I used to think that the perfect God created this world with the intent of providing souls with a strong enough challenge that they will be forced to evolve spiritually and develop qualities that would be very hard to develop in heaven, where there is no pressing need for them. Essentially, I thought that heaven is a poor place for spiritual progress because you basically feel good, feel that everything is good, and you have no motivation to change anything. Yes, you can probably see those more evolved than yourself, but in order to get there from here you would probably need to change something drastically, and change is hard when things look perfect, or almost. So, I thought, the souls basically stay in the same place for a very long time, because their way of conceiving progress is “more of the same”, basically absorb God’s light the way you always did and hope to grow eventually.

This place, however, has thousands of ways to make your life unbearable unless you really make an effort. It forces you to develop skills and abilities in order to overcome problems, or you suffer terribly and die. From this perspective, it’s a very unpleasant place, but many authorities implicitly or explicitly surmised that it might be exactly what it takes to accelerate one’s spiritual evolution, and I saw no immediately obvious argument against this. So, everything here had to have a constructive purpose behind it – for instance, amnesia at birth is probably necessary in order to prevent inertia of past choices to completely overwhelm one’s freedom to make new ones; basically, if you want to snap one out of what they were doing for a long time, make them forget what they are, what they were doing and why they thought it’s a good idea, and put them on a clean slate to explore new ideas and options, and maybe they will do something different for a change. Sure, past choices will find a way to manifest themselves slowly on an unconscious level, but not to the point where they inhibit all possibility of experimentation. Every other unpleasant aspect of the world can be rationalized in this way – for instance, inability to call on God to solve your problem might be what it takes for you to develop skills to solve it yourself, and thus embody this aspect of God into your spiritual makeup.

So, assuming that this is the way things work – that souls are here to figure out paths back to God, by becoming more “of God”, it became immediately obvious that it doesn’t seem to work. Most humans aren’t really aware of things, or really motivated to embody God and be in God. They are involved with desires for worldly trinkets and chasing projections, mirages and reflections of spirit on the things of the world. I thought they need knowledge. I also understood that beings that can draw upon only the very basic energies can’t really understand high spirituality, so I thought they need to be brought in touch with high spiritual energies that will awaken the connection to God in them, which will remind them of what they lost and what they are actually looking for, and once reminded, they will work as hard as they possibly can to achieve the goal they now understand to be theirs. In my world at the time, there was no place for evil. Evil was an emergent property, something that appears to exist when you combine ignorance and low energy. Introduce knowledge and high energy and suddenly you get holiness and goodness. So, I began to work from those assumptions, and I was immensely shocked when I saw that the results don’t conform to my expectations. I could introduce knowledge and high energy, but this didn’t produce the expected results. In fact, I encountered many situations where high energy and knowledge produced envy, hostility and all kinds of evil intent and deeds, and I don’t mean that in the sense that people failed to receive high energy – no, they saw it, and reacted with hatred. I could bring them into the energy of the presence of God, and they reacted to that like you would expect a demon to react to holiness. Slowly, I was forced to accept that evil is not a mere absence of the light of God, that it is a spiritual choice and a path, and that it is its own thing, and this was something that disturbed by worldview greatly. You see, my worldview was mostly Vedanta, and according to Vedanta anything resembling evil is merely dirt blocking the light of Brahman. However, when I saw people’s souls directly, that’s not what I saw. I didn’t see filtration of pure light through stained glass, so to say; I saw a structure of energy that produced some light of its own, and if this energy was low, you couldn’t just scrape off dirt and get a saint. No, it would be like taking a monkey, scraping off dirt and expecting to get a human. If you scrape monkey-stuff off a monkey, you get a dead monkey. If you scrape off dirt from a dirty soul, you kill the dirty soul, you don’t get an enlightened saint. Gradually, I understood that what I’m perceiving conforms very nicely to a Buddhist expectation, and Vedanta seems to get things completely wrong here, but there is a saving grace, so to say – the light of the karmic entity that is usually called soul does indeed seem to be a manifestation of Brahman, in a way, but it doesn’t really work the way Vedanta thinks it does. It’s not karmic dirt preventing the light from shining, because what appears to be dirt consists of poor alignment of a small number of particles of spiritual energy, kalapas. You can get the structure to shine brighter, but you need to “get inside”, so to speak, do samyama on that entity, and make changes of perspective necessary to understand truth and reality more, and that changes the structure from within, and make it shine with more and purer light. The problem is, the soul doesn’t necessarily see that as an upgrade – they think they need to obtain fulfilment of their worldly desires in order to obtain happiness, not change their spiritual attitude and structure, and what usually happened is that I could only get them so far before they started resisting, and they also tried to involve me in their worldly nonsense, presumably as an energy source that would make it all possible.

