https://youtu.be/k8LjCS9Qhto

It’s interesting what it comes down to. Religion, according to “rational atheists”, is complete bullshit without any factual basis. It’s all made up by humans. However, when those rational atheists provided a rational, intellectually sound and scientifically based alternative to replace all that religious bullshit, the result was always and without exception an unmitigated disaster. So basically, if you base your life on the life and teachings of Jesus, who is supposed to be an imaginary character like Spongebob, you end up fine. If you base your life on what the rational atheists recommend, you end up being a cynical sociopath who needs to be constantly medicated for depression. And here we have Steph who presents himself as rational, and who actually understands this conundrum, but doesn’t follow it to its logical conclusion, which is that maybe, just maybe, if religious people manage to get their shit together more successfully than atheists, maybe that’s because their brains are more in tune to what the reality actually is, which is that God actually exists and his existence and character make moral demands on those who want to be in tune with him. So yeah, the ideas atheists come up with as substitutes for religion are complete and utter rubbish, they themselves are irrational and crazy, but their basic worldview is the scientific truth and makes so much sense, because whatever.

“Wait a minute, if you say you are the same now as you were at the time of birth, that your essential consciousness is the same, what about the practice of yoga? Didn’t it change anything?”

Of course it changed things. I learned that things, that previously appeared to be merely states of consciousness, are in fact planes of reality. I carved pathways within my physical brain that allow me to do things that are so far out of ordinary human experience, I am loath to even discuss them outside the circle of trained initiates who are able to verify or falsify my claims. But the thing is, higher initiation didn’t feel like expansion, it felt like removing limitations. So, basically, the advanced practice of yoga, and things that I do in the last two decades, that are not really yoga, but rather wielding of spiritual power, had the effect of enabling me to do some things, while incarnated, that I would much more easily and naturally do while discarnated. Essentially, it allowed me to get around some of the bodily limitations. This means that it didn’t produce spiritual evolution or expansion, but rather that it neutralized some of the zombifying effects of physical incarnation. Essentially, yoga is less effective than death for removing corporal limitations, but has that convenient peculiarity of not having to die in order not to be completely useless. Yes, I still see my physical incarnation as a stupid hairy ape-like creature that is the cause of all my problems, but unlike before, I now have a certain degree of control, awareness and knowledge. The ape-like thing causes inevitable mistakes in everything I do, which is humiliating in a way, but I try to keep it on a short leash.

“You are often saying that you have to suffer in order to spend or transform evil global structures. Isn’t up-stream kriya of Kundalini-yoga supposed to do that?”

Well, no. What kriya does is destabilize your energy system in order to make it fluid, and remove resistance. It also creates a strong upward flow of energy which is a close relative of orgasm. In regard to transforming, breaking down and spending energy blockages, larvae and, in lack of a better word, accumulations of past sins, what kriya actually does is allow you to detach from a structure, guide energy towards it in order to dissolve it, and when it releases the traumatic content, it allows you to mitigate the trauma. You still experience suffering, but you are in a state of surrender to God while you are suffering, so to speak, and this makes it possible for you not to simply close the damn thing off in another larva, but to deal with it permanently. Once you’ve faced the traumatic emotions, they lost their harmfulness and you can deal with them as you would deal with anything. So basically, it’s the suffering that spends bad karma in any case. Everything else is there just to make it easier to bear. If you’re not suffering under the onslaught of traumatic emotions, you’re not really spending anything, by definition. I recently used a comparison with brakes on a car. What they do is equivalent to suffering: they take the kinetic energy of the vehicle and spend it by taking it onto themselves, by transforming it into heat. The molecules of the material of the brakes are accelerated by the transfer, and then this heat slowly dissipates into the environment. Similarly, any transfer of karma disturbs your spiritual body on the kalapa-level, changing its specific energy. With a combination of suffering and surrender, in other words detachment, you absorb the energy of the impact, integrate the additional karmic mass into your own on a kalapa-level, and raise the energy of the resulting mass onto your previous energy level. If you’re not a high initiate, meaning if your spiritual body isn’t made of vajra, or to be technical, if it is not made of a substance that is qualitatively higher than the substance you are absorbing, the process will actually change your soul-structure in such a way that your entire motivational structure might change. The additional karmic mass might end up transforming you, and not the other way around. You need to be made of higher quality stuff, so to say; so, the karmic transfers are a different order of magnitude of a problem compared to dealing with your own personal issues. If you’re very strong, you can do small things without any apparent effort, like Earth absorbing space dust in form of small meteors. It just makes a passing glow and then it’s absorbed into Earth’s mass. However, something big can make quite a mess, and can take some doing to recover from. Since my official job title seems to be “garbage reclamation unit”, I’m basically very close to 100% of the maximum load that I can sustainably take. It’s not enough to wreck me, but it’s enough to seriously ruin my day. Sometimes the load exceeds 100%, which means that it would cause serious damage if it were kept on that level. Sometimes it falls under 80%, and then I feel great and recover quickly. I can’t really remember it going under that level, though.

