Every now and then I run into claims that God and Devil are fighting for human souls, which are so precious that everybody wants them for some reason, and I roll my eyes. You see, I’ve been there, only from the position of Vedanta, which states that all souls are in essence bound and deluded aspects of brahman, the Absolute, and are precious as such. This was the implicit assumption I worked with, and it was seemingly confirmed by the visible efforts “the guys up there” went through in order to bring someone to the point where they would make up their mind. Imagine my surprise when it turned out that they saw a final decision of any kind – for or against God – as a good thing. My implicit assumption was wrong; what they wanted was for souls to be removed from the pool of the seemingly undecided. Liberation of the good and destruction of the wicked was fine, but wicked finding perpetual excuses as for why they didn’t really have the right opportunities and so their choices aren’t really valid so they need to go at it yet another time, or the almost-good ones perpetually finding ways to get stuck in something and needing progressively better, “cleaner” options to choose from, that seemed to be very bad and they wanted to drain that swamp as soon as possible. The implications of this reality to my worldview were not good, but I had to learn what it meant and how to deal with it.

The thing is, humans seem to live in some kind of a narcissistic illusion of the kind typical for teenage girls, who found out that all the guys want them, which they interpret as a sign that they are something special and valuable, while the male teenagers have the opposite situation where nobody wants them and they have to learn how to deal with it. The problem the teenage girls have is that they don’t seem to get that they are in exactly the same position as the male teenagers. The one they would truly want doesn’t care about them. The ones that want them, they just want to fuck them and leave. For the one who really matters, they would have to work – acquire virtues, prove value and loyalty, and so on. However, it’s very hard to understand that you can’t have what you really want, when everybody is seemingly throwing themselves at you. You think you have so much choice, not realizing that all the choices you seem to have are bad, and the option you really want is the one you have to work for as hard as any teenage male who seemingly has no options. You are both in the same position, where the one you want isn’t available, it’s just that having all the undesirable options gets into girls’ heads.

You see, in a spiritual sense you have all kinds of options, and they are not God and Satan, they are mostly various flavours of Satan. God isn’t an option for you. In order for God to be an option, you would have to really work for it, to put yourself out there, to give up all the false, undesirable options the way a teenage girl would if she kept herself for that one guy she really wants to marry and spend the rest of her life with. God becomes an option only when you reject everything else first, and without any guarantee that God is even achievable; however, you know that anything else isn’t an option for you, and you refuse to settle for cheap substitutes.

It seems that pretending to be undecided and trying to disqualify all the available options is a standard strategy of the evil souls that reject God, but who want to avoid the consequences of outright rejecting God. “Oh, I really wanted God and Guru but nobody was pure and good enough for me, and I couldn’t settle for anything other than perfection” seems to be a standard trope, and it seems to be working, for a while at least. Eventually, everybody makes a decision. Either you ignore the real thing because you can’t be bothered to look, and that’s a decision, or you see the real thing and you find faults with it, or you choose it but your heart isn’t in it and you just fumble around until you fall off. Or you choose the real thing with all your heart and stick with it forever, changing yourself to remove anything that’s in the way of that choice.