Empowerment

(continuation of the previous article)

Sometime in 2006, I asked a rhetorical question out loud – why are my powers under an embargo; why am I essentially stripped naked here, only to have to endure all kinds of avoidable crap. To my surprise, a few Gods actually answered. I talked to just one but I could feel the presence of others in the context, as well. He told me it’s because I would kill everyone. I was shocked – like, “Who, me? Fuck no, I’m the guy who talks to a cat to calm it down when it’s upset, why would I kill everyone?”

What he did conveyed the same emotion as if a human raised his eyebrows and looked at me significantly – like, come on, think about it. And I did, and in the following second or two I understood what he meant and I saw that he’s right. He then let me know that it’s actually not a bad thing or a bad idea, but that they have a different plan for dealing with the problem. Poof, gone.

But I understood several things then. First is that humans are not seen by Gods as children of God, whose lives are precious and important. Rather, they are seen as an abomination, a dark evil. And I understood why they thought I would kill everyone were I not under an embargo on use of spiritual powers.

Let’s play out this scenario where my powers are restored to me, like my vision is occasionally restored to me when the Gods want to tell me something. It doesn’t feel like getting something, it always feels like remembering and retrieving something that was covered by a veil and was inaccessible. Also, it doesn’t feel like me getting powers, it feels like me remembering the more real version of myself, unrestrained. So, I walk through the city and suddenly a veil drops, and I feel an expansion of self. I stop and find a bench in a park to sit down, all the while feeling the consciousness that is light that is vibrating in me, in things, in other beings. I feel both the kind of diffuse, soft, foggy light that makes the material objects, and the hard, strong, pure light/consciousness that makes things that are of higher reality. I just sit there and explore the “taste” of high consciousness, what it tells me about God, about His intents and the way He exists, and I test how deep I can go and see, how much of the intensity I can take.

Apparently, me sitting on a bench in a park and looking at nothing in particular is seen as suspicious to two cops who approach me to ask for ID. I perceive their existence with a fraction of my expanded consciousness, but I don’t see them as interesting in the context of what I’m doing, and I don’t see why I should interrupt my exploration of God’s inner being in order to respond to wishes of two lower astral entities wearing physical bodies. They, however, bark orders and radiate lower astral energy in the direction of my body. I decide that their existence is annoying, and transform their clothes, guns and batons into air, because their silly pretense of authority over me opposes God’s desired order of the Universe, and I strip them of their silly toys in order to show them what they are.

The naked and unarmed cops retreat in disarray and I proceed to test various parts of the Creation to see what is there that pleases God the most. Some things in the higher words are made of energy/consciousness of extremely high order, and beauty of it all is almost too much for me to bear, but I cannot force myself to stop watching. The crystalline structures made of solid vajra, of different colors, parts of it blue and parts so deep and intense it’s black, almost stab my mind with clarity, perfection, intensity and wonder of what it is to be God, and I sit there stunned, when something interrupts me. Apparently, the cops called for reinforcements, who are aiming guns at my physical body, hitting it with batons and trying to bind it with shackles, making angry noises and demanding my immediate submission, as if they are in the position to demand anything from me. Again, I strip them of their silly weapons and uniforms and this time I transport them all to the top of Velebit mountain, so that they’ll have time to think about their poor judgment on their way home, barefoot across sharp rocks.

However, all hell now breaks loose, because a TV crew was broadcasting the event live and it appears that the humans decided that I was somehow an evil threat that they must counter at all cost, because I was powerful and I didn’t feel like complying with their stupid bullshit because I was seeing them for what they are, in the absolute frame of reference. Of course I would not comply with their laws and their silly policemen, no more than a human would comply with the laws of an anthill. You don’t necessarily want to step on ants or burn them all with a flame thrower, but if they annoy you enough, you will eventually do something about it, but that “something” will certainly not be “compliance” with their laws, because you are under a completely different authority and you work with a much wider frame of reference.

