“My Lady, can we have a word with you?”, an angel accompanied by three others addressed Lady Hypatia.

“Of course, Berfrid”, she smiled. “I am so glad we meet again, this time under better circumstances”. She looked at his family. “And these must be your wife, Isalde, and the children are Albert and Hilde?”.

They all bowed as she addressed them. “They are indeed, and thanks to you alone”, the man bowed deeply. “The teachers in the apple orchard, the blessed Padmasambhava and his holy wives, have been explaining to us and the others how the real world actually works, how the souls are created, how they grow and achieve enlightenment, and so on. Specifically, he told us what you did, because it was the first such case, how you took from your own soul and gave my wife and children immortality so that they could join me, simply because I begged for you to save them”. He looked her straight in the eyes with such depth of worship that shivers went up her head. “I offered you my soul in exchange, but you wanted nothing. Know this, however. We will forever worship you, every day of our lives, even if we get to live forever. You will forever remain our Saviour Goddess, and our souls are forever yours”, tears started welling up in his eyes, and Hypatia just hugged the man and said nothing.

…

“I am so proud of you”, Lord Azrael whispered in his wife’s ear.

“The feeling is very much mutual, my Lord”, she whispered back.

“When I was overwhelmed, you took control, arranged for my replacement, and brought me to the exactly right people who could actually do something in time, and only because of this immediate and perfect response did anything I wanted to do actually matter”, she kissed him. “If not for you and Lord Shiva, my tears would have amounted to nothing. Only because of your immediate reaction, and his world-tearing power, was this family saved”.

“Be it as it may, you still sacrificed a part of your own soul for them, which makes you legendary and worthy of highest praise”, he smiled.

“And instead of a scar, I got this jewel”, she pointed out.

“Proof that holy acts of sacrifice are never a loss”, he kissed her brow.

“I don’t know if you can even imagine what this means to me”, she was lost in thought. “On Earth, I always had to be in control of myself, because any lapse would be interpreted as female weakness and incompetence. But here, when I lost it, you treated it as a sign of a legitimate emergency, covered for my failings, and elevated the problem to the highest authority, and at no point did anyone think less of me for it. If anything, Lord Shiva took my tears and those poor people’s suffering so much to heart, that he seems to have proclaimed a personal vengeance against Satan. I feel something in me relaxing for the first time, as if I can allow myself to react emotionally, knowing that it’s fine, that you all have me covered. It feels wonderful”, she melted into his side.

Lord Yama entered his wife’s ‘office’, bringing coffee to cheer her up.

“My love, what’s wrong?”, he was immediately at her side, as he saw tears streaking down her face.

“I just tried to comfort an angel who returned from earth”, she tried to control the sobs enough to get the words out.

“He was a serf somewhere in Europe. He lived with a young wife and two small children. The winter was hard, and they hadn’t eaten in three days. The children kept crying from hunger, and his wife was too weak to get out of bed. He had enough and went into the woods with a bow to hunt a deer. The lord’s men caught him and threw him into a dungeon to be hanged tomorrow for poaching. He pleaded with me to please help his wife and children, who are certainly going to die without him. He said I looked like a good and holy lady and he will give me his soul in exchange, if only I helped his family. He said that Satan came into his dreams in the dungeon, and offered him a deal: sell me your soul, and I will take care of your wife and children. He was afraid and started praying to Jesus and Mary to save him, because Satan gave him the sense of cold fear and terror. They hanged him in the morning, of course. He told me he’d make that deal with me, because he felt I was good and kind, and he had no problem with his soul belonging to me.”

“I comforted him as much as I could, restored his memories and sent him to recover, but I couldn’t do anything for his family. I know they are dying from cold and hunger, because the wife is too weak to go into the woods and collect twigs for fire. I just keep waiting for them to come here and ask me why God didn’t answer when they kept praying for help”, she sobbed.

Azrael held her in his arms and comforted her as much as he could; he closed his eyes and called for one of his lieutenants. An angelic woman appeared immediately.

“Grace, would you please be so kind as to take over from my wife? She’s not well”.

Grace took in the sight, curtsied and nodded, and shooed them away with a smile as they shimmered out.

…

“So that’s what he’s been up to. Purchasing premium assets at bargain prices”, Lord Vishnu nodded, gnashing his teeth in fury, as Jesus was comforting Lady Hypatia.

“I just wish I could do something for them”, she sobbed.

“Oh, you just did”, Lord Shiva pointed at her tears, end of the world flashing in his eyes.

“You just did”.

Black fire wisped over his hand, and her tears sparkled and vanished, as the world shook from within.