“Can’t someone help you?”

You need to understand that the requirements for this shit are rather high, so high that in order to be able to do any kind of a karmic transfer, of any quantity, you need to be a high initiate and a decently skilled yogi. Not many people throughout history have been able to do it. I’ve seen high initiates who are decently skilled yoginis start the process of breaking apart and dying because they carelessly “looked” at what I was spending when I was spending something particularly nasty, and a few tiny specks of that attached to them. The result was devastating, because not only were they not able to absorb and transform it, their efforts had no influence whatsoever on it, and the stuff simply kept shredding them. I fixed the damage simply by paying attention, spending those stray specks in a second, restored their lower bodies from their core karmic template, and proceeded to feel like shit under 110% load. No, nobody can help me, because I’m uniquely powerful and skilled, and the second most powerful person ever to have lived would be merely a helpless victim whom I’d have to patch up. But I can be helped in other ways, that’s true. The entire logistics of my effort are made possible through others’ help. I’m not doing this alone. In fact, one of the “hacks” that makes the entire thing possible is that others willingly assist me in every way possible while I personally am under “attack”, because there are “immune responses” that were set against me and would have blocked my effort years ago had there been no help from others. So, nobody can help me with my part, but my part is only a piece in a wider puzzle, and without the other parts, it alone wouldn’t do much.

Whenever people talk about empathy, it’s always positive, as if were the single most desirable spiritual quality to have. It is seen as weakening the limiting effects of ego, or some other bullshit.

Let me tell you a true story.

I was born with extreme empathy always turned on. Today I would classify it as strong involuntary samyama, but as a child, it took me more than a decade to even guess what was going on. I simply became a different person when surrounded with different people. It’s not that I absorbed the qualities of the environment, but more than what happened inside my mind changed; its flavor, emotions, thoughts, general attitudes. My entire existence was different when I was with my grandparents compared to being with my parents. School was a nightmare. It wasn’t so much a change as destruction and negation of everything I am in the incredible deluge of chaos. Too many children, all crazy, wrecked my my mind so badly I sometimes wonder how I was able to function there at all; but it was in the 7^th grade or so that I started figuring out what was going on, when my technical drawing teacher expressed doubt that the drawing that I did for homework was done by me, because it was so much better than the stuff that I did in school; she thought I had my parents do it for me. I thought to respond “But of course it’s better, I did it at home, where it’s…” and then it clicked. It’s calm, at least compared to school. There were no thoughts of others, chaotically interfering with my own like very loud hissing of white noise. At home it’s not like watching TV signal without an antenna, in an area with poor reception.

To me, empathy is not some positive spiritual quality, as it appears to be to people who talk out of their arses and who never actually experienced what it means to have no personal boundaries, to have such strong perceptions of thoughts and emotions of others that it completely overrides and erases your own, to the point of taking decades to figure out who and what you actually are.

To me, empathy is a terrible, debilitating mental illness that I have to live with. It’s like having no firewall and no antivirus on your computer, and having it constantly hacked and invaded by others, only it’s not your computer but your mind, and it’s not only invaded by those who mean to, but by everyone, all the time. It never ends, it never stops. You cry with other people’s pain and laugh at what they find funny. When you dream, your dreams are mixed with the background noise created by others. When you’re surrounded by a mass of people, you’re flooded with chaos, completely disorderly and senseless, like hundreds of people talking at once. When you’re with one person, you simply adopt his ideas, point of view, way of feeling and thinking, basically you are an empty vessel that is filled by that person’s content. You cannot effectively argue a point, because if that person isn’t receptive, your mind simply stops working. When that person explains his point of view, it becomes yours.

That’s what it feels like to have no ego and to have extreme empathy.