And so they start shooting bullets at my physical body, and using flame throwers and bombs and grenades and what not, because they are incredibly threatened by the fact that they cannot order me around and control me and imprison me and kill me as if I were one of them, because I understand that their society is that of fear and submission, and politeness and compliance out of fear, and there are almost no positive aspects of the entire thing they call the “state” or “society”. I grow weary of protecting my body from all kinds of attacks and I first dematerialize all the weapons in the world, and then, after further thought, I dematerialize all the humans who are using this instrument of forced compliance on others. The remaining humans proceed to commit all sorts of evil deeds against each other, and manifest great spiritual darkness and perversion, and I decide that this form of existence is contrary to the will and intent of God, which is greatness and beauty, and I destroy everything that manifests ugliness and perversion, only to see that there are less than a thousand humans now left in the world, and they are confused, disoriented and helpless in this new world empty of organized evil and forced submission, and I take pity on them and transport their souls to higher worlds where they will be among their own kind, and under rules that are actually designed to implement the will of God and promote beauty and greatness. I then understand that this world is inherently evil, that it promotes the form of existence that is contrary to the will of God, and serves as a refuge to all kinds of evil enemies of God who made their evil den here, and that those who love God are lost here and subjected to evil rules contrary to goodness and reason, and I simply destroy this world and implement a ban on creating anything similar in the future, shedding my physical body in the process since it’s merely an image of light that no longer serves any purpose to me. All the good souls rejoicing in the higher worlds proceed to praise God, and all the evil ones who sank into various hells due to their inferior spiritual makeup, proceed to hate God and curse Him, falling even further with each decision.

I see that as a significant improvement and proceed to admire the beauty of dark vajra that makes the souls of Gods, stunned by the beauty and magnificence of God’s intent and his true creation, unlike that vile den of evil that Satan created in his spite, wishing to prove God wrong.

That’s what I understood in those two seconds, under a God’s “oh really?” look. But that’s not all that I understood. I understood that they see humans as vile scum, and this world as a shithole of the worst kind, and that there was no condemnation of what they knew I would do; in fact, they found the idea appealing, but not as thorough as what they had in mind, and they didn’t tell me at the time what that was. Apparently, they only wished it were so easy, but at that time I didn’t know about the problem with Sanat Kumar and all the protections he made against exactly that outcome.

Vermin

As you could have guessed by now, I read and watch many things, often quite weird, in order to be better informed about the state of things in the world, and the creatures that love to think of themselves as children of God. I recently watched many YouTube videos about gun culture in America. Some of those videos are harmless fun – some guys shooting targets with various guns. Some are about people field-stripping rifles, or even reconstructing them completely, or making their own ammunition.

Some, however, use the guns for their intended purpose of killing. There seem to be areas in America that have problems with coyotes and wild pigs. Only in Texas, there are over 4 million wild pigs that feed on crops, and the farmers are trying to do the best they can to deal with the situation.

One farmer grows pecan nuts, and the pigs come every night to eat his pecans, and at some point he called a friend with a gun and a night-vision sight to, basically, convert pecans into hams. Pigs eat his pecans, he compensates by killing some of them when possible, and eats them. I can understand that and I actually sympathize with the man. His position is “no wonder the pigs taste so good, they’ve been eating nothing but my pecans”.

Some farmers take it further and install fences with GSM controlled trap doors and cameras, and they capture pigs at the rate of 30 at a time and sell them for meat. This method is actually so effective it can be seen as the most effective pig farming method. Take some corn as bait, capture 30 pigs; I don’t know how much corn farmers normally use to grow a pig but I would bet it’s much more.

But this is when I get to feel sorry for the pigs, because they are getting hit disproportionately to their offense. The only decent thing I’ve seen those pigs experience from humans was when the hunter took pity at them and sprayed them with a water hose to cool them down, and I can just see how smart and aware of the situation they are, they’re not stupid animals, but very close to human level of awareness and emotion. You can see their fear and even emotional pain, the feeling of “please don’t kill me, I was just eating some corn”. And that’s just it – that’s the extent of their crimes. They ate some corn. I can see the farmers’ position. He grows his crops, be it peanuts, corn or pecan nuts, and the pigs eat what doesn’t belong to them and harm him, so he has to do something about it. But I also see the pigs’ position. They were eating something tasty that was on the ground, and they are captured and being driven to the slaughterhouse. They are not evil or malicious; they are smart, cute and like tasty things.

There are words that people use when they want to depersonalize you in order to feel morally justified when treating you extremely badly. One such word is “animal”. It’s a very general word for beings that move around on their own, and are not humans. It is so broad it encompasses everything from bugs to whales. If something is an “animal”, it means it can be excepted from empathy. It can be killed and eaten. God doesn’t protect it, moral law doesn’t protect it.