This changed my opinion on all sorts of failed spiritual teachers and the movements/cults they started. I used to think that they failed because the guru wasn’t pure enough and didn’t shine with pure enough energy that would bring the students to God. What turned out to be the more likely cause of the problems is that the students didn’t want to go where the guru wanted to lead them, and instead they worked on involving him in their issues, corrupting him and turning the organization into a mess, where everything seems to be about power, money and sex. The guru never seemed to be completely blameless, because there had to be some impurity in them that would allow the corruption to take root, but the more worrying thing is that the main reason for similar failures across the entire spectrum was in faulty premises. Those gurus had basically the same premises as I – they obtained realization, and now they wanted to pass it on, to share it with others, assuming that the souls are suffering in the world because they lack spiritual realization and energy, but they all desire it, and the reason why they turn to the low energies of the world is because they don’t experience and see anything else. If you show them greater light, they would go for it instead of the lower lights of the world, or at least that’s how the expectation goes. What actually happens is “oh, there’s a greater energy source, now I’ll be able to be important, have money, have influence over others, and get sex”. I don’t know how far those other gurus came in understanding this pattern, but I caught on pretty early in the game. What I didn’t understand is how that is possible, and what does it say about the world that my implicit and explicit assumptions about human nature and motivation fail to pass the tests of experimental verification.

I did understand that the Devil actually exists, that there is some hidden but very aware being that has its tentacles everywhere and seems to work on disrupting anything that would cause the souls to be liberated from the worldly involvements, deliberately obstructs and obscures high spiritual influences, and so on. What I also understood is that the souls are by no means innocent in all this. They always seem to cooperate with the Devil in some way, and that usually works because the Devil either offers them something of the world that they will get if they go along with the path of least resistance he’s offering, or he shows them some worldly horror to threaten them with; some, unfortunately, are so inherently corrupt and evil he doesn’t even have to try, because they are his willing allies. As I learned those things, I was mostly numb with shock, because this seriously disrupted my inherently positive idea about this world – I expected a gym where the souls lift material weights in order to strengthen their spiritual muscles, so to speak, and what it increasingly turned out to be is a very crazy place where the Devil can manipulate your weaknesses in order to extinguish any spiritually constructive idea, turn you into some sort of a destructive energy loop where you pump your power into something that binds you and drains you, and your “spiritual muscles” mostly atrophy. This looked like a serious aberration and deviation from what I thought to be God’s plan of evolution here, and I performed many thought experiments to figure out what could be done to make things better, because it increasingly looked as if I am here exactly for this reason – to understand what the problem is, and make things better.

One idea I had was to fork the human species. That wouldn’t be done by any material means, but merely by allowing the “siddhis”, or spiritual powers over matter, for those who are spiritually evolved enough to have them. This would remove the present illusion that humans are all basically the same, by capping the maximum ability of the individual at a very low level, thus forcing the humans to join forces into tribes, nations and states in order to get anything done, and this causes all kinds of spiritual degradation. By removing this “cap”, and allowing unlimited power to be accessibly by the qualified individuals, you would effectively “fork” the species into the base humanity similar to what you have now, and something that would look like the living gods with incredible powers, developed along different lines. This would automatically cause two things – the ordinary humans would feel threatened and humiliated by what seems to be a superior sub-species of man, and attack them. They would lose, really badly, and understand that this alternative path is superior to anything they can do by joining forces. This alone would do great things for motivating large numbers of people to work on their spiritual core, instead of wasting their efforts on trying to control other people and physical matter by physical means. Eventually, by changing just this one rule of the world, the world would start to change, simply because strong incentive would have been generated that would motivate spiritual growth.

Then I started developing this further, thinking what else could I change to make things better – for instance, remove the layer of ignorance that obscures God. You see, somewhere at this point I understood another error in my thinking, when I understood that spiritual people here become “spiritual”, or in other words aware, awake and realized, because they had strong spiritual experiences, or almost died and retained some memory of the astral world. They don’t become more spiritual from exposure to matter, but from breakage of matter and exposure to pure spirt that is normally obscured by this world. This falsified my original notion that this world promotes spiritual growth by making it hard – it in fact inhibits spiritual growth by obscuring the spirit, and you get spiritual growth only when you break the illusion of the world and see the light on the other side, and that light is what produces spiritual growth. So, what could I do. Remove the veil of darkness. Remove lack of sovereignty over one’s vehicle of incarnation, thus removing sickness, degradation with age, involuntary death, ignorance at birth, and indignity of childhood. And after I completed this list, I understood what such a world would look like. The perfect, improved world would look exactly like the astral world that predated this one. The perfect world already exists, and doesn’t need to be created. It needs to be chosen, and therein lies the dilemma: some souls in this world like it dark. They like to be as far from God as possible, and they like the ability to subjugate and hurt others. If you took that away from them, they would hate it. The others are simply enslaved and don’t seem to be able to do anything about it, or they are trying to do something about it, but they have to invest inordinate amounts of work just to get 10% of what they would normally get if they “died”, in essence shed their physical body and found themselves in the astral world, which works like one would expect a world made by the good God to work.

Which brings me to my main point: this world needs to be destroyed, not fixed. It is made by taking the template of a normal world and increasingly fucking things up by introducing limitations until it would not work any more, and then going one small step back, to make it as fucked up as possible while still allowing for incarnation of souls. You fix something in order to make it good, but the good world already exists. You don’t have to make one. This one, on the other hand, is designed in such a way that you would destroy every distinction it has compared to the astral world, merely by removing its flaws. If you destroy something by improving it, it’s obviously designed to be shit, and truly does need to be destroyed.

Somewhere at this point I understood what Sanat Kumar was up to, what the main design goal of this place seems to be, and all hell broke loose.