I was completely and utterly confused in elementary school. I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t know that something was going on. I was just completely and utterly messed up. In the two last grades I started getting my shit together slightly, though, because I started to consciously perceive the differences in the way in which I exist when alone or with different others. Also, I started to self-medicate, so to say.

You see, this extreme sensitivity doesn’t just work for living humans. When I read a book, it recreates aspects of the author’s consciousness in me, in the exact same way the consciousness of living people overwhelms me in person, and I learned that I can drown one influence if I magnify the other. I could, for instance, read something created by a wonderfully organized mind, like Stanislaw Lem or Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert or Arthur Clarke, and basically “format” my mind with it as I would a floppy disc, allowing it to overrun the chaos and the inferior people’s influence. I couldn’t just turn it off; it never turns off, really, but I learned that I could change the channel, so to speak, and if I chose to fill my mind with one content, I could completely suppress the unwanted noise. I must have looked like a total weirdo in high school; I intentionally adopted a contrarian attitude in order to preserve my identity; I was intentionally reading things that nobody else was reading and doing things that nobody else was doing, just to create some form of a mental boundary between self and others. Also, since I became aware of the difference between self and other influences, I began to perceive my own consciousness under the influence of others as one would perceive a movie screen with movie playing. It took me a long time to understand that I was a movie screen, but then I started to consciously “watch the movies”, so to speak, and it confirmed a hunch I had for a few years at that point, that I was fundamentally, structurally different from all the others that I have met. My own consciousness, when I managed to put it under control, and that was never easy, went deeper than theirs. When I did samyama on deep thinkers and deep ideas, I found out that my own ability was always able to stretch farther than the object on which I did samyama; it was just that I ran out of deep templates on which to focus. I found several ideas in books and several pieces of music that stretched me to my limits and then I could feel things that were so far above my physical life it drove me crazy. I could also feel the Presence, the high consciousness that was always there, always aware, but never actually communicating. Between the violent hell at home caused by my mother’s quickly progressing madness and evil, and chaotic noise and constant bullying I had to suffer at school, and a bus ride in between, and a limit I hit in my attempts to find and explore things that were beyond this darkness and evil that always tried to swallow me and destroy everything that was me as separate from them, I became a combination of distress, frustration and anger, and, unable to find any hope or a way out, I tried to kill myself.

When that failed, I was completely wrecked, because I had absolutely no hope of ever having an existence that’s worth having. I was mentally assaulted by humans and rejected by God, I was locked up in a lunatic asylum, in complete power and control by people who perceived me the way a butcher perceives a pig, and I had nowhere to go. I would have sold my soul to Satan then, had he made me an offer; it was that bad. I gradually pulled myself out by mere contempt and hatred for humans: I simply didn’t feel like allowing the beings that were such incredibly pathetic pieces of shit to defeat me.

Can you imagine what it’s like for an extreme empath to be locked up in a lunatic asylum, among crazy people in a drug-induced stupor, and you’re given psychosis-inducing drugs that limit any attempt to preserve your own identity? It’s worse than a death sentence. However, I learned to adapt. I finally succeeded at learning AT, and I became so good at it, I could re-program my liver to neutralize the drugs they gave me. Having done that, I started to recollect my faculties and replay the strong points from books and music in my head, and I regained coherence. I finished highschool from there, basically learning the entire year’s worth of material from two subjects every week and giving exams. I had to take two weeks for maths and literature respectively but that’s the way I did it. I was so incredibly good at it, I used it as leverage to get myself out, because the false narrative that my psycho parents told the psychiatrists in order to shift the blame from themselves, and onto me, crumbled. The order of magnitude of the problems I had to solve gave me the level of self-confidence I later used to solve other difficult problems, and basically limits my compassion for other people’s whining, because whatever you had, I had worse. Some people may have had one worse week than my average, but that’s it. And I learned how to solve problems, how to shield myself from others’ influence, how to keep strong focus for a long period of time under unyielding, devastating pressure. I learned how to overcome my debilitating weakness.

And that’s how I view empathy. It’s my debilitating weakness, a mental illness that I was born with and have to compensate for in order to be able to exist as a person of distinct and separate identity, will, thoughts, emotions and intent. That’s why I don’t see ego as a spiritual flaw, and empathy as a cure. I actually see it reversed, I see empathy as a spiritual flaw that threatens me with complete negation and destruction of my identity, and ego as cure for that deadly disease. I see ego-boundaries as a shield I learned how to raise in order to first identify myself as a cinema and not as a movie, then to play other movies more to my liking, and then to create my own content, of a higher order of magnitude.