There are worse words, like “vermin”. “Vermin” is the subset of animals that is seen as harmful to human interests. A cockroach is vermin, for instance. You can kill it with no remorse and it’s actually a good deed. A rat is vermin, a wild rabbit is vermin, a coyote or a fox is vermin, and apparently a wild pig is vermin. The word “vermin” is emotionally charged in such a way that one feels absolutely no remorse for eradicating it. They are pests and they are stepped on like bugs. This works especially well when you exterminate vermin from afar, seeing it as a tiny speck in your rifle scope.

When you kill vermin from a helicopter, it’s a funny target practice. There’s no empathy, because you’re shooting vermin, and they are just rat-sized moving targets seen from above.

But that’s the trick: humans can be seen as vermin, especially if you see them from afar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTHF2OeskEQ

You see an image on the screen and you decide whether it’s human or vermin. If it’s vermin, you press a button, see puff of smoke and vermin falls down. If it continues moving, press button again until it stops. Vermin eradicated.

There’s a reason why the Nazi concentration camp workers and commanders lived perfectly normal lives and didn’t suffer from any particular stress. They were not killing people. They were eradicating vermin. It’s a good thing, it has to be done for the benefit of your kind. You are a child of God, and that’s just vermin.

A cockroach is vermin, a rat is vermin, a pig is vermin, a Taliban is vermin, a Jew is vermin. From afar, all vermin is alike, they are cockroach-sized specks you can place a cursor at and squish them until they stop moving. From up close, a pig is conscious, aware, afraid and feels pain because it knows it is about to be killed for the horrible crime of eating corn. From up close, vermin that is brought to a concentration camp for orderly extermination is Anne Frank. But you don’t want to look up close, you shave their heads, dress them in rags and treat them like pigs or rats or some other species of vermin. It helps you make the moral distinction between you, a child of God, and vermin that needs to be exterminated for the greater good.

Humans like to feel good about themselves, they like to feel they are better than vermin, than animals, than “that scum” they are shooting. Americans in particular seem to be very fond of that attitude. They eradicated the Indians who were vermin. They eradicated the American bisons by shooting them from trains for sport. They went to Vietnam where they treated the patriotic locals as vermin, and occasionally eradicated entire villages full of vermin, the strange looking people who didn’t speak English and instead made incomprehensible vermin noises. Obviously it’s not a problem, it’s not like they’re killing good Americans.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a famous Buddhist teacher, told stories about how the Americans killed his students in Vietnam, either by accident or in their valiant effort to exterminate vermin.

It’s interesting how vermin can be quite smart and sophisticated. I, myself, used to be that caged pig, and I used to be an ant-sized creature in someone’s targeting scope when he shot rocket-propelled cluster bombs in the general direction of where I used to live, along with other vermin that was to be indiscriminately killed. The Americans who pay for the opportunity to shoot at pigs from a helicopter remind me of the so-called “weekend Chetniks”, who found great entertainment at shooting the Croatian vermin in Vukovar during the siege. It’s not like they were shooting at proper humans or anyone of value. It’s not like my wife was there as a child, throughout the entire siege, and was hit by shrapnel from a tank grenade that exploded in her home. I must say it’s an interesting experience to be seen and treated as vermin, because you get to learn much about humans and how they rationalize the evil of their existence. They, the children of God, who are doing only what has to be done for the greater good, exterminating vermin and fighting evil.

But what if the table were to be turned, and you found out that “vermin” were in fact the precious children of God, and you are a dark abomination in the eyes of the Gods? What if they saw your extermination as a good thing, as destruction of the evil spawn of Satan?

(to be continued…)

Why Buddhism works and New Age doesn’t

Positive thinking is all the rage in the New Age circles.

In my opinion, that probably contributes enormously to the general outcome of them not managing to achieve jack shit, because positive thinking is a slave-girl mentality.

I am now going to make a rather graphic presentation, but I assume that if you lasted here so far you are a mature enough person and a fainting couch will not be needed.

Imagine a New Age/Wiccan paradise of people somewhere in the early Holocene period, who worshiped Goddess Earth, praised her for all her bountiful gifts – fruits, grain, domesticated animals that provide you with eggs, meat and milk, and not least of all, sex. Focus on the positive, feel happy, praise Goddess in all things. Earth is beautiful, it loves us and showers us with gifts.

