”, the other hero answered. “It’s true that I came at them hard as they jumped us, but I had tunnel vision and didn’t survey the environment properly, and missed three bastards hiding in the foliage, and he saw them aiming at me behind my back and took their heads off before I figured out what’s going on. I owe him big time, he was so much tactically smarter than me that day, that it wouldn’t have been a victory if not for him. I’d have kicked ass until I got killed, but thanks to my buddy, it all looked easy instead of it being my funeral”.

Story three. “Guys, I have to tell you something embarrassing about Joe.” (everybody giggles, Joe thinks “here goes…”). “When we were camped out near Kandahar, the dumbass commander had the camp placed in the valley between two hills and stationed guards at the entrances of the cauldron. Of course, the Taliban crawled down the hills quietly during the night, ended up right in the middle of our encampment and started shooting at the tents and throwing hand grenades. We were all running around like headless chickens trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, and Joe was in his underwear, balls hanging out, grabbing a heavy machine gun and starting to spray the motherfuckers with heavy metal. He got five of them good, to the point where the rest started losing their shit and the rest of us sleepy bastards managed to wake up enough to join him in kicking their ass. He looked like a fucking god of war or something, nuts out, peppering the hostiles with vengeance; I wouldn’t be too surprised if he zapped them with lightning from his eyes or some shit, that’s how awesome he was. He saved our butts, and the idiot commander later reprimanded him for facing the enemy in improper uniform. Can you believe this shit?”

Story four. Women hanging out and complaining about their husbands, trying to make themselves important by criticising and belittling them. The last one feels uncomfortable by the whole atmosphere where women try to impress others with how cool they are and how stupid, weak and boring their husbands are. Eventually, she decides to speak: “I am very sorry that all of you seem to feel the need to belittle your marriages and yourselves in this manner, and I wish to have no part in this. My husband is smart, focused, good and I keep thanking God every day for letting me find him. Everything is so much better when he’s around and if I had to complain about something, it would be that people outside the family don’t know enough of what a wonderful person he is”. Then the rest of them start making faces and snorting with contempt, and she takes a good look at them, excuses herself and leaves, making a mental note to avoid bad company in the future. She comes home, the husband asks how it went, and she shivers and says “may dear God save me from ‘friends’”. She tells the husband the details and he makes her popcorn and cocoa before bed, while the crazy harpies proceed to plan how to cheat on their husbands and destroy their families.

So, you see, there are multiple ways of hanging out with friends over a beer and sharing stories. There’s a whole art of narrating something in a funny way so that you extol someone’s virtue, or pretend to make slight fun of them while in fact praising them for being awesome, elevating them in front of others. Or, you can tear someone down and create resentment, discord, pain and humiliation, while pretending it’s humour. Also, it takes some virtue to see that something is developing in a nasty direction and either counter the bad narrative or just remove yourself from the situation completely. Basically, weak people seldom have the courage to counter a popular but evil narrative from their “friends”, and to rather leave the company altogether than to continue participating in it and destroy their lives.