When I say that I learned how to meditate in a bus, in a crowd, while interacting with others, do you have any idea what that means to me, with my inherent weakness?

That’s the cause of my crushingly strong willpower and intent. That’s the cause of my ability to touch the consciousness of others, and then change it; I learned how to turn it the other way, how to influence others instead of being influenced. It’s just a matter of power, and the level of power that I had to master in order to merely survive the shit I was buried under, is essentially unheard of. I find it silly when some “spiritual people” talk about their more-less failed attempts at controlling their own minds. And that’s supposed to be difficult? Try controlling your mind that’s constantly open to every single form of outside influence, by design, from birth, so much that you have no distinct identity, then learn to compensate and overcome, while in a position of slavery, under  others’ total physical control, under extremely harmful and invasive psychoactive drugs, without any resources at your disposal, with everything against you. I see how people envy what I am now, and they think they would like to be me, but they certainly don’t want to go through what I had to in order to become me. It’s like sausages: the result tastes good, but you don’t want to know what went in there.

Truth is under no obligation to make sense. It is inherently irrational, because truth is obliged only to state the facts as they are, without distortion.

Only conclusions and interpretations of facts can be rational or not. They are rational if they follow Aristotelian logic, regardless of the truth of the premises. You can make a perfectly rational logical process that starts with the premise that all men are crocodiles, another premise that Socrates is a man, and correctly concludes that Socrates is a crocodile. Rationality, therefore, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with truth.

Truth is also under no obligation to be elegant. The Greeks loved elegant lines of thought, and that almost always resulted in their adoption of utter falsehoods. Truth can be messy and inelegant. For instance, the beings on Earth evolved this way not because some elegant master plan of a wise divine being, but because global cooling and a big asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs, and forced the survivors to either learn to hibernate, or to migrate to warmer parts, or develop big enough brain to be able to make clothes and use fire. This entire set of circumstances is inelegant, but true. There’s no circle or a sphere or a dodecahedron underneath, just a huge mess of thermodynamics, entropy, accident and chaos.

The reason why I believe in some things that sound crazy isn’t because I think they are elegant and rational. The entire model that sees Sanat Kumar as an explanation of the mess we are in is the exact opposite of rational elegance. It is ugly and messy and based on randomness and chance and exceptions, not all-encompassing general rules that make elegant models. So, it’s neither its elegance nor rational aesthetics that make it appealing. Unfortunately, it just happens to be the best interpretation of facts and evidence that I managed to formulate. I didn’t even make it up; for the most part, I simply accepted it, because huge parts of it were already provided by Gods, saints and people gifted with particularly good spiritual vision. I actually knew about that model for a decade and a half before I stopped resisting it – I hate it that much. I prefer impersonal models. I prefer a model of gravity that simply states that mass curves space. I wouldn’t like a model that assumes existence of an evil god Tatarus under the Earth, and explains gravity by him trying to suck everything into his realm. However, the fact that I would hate that model doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t accept it if forced to do so by the facts. That I had to accept a model that ascribes huge part of all perceivable phenomena to a quite insane spiritual being who did it all out of hatred for God and out of wish to prove some crazy point, is painful. I actually tried to come up with some other interpretation of the facts, for instance to interpret the Sanat Kumar phenomenon as a very old giant tulpa created in the Earth’s astral field by some form of coherence in thinking and emotions by a very large number of humans and humanoid beings that preceded them in evolution. If this structure were to behave according to the classical tulpa model, it would be a very good explanation of the perceived reality. However, I am aware that this explanation is merely an outburst of my hatred for the inelegance of my primary model, and that I was willing to ignore a significant amount of facts and evidence just to come up with an impersonal, elegant model.

However, if we come to elegance, how is inheriting a bad powerful entity less elegant than making one gradually by means of collective spiritual pathology of mankind? If we imagine that the Sanat Kumar entity was indeed created by mankind, and that mankind perished in an ice age or a nuclear war, and he survived to make weird, irrational things later on, how would his existence and actions be perceived by our successors? Would they perceive the solution as elegant?