Then there are other people, with horses and swords, who look at that place and they also see the gifts of the Goddess Earth – fruits, grain, domesticated animals, and humans to be enslaved as domesticated creatures that provide you with sex and labor. They, too, will praise the Goddess for her bountiful gifts of food, sex and slaves.

When you praise Goddess for all the resources She gave you, you think of wheat and apples as resources, you think of cows, pigs and chickens as resources, but you never think of yourself as a resource that will be harvested by someone else, who will praise Goddess for giving him your body and servitude to enjoy, because he is so loved and appreciated.

There’s a reason why men have a different attitude towards positive thinking on a genetic level. It’s because men who were thinking positive ended up castrated and died working on some field or in a mine or building an aqueduct. They didn’t leave descendants. Those who were cautious, aggressive and who were assuming the worst, who have taken up arms at the first sign of trouble and simply killed all the enemies, they lived to reproduce and have their offspring reach maturity. Positive thinking simply died out in the male line because it’s a lethal trait.

In the female line, things worked differently. If the females were loving, submissive, forgiving and positive, they took well to captivity and servitude. As they were thinking positive thoughts, lived in the present moment and tried to use the situation the best they could, they fell in love with their captors, admiring their positive qualities and ignoring everything negative, such as them having butchered their former husbands and children. No, that’s past and can’t be changed, but the present moment is what’s important in order to build the future. As they were thinking positive, they were radiating a sexy kind of energy and producing nice hormones, making their captors’ cocks hard, so they proceeded to fuck them. Those who were the most positive had the most orgasms while fucked, were the most favored slaves, and as they got pregnant they were elevated to a higher status, their children survived and their genes went on. Those who were loyal to their former husbands, who were angry at their captors, or were sad and depressed, were either outright slaughtered as potential danger (Judith and Holofernes, anyone?), or were relegated to menial labor where they wilted away and died without leaving offspring, and so their genes died. Women were therefore genetically selected to be happy, tolerant, positive, loving and forgiving slave-girls who live in the present moment and build their future from there. Men were genetically selected to be aggressive, ruthless, paranoid and cautious, mindful of past experience, understanding patterns, and carefully planning ahead. Men who thought positive died as castrated slaves building an aqueduct or mining copper.

New Age is a religion of successful slave-girls. It makes defeat into future victory and submission into orgasm and pregnancy. It makes rape a victory because you belong to a better man and you need to be thankful to Goddess for giving you into the care of a better provider and a source of more successful sperm. A successful slave girl doesn’t mourn being enslaved by a warrior tribe, she immediately starts daydreaming about how sexy and strong those men are, and falls in love with them. They don’t have to rape her, she’s all willing; she’ll orgasm before they manage to take her panties off. That’s what makes her successful: she’s so positive she’s seen as cute and bountiful gift of the Mother and the captors take to her immediately, in fact the leader will take her for himself. The less successful ones will die doing laundry, for both the men and the successful slave-girls and their children.

Buddhism, however, is a religion of super-successful men. It is realistic to the point of pessimism. It admits we’re fucked, diagnoses the problem excellently, and prescribes therapy. It doesn’t care for positive thoughts. If you’re hit by an arrow, positive thinking doesn’t do shit for you. What actually helps is to admit you’re fucked, to try to figure out how to remove the arrow without bleeding to death, to suppress infection and to survive the ordeal.

It’s not at all surprising that Buddhism was invented by a prince from the warrior-caste. His ancestors lived because they were pessimistic, they assumed the enemy was stronger than it is, better armed than it is and has a better strategic position. Then they assumed that his peasants were more productive, his blacksmiths made better swords and his horses and elephants were stronger. They then proceeded to organize their state so that the peasants were more productive, the blacksmiths made better swords and armors, the horses and elephants were bred to be stronger and more resilient, the walls of the cities were taller and stronger, they occupied better strategic points and their spies gave them better intelligence about the enemy, and they struck first and won.

That’s why Buddhism is useful for conquering the world and getting out of jail free, and New Age and Wicca, the favorite female religions, are useful for being a happy slave-girl who showers her captors with love, kindness and servitude, heart warm with feeling and pussy wet with acceptance.