“What did you do?”, Jesus looked at him, stunned.

“Oh, I broke his world some more, and sent her tears as comfort to the suffering souls, so that they would know that God is with them, and resist temptations of Satan. I can’t do more at this time, so this will have to do”, Shiva growled.

“That, my son, is why he is our great comfort in hard times”, Vishnu smiled at Christ, who stood there in shock.

“Oh wow”, whispered Hypatia. “Wow…”

“They came?”, her husband asked.

“Yes. They say they were starving and freezing after the father didn’t come home, but blue light of God came into their hearts and they prayed to it to help them and save them, and it became one with them as they looked at their bodies from above”, she whispered, made a hand motion, and three small angelic beings shimmered in. “Go to your father and husband, he’s waiting for you”, she smiled and sent them away.

Jesus stood there in shock. “I don’t know what I just witnessed, but all praise to both of you, regardless”, he looked at Shiva and Hypatia.

“What just happened, my son, is that her tears latched onto the barely nucleating souls of that angel’s dying family on Earth, guided by her intent and power of Lord Shiva, and as they identified with them and prayed through them, their identities merged, and through death they returned to our wonderful Lady here, who could have just integrated them into her own being and acquired their memories. Instead, she sacrificed a small part of her own enormous spiritual power to give them independent life, thus saving that family in the only way that matters, because saving physical bodies just delays the inevitable. And, of course, the karmic effect of her generous and compassionate sacrifice is that her own soul grew greater, by this large deep blue jewel she just got”, Vishnu pointed.

Jesus just bowed deeply and silently to the now glowing Lady, and to Lord Rudra, who gnashed his teeth as he thought about Satan, and how their ‘conversation’ would go, when his time came.

…

“He’s building attractors”, Lady Shakti whispered into Shiva’s ear, as she massaged his shoulders to get him to relax. His thoughts were full of righteous anger and murder, and he was tense like a compressed spring.

“He’s acquiring souls of the most powerful kind, now that they are suffering terribly there, and are sensitive to temptations; and he obviously needs them for something. Most likely, he’ll build things that will seduce souls deeper into his darkness by glowing with true light, and he needs sources of true light, that will indicate the sense of fulfilment in various deserts where people will come to leave their bones”, she mused, as she kissed his neck from behind.

“I will strip flesh off his bones as he screams in darkness of his own making, where nobody will hear him”, Shiva murmured menacingly. “I will visit all the suffering he caused upon him sevenfold”.

“And I will help you do it, and then make you coffee”, she nodded as she kissed his ear.

“He’ll get what he is due”.

“How bad is this?”, Azazel asked Lord Shiva, looking worriedly at his wife, who seemed not to be taking this well.

“It’s bad”, Shiva nodded, lost in thought. “I’m trying to understand the repercussions, but the short of it is that Sanat Kumar now has a true bridgehead in the real world. The game no longer ends with the loss of his control over the Jewel, which was contractually defined and which used to be a given. We thought this game had a known endpoint in time. This is no longer the case”, he mused.

“This is all my fault”, Kay whispered.

“No”, the Great Lord denied decisively, and came to embrace the girl. “You just did normal things that made sense and served a legitimate purpose. This in itself wouldn’t have resulted in any harm. However, combined with several other factors that weren’t known enough to predict for, we got this problem. It’s easy to be smart in hindsight”, he ruffled her hair and looked her in the eyes. “It’s not your fault”.

“Thank you”, she smiled weakly.

“But how is this even possible?”, Azazel went through his hair with his fingers. “I thought the Throne of God was the force that kept the worlds in existence. Wouldn’t removing a world from beneath the Throne of God have resulted in that world’s removal from reality whatsoever?”

“Only metaphorically and in the perspective of Eternity”, Shiva shrugged. “The Throne of God means alignment and harmony with the Will of God. It’s the answer to that prayer Christ formulated – ‘thy kingdom come; thy will be done’; if a world is under the Throne of God, his kingdom is here, and his will is done. It means that something is part of the Absolute’s eternal plan and Will. It is also optional, because free will does exist. God’s reign is optional. Consequences aren’t”, he sighed. “Living according to the Will of God, in the Kingdom of God, has consequences, and they are, well, the two of you”, he managed a smile. “The two of you are an excellent example of beings who chose to live the Will of God and became perfect, which is why we all love you so much, and which is why, for instance, your wonderful bride is so distraught now, because she thinks she somehow did something against the Will of God, and it resulted in a disaster. This is not so. I see the Will of God shining very brightly in her, which means it was the Will of God for this to happen as it did, so that the events might proceed in a certain way, leading to a resolution that will put everything right, but on a higher level of goodness; so, don’t be sad, sweetheart. Instead, let’s think about what this means, what were the required conditions of it happening, and what conditions need to be met in order to put it right”, Shiva kissed the jewel on her brow and she finally smiled I earnest.