So, my best effort at achieving intellectual elegance only produced the same inelegance, one step removed. It’s like the panspermia theory of the beginning of life – it removes the problem of primordial soup from Earth only to displace it into the supernova remnant cloud. It is for this reason that I simply suspended my desire for rational elegance and accepted this mess as it is – filthy, disorderly and inelegant, with the only condition that it be as close to the truth as I can possibly understand it. And that, of course, is the limit of the entire problem, because the actual truth and the actual facts might be completely beyond the grasp of human cognition, and only accessible in a pure spiritual state, unbound by physical incarnation. Be it as it may, I will continue trying to comprehend it, to the best of my abilities, and without conditioning the facts with the prerequisite of rationality. After all, if platypus and blob fish exist, then any kind of weird inelegant shit is not only possible, but probable.

I’ve been thinking about how politics, philosophy and religion are always intellectually degraded when the medium for their presentations is a conflict of opposing opinions.

This is opposite to what people believe, of course; it is commonly believed that a dialogue of opposing views improves the arguments, but this is not my experience. According to my experience, I can present the highest quality of arguments and make the best possible case for my ideas when I’m left alone to write a careful, deliberate monologue in which I can explore ideas in peace, and write one of my rhetorical arcs. Occasionally, I can improve my arguments in a discussion with an intelligent, knowledgeable person who has an intellectual position that is very close to my own. If I’m having a discussion with someone whose opinions differ greatly from my own, the result will be that everything beyond the intersection of our opinions will be hotly contested, and since I’m yet to see someone actually change his mind based on good arguments from the opposing side, usefulness of the entire exercise is questionable. The best discussions take place when the point in contention is very narrowly constrained; the wider the constraints, and the greater the area in contention, the greater the probability that the entire discussion will degrade into a shouting match and an ad hominem shitstorm. Similar but slightly different viewpoints, on the other hand, can create very fruitful brainstorming sessions, but of course one must be careful not to descend into the echo-chamber mentality in which outputs are reused as inputs and people start using very dubious suppositions as facts on which they proceed to build quite insane mental constructs. It must always be an exercise in “let’s see where this leads if we take the arguments to their reasonable limits”, but one must remain mindful of the word “reasonable”.

I tried dialogue as a rhetorical instrument. God knows I tried. The results were almost always insignificant compared to what I could do in a monologue, when I can explore my thoughts without interruptions. What interruptions can do is clearly visible in TV and Youtube arguments where all discussions worth seeing are basically between people of very similar positions. Whenever their positions diverge too much, the discussion degenerates and is very difficult to watch. I’m not talking only about the positions I personally agree with – for instance, I personally hate Islam and hold it in greatest imaginable contempt, but if I want to understand what the Muslims really think about an issue, I will watch them talking to other Muslims, expressing their true thoughts unhindered and uninterrupted by opposition, among people of similar beliefs. Watching a Muslim’s speech interrupted by constant shouts of consternation isn’t useful for finding out his actual opinion. The same goes for everyone else; a discussion between advocates of very different positions is more of an exercise in rethorics and skill in manipulating the audience with sound bites, than an exercise in finding out any kind of truth. I, personally, don’t function well in a situation where I have to condense my entire position into less than five carefully weighed soundbites delivered with humour and cynicism. I prefer to tell a story, to make an atmosphere in which you can get a taste of an idea cooked in its own juice. I prefer it to be a complete meal, rather than a short snack.

Don’t get me wrong, I am good in a live dialogue, but I’m deadly in a written monologue, because when I’m arguing with someone in realtime, I have less time to consider my arguments and it is more difficult to source supporting quotations and facts. I have to rely on my memory, which is quite good, but not as good as a search engine that allows me to find supporting facts on the Internet and link them into the narrative. In a realtime discussion, I’m also limited by the capacity of the audience for processing what I’m saying in realtime, which is too much of a constraint for my arguments to bear, because in written form I can go far beyond almost anyone’s ability to follow in realtime and count on the audience re-reading the texts for years in order to digest them properly. If I did that in a realtime discussion, I’d lose them entirely, because in a live discussion you win if you can leverage what people think they know, and introduce only as much new information as can be digested in realtime. If one degrades things further from the already low baseline, by introducing opinions that are so divergent as to make any kind of a discussion hard (for instance a physicist and a flat-Earth apologist, or a religious mystic and a militant atheist), you can be sure only that the opponent with most practice in delivering comical soundbites will “win”, but the entire exercise will not be greatly informative.

So what I’m saying is that I like to watch opposing ideas and philosophies and see where they lead when their advocates are allowed to extend them to their logical limits and beyond, in the same way in which I like both hot sauce and ice cream. I just don’t like them mixed together at the same time, because the result is useless.