If you want to achieve anything in spirituality, the positive “all is well” attitude is the first thing you need to lose. The only kind of positive attitude that you need is that of believing that it’s possible to get the fuck out of here if you do everything right, if you ask for and receive all the right kinds of help, if you use your luck and opportunities to the best possible advantage, if you’re not discouraged by failure because the situation is so dire that it’s expected. The true positive attitude is that you invest all your energy into efforts that will produce liberation, and retract all energy from things that further your bondage. That’s the way of thinking that helped men keep their balls in their sacs and their heads on their shoulders, and since this is the kind of mentality that actually works for winning, and not just for being a happy loser, you would do well to pay attention, men and women alike.

The common core of sectarianism everywhere

I recently commented on the similarities between the Open Source community and New Age. Since then I thought more about that and it seems to me that the similarities are far from being superficial. In fact, I think I’m on to something here. But let me explain.

They both think they are saving the world

In the Open Source community, “the enemy” used to be Microsoft, but now Apple seems to be taking over that role. Essentially, what makes them evil is that they make things everybody can use and find useful, and they make a shitload of money doing it. Of course, that’s not what the Open Source advocates will tell you. They will rant about closed source and proprietary code and what not, but there seem to be two main objections that weave through the arguments. First is “I don’t feel important and special if I’m using it because everybody can do it”, and “I can’t see the source so it must be spying on me in secret and I can’t trust it”. There’s a striking parallel between that and the opinions about the Catholic Church in the smaller religious communities. It doesn’t make you feel special because there’s a billion members, and there are all sorts of conspiracy theories about Vatican and all sorts of its supposed nefarious activities. Essentially, the big bad evil Sith Lord Emperor is in power and the valiant rebels must take him down, with the help of the Force, of course, because they are the good guys. When they take down the Evil Empire, suddenly everything will be right in the world. There will be no need for money because everybody will share things equally with others and respect each other. How they imagine they will remove conflict and disagreements in the world when they can’t agree on the color of shit even in the smallest of things they are in charge of today, I have no idea.

The things that actually work in the real world are the enemy

Let’s put it this way. If you want a computer that just works – all the hardware drivers work, all the software you need works, it’s fast, doesn’t get in the way, it’s difficult to break and will reliably allow you to do other work and completely ignore the underlying bells and whistles, what will you choose, assuming that you are technically proficient enough to be able to use just anything? Will you use a Mac, a Windows machine or a Linux machine? I’m in that exact position so I know. I used everything at some point, from Commodore 64 through a DOS 3.20 PC, Windows 3.11, 95, NT 4, 98, 2000, XP, Ubuntu Linux from Gutsy to Trusty, and a Mac Air laptop. You know what I use when I want things to work reliably, without interruptions, for years? I use Windows. It’s the most stable, the least problematic OS I know – with exception of Windows 10, which is only slightly better than Linux, in that every now and then some small thing breaks and I need to restart it. On a Mac, every OS upgrade breaks something important and I have to reinstall few programs I rely on, because they stop working properly and a new version needs to come out that is adapted to new crazy and pointless shit that Apple introduced just to fuck with it.

But when you listen to people, you’d get the impression that a Mac just works, never breaks, and Windows machines always have problems with this or that, and if you have problems with Windows and you don’t want the proprietary prison that is Mac, get Linux, that will solve all your problems. My experience, however, is that you need to have Linux on your desktop if you want to keep your skills sharp because shit is always breaking down and you need to keep fixing it, and all of it’s done from the command line, and keeping current with that helps you from getting lazy; essentially, you’re constantly in the role of a system administrator, not a user. With a Mac, things just work until you install an OS update. Then everything goes to hell, then you fix it and it keeps working for another year, when there’s a new OS update. With Windows, you install it and it just works for 10 years. When there’s a service pack, you install it and it still just works. Things break as an exception, not as a rule. You need a major OS upgrade so infrequently, you will often be having two major hardware upgrade cycles in between. With 2000, XP and 7, I kept suspending and waking up the machine for so long, I’d usually shut it down only when I went away for a vacation, and rebooted only to install some major software upgrade. Essentially, the machine with Windows behaves like a toaster, only I had toasters break more frequently than Windows machines. It’s incredibly reliable. If a Windows machine is unstable, in 100% of the cases you have a hardware failure, 80% of which is a bad RAM stick. Unfortunately they broke this polished reliability somewhat in 8 and 10, and 10 GUI is now on the reliability level close to that of Mate desktop, which is the most reliable and usable Linux window manager that I know of, which means that it usually just works, with occasional stupid shit happening without any apparent reason, like quarter of every icon missing where the shortcut sign is supposed to be, because [reasons]. Fixes with reboot. Other than that, the machine behaves like a toaster, which means, it just does what it’s supposed to, quickly, reliably, every day, so that I can do whatever else I do when not fixing the computer.

The similarity with the New Age is apparent. If you say something positive about the main-stream spirituality to someone in the New Age circles, it’s like praising Hitler in a synagogue. You can say all you want about the main-stream being spiritually sterile, obsolete, corrupt, power hungry and godless, though, and just watch the audience’s eyes glow and hearts warm with happiness as you do, but if you say something positive about the main-stream religions or something negative about some New Age nonsense, they’ll turn into harpies and try to scratch your eyes out. But the smartest people usually come from the main-stream, from the exact organizations that are supposedly devoid of all spirituality, corrupt and dark, and all those supposedly creative people in the New Age communities usually just rehash other people’s ideas, write bad poetry and literature and are intellectual midgets who think they are giants.

There is a huge number of “contributors”…

…but they mostly simply copy things from the few actual major contributors, who all originate from outside the movement. Just think about it: in the Open Source community, the greatest number of “contributors” either duplicate each other’s efforts, or contribute very simple, trivial things of little use, like ten different text editors that are all either the same or they are shit. The greatest contributions come from great companies, like Sun Microsystems, IBM, Google or Apple.

Again, the similarity with New Age is striking. When I was on the Kundalini mailing list, there were exactly two people there with original techniques that were not simple rewrites or rehashes of previously available stuff: Angelique and myself. There were practitioners of Vipasana and Dzogchen who did their stuff according to tradition with little or no innovation, there were practitioners of all sorts of pre-existing techniques and systems, and those who were the most innovative, in the sense that they did their own thing, were usually the craziest one with most problems, which would be easy to correct by simply switching to some traditional approach. So basically you had a group of people that appeared to be extremely fragmented and individualistic, but when you had to summarize and see who was it that did something useful that actually worked, you got several old traditions and two original contributors who were actually proficient enough to invent techniques and approaches through their own personal practice. Out of what, six hundred people or whatever the number was? However, whenever people spoke about traditional systems, you would get the impression that traditional systems are restricting, limiting, and inferior to the freedom and individuality of New Age.

Infighting and sectarianism are rampant

Let me quote something from Wikipedia. It’s not a list of Linux distributions, it’s a tree of distribution-types:

Basically, everyone in this tree hates every other branch, and they all hate Apple and Microsoft. But when you ask them what they are all about, they’ll talk about unity, love, freedom and creativity. I don’t even need to mention similarity with the New Age communities, do I? You just can’t believe this shit.

The moment something has a chance of actually succeeding, it is denounced as the enemy

If it doesn’t work reliably, it’s a creative small independent community or an individual who is boldly experimenting with advancing [x]. When it actually works to the point of other people wanting to use it and it becoming the main stream, it’s the evil cult of money and power whose only purpose and agenda is to limit and enslave others. Replace x with [software, spirituality, food, soap, toilet paper].

It’s only seen as positive and creative as long as it’s useless or actively harmful. When it actually starts being useful, it becomes boring and is denounced by the community of thrill-seeking ego-motivated misfits. For instance, when Ubuntu started being actually useful as an end-user-oriented distribution that could actually be installed on normal people’s computers and used to do actual work, it was immediately and universally denounced by the Open Source advocates as a commercial sellout. Prior to that, the professed goal of the community was to increase Linux adoption in the general user base. However, as that started to happen, the Linux advocates no longer felt special just for using Linux, and now had to use some “pure” shit that’s not contaminated by the plebeian main stream adoption. Similarly, when each New Age person is doing their own thing and stumbling in the dark, they praise each other as great examples. However, when someone is actually successful, and others come to him in order to learn, it’s seen as a negative example of a cult following and falling to the Dark Side. I’d say it’s the same thing: jealousy of someone else’s success, and frustration because of the possibility of a realization that originality is not necessarily a good thing if it actually stands in the way of accomplishing goals. Also, different approaches that can’t make the basics work are hardly originality; more likely, they are abortive attempts. For instance, if you can’t manage to concentrate, it’s a better idea to learn some reliable preexisting method than to experiment. Experiment only when no preexisting method is available or satisfactory. However, neither Open Source nor New Age, for the most part, are actually doing things on the bleeding edge of human endeavor. Open Source is mostly reproducing shit for free that someone else had already done for money, and New Age is no better; its stated goals are mostly re-hashed Vedanta with some Buddhism and Christianity. If something is actually new and original, it stands alone outside the New Age community, rejected because it went outside the dogmatic boundaries of a group that’s supposed be free from dogmatic boundaries.

New Age as the Open Source approach

New Age borrowed a great deal from classical Hinduism, Buddhism and Yoga, and the list of such adoptions would be too extensive for this format, but the process didn’t necessarily go only one way. It is my opinion that New Age actually contributed some important new aspects to the classical lore. It’s as if New Age treated all its sources according to the GPL license; it took everything it found interesting, but it also left the open-source contributions in the thoughtspace.

For instance, the New Age lore on Kundalini is much more extensive than anything I could find in the classical literature. In fact, the classical writings are often deliberately deceptive and written in some sort of code, where the “key” for proper understanding was orally transmitted from master to disciple. Also, the chakras and their connection with the higher bodies are much better understood and explained in New Age. The problem with the classical concepts of lineage is that very few people actually had the opportunity to experiment with the techniques and contribute to the lore; essentially, it’s like closed-source software, where small isolated communities of programmers work on problems, compared to the open-source community where many more brains can be thrown at a problem and contributions are pooled together. Of course, not all contributions are equally valid or even positive, but the same can be said of the classical Upanishads. Not all ideas were equally brilliant, or ever contributed to the solution of any kind. One of the greatest contributions of the Kundalini mailing list from the 1990s is that it pooled together all sorts of people who mostly unwillingly experimented with Kundalini experience, and you could see what worked and what didn’t. Sometimes it was worth more to see the consequences of a wrong approach, and seeing a lot of people go crazy on a pattern told you volumes about going crazy. To me, personally, the most valuable aspect of the entire thing was confirmation of the reality of the phenomenon, confirmation of the basic concepts I personally established by experimentation, and understanding what happens when you don’t do it the way I did. Also, I got several useful ideas about things I personally hadn’t thought of, but once I tried them they were quite intuitive. I, too, contributed my personal findings to the data pool.

The problem is the same as with the open source community – most contributions consist of hundreds ways of coding a notepad or a calculator. There are many different “projects” and micro-communities that don’t necessarily do things the most efficient way, but at least you have choice. There are people who merely copy other people’s work and present it as their own in order to bloat their ego. Essentially, you need a certain amount of skill in order to be able to safely navigate this mess, but you can say the same about the classic literature about spirituality. In any case, the New Age Kundalini community probably did more for extending the bleeding edge of human knowledge about yogic mysticism into the realms of unknown than any single conventional school of yoga that I know of. In fact, while the New Age community was busy really exploring spirituality and doing often messy experiments in vivo, the traditional schools of the time were mostly doing jack shit. They were merely rehashing old ideas, having mediocre results, and boasting their ancient authentic lineage. So, it’s something like Linux. When you hear about the way it was made, you are tempted to conclude that such a thing can’t possibly work and that a traditional operating system would be much more reliable. In reality, if you want your server to run reliably, run it on Linux. The fact that it is open source exposed all its flaws and made it possible for them to be fixed quickly and easily. The fixes and contributions were all made public and contributed to the overall reliability and quality of the system. The chaos and the bullshit that is often part of the creative process tends to cancel itself out because for the most part only the useful and good stuff is actually used, and the rest is summarily discarded.

The problem is, there’s usually quite a lot of theory that is never properly tested and is merely accepted; sometimes, wrong conclusions are propagated because they seem to work well in the limited range they were tested in, and sometimes things are accepted because they simply feel good, or because they were accepted from a trusted source. There are many problems, for sure. However, if one actually approaches things carefully, vetting sources for credibility and competence, and avoiding obvious confirmation bias, such an approach to things can be quite helpful. I do, however, admit that I made greatest progress when I worked alone and relied on my personal methods of testing things, because then I could feel comfortable exploring ideas that were so uncommon and “out there” that I couldn’t really rely on anyone’s feedback, and silence was the best company.