“So, let’s see how this could happen in the first place”, Azazel nodded. “First of all, there are sub-planes with worse people that are still under the Throne of God. There’s a hell with fanatical murderers, inciters of murderous mobs, gangsters, rapists, torturers and other villainous souls that could rightfully have been destroyed outright, but were instead preserved in case an opportunity arose later on, where they could possibly be redeemed. So, why are they still here?”

“It’s a very valid question. It would seem that committing vile crimes and being a monster would remove one from the Reign of God, but apparently it is not so, which is what makes this case particularly interesting. So, let’s see what those godless souls were. You are saying that you created that sub-plane for souls that were born on Earth, through the process of nucleation, or bubbling off, the way water vapour is released from boiling water?”, Shiva frowned and scratched the back of his neck.

“Yes”, Kay nodded. “It was a sub-plane for the souls newly created on Earth, that were completely godless and had no sense of transcendence, or any concept of God other than Sanat Kumar”.

“So why did this sub-plane not remove itself from under the Throne of God once the first such soul was put there? Wouldn’t this technically meet the requirement of all inhabitants being godless?”, Azazel looked confused.

“That’s the easy part. The overall energy of the souls inside would have to outweigh the energy invested in creation of that sub-plane, and they would all have to be godless”, Shiva nodded. “The problem didn’t arise immediately because you needed a serious mass of spiritual energy to counter the Will of God inherent to the structure itself”, he waved the thought off.

“Why do some souls created on Earth get to be worshippers of God, while others grow to be godless?”, Kay wondered.

“It seems to be related to the conditions they developed in, initially”, Shiva offered. “For instance, if a soul is created when a human being is exposed to some religious or intellectual system that is devoid of transcendence, but requires lots of thought and emotion, it seems to catalyse genesis of souls, but those souls are not really what we are used to seeing here”, he shrugged. “They have consciousness, intellect and emotions, but they lack transcendence and the sense of belonging to it. If a soul is born out of the mutual worship of the Gods, it wants to return to that state and it drives its evolution. Also, if a soul nucleates on Earth in the presence of one of the major sources of spiritual light, this determines its nature and goals, and it wants to return to the state of fullness of this”, he nodded.

“And if you put lots of godless souls somewhere, the ideal of existence they will try to achieve is godlessness”, Azazel nodded.

“Exactly. And apparently, the worst criminals in that other place are better than this, which seems to demonstrate that godlessness is worse than murder and hatred, because hateful murderers can still have a spark of something that wants God, somewhere inside them, which makes them redeemable, while the godless souls don’t”, Shiva finished grimly.

“Aren’t we better off without them, then?”, Kay shrugged. “I mean, they wanted to be done with God; now God is being done with them, and they will eventually perish in time as they are separated from Eternity, and basically good riddance?”

“It would be as you say, if not for one thing”, Shiva agreed. “The world they occupy is connected to the rest of the astral world by its fundamental reality, and Sanat Kumar can now use it to make another, astral Earth there, that will outlive the one generated by the Jewel, and outlive his authority to use the Jewel. It will likely outlive him as well. Every godless thing in that sub-plane came to be because of his designs, and so his evil lives on, and it just jumped planes, from illusion to a lesser reality. This means it’s actually a big deal and we have to figure out a way to restore that sub-plane back to the Throne of God”.

“What would it take?”, wondered Azazel.

“It’s one of those almost impossible things that eventually come up and then someone like Lord Vishnu usually takes care of it by thinking of a solution nobody else could figure out. But essentially, you would need to have a legitimate inhabitant of that plane, not merely a visitor, but someone condemned to be there, who would at the same time be spiritually powerful enough to call to the Throne of God directly, or, alternatively, call for both myself and my wife to manifest there in power, which would allow us to form the Golden Fire and thus reclaim that world for God”, Shiva smiled. “Basically, you would need to have a person that’s holy enough to invoke me and my wife both, and be condemned to the world of the godless souls for some reason, which is close enough to the requirement of something being wood but also iron”.

“Oh”, both Azazel and Kay looked wilted.

“Don’t worry about it, we’ll figure it out”, Shiva laughed. “After all, if we could make a demon into a God, we can make wooden iron easily”.

“I just got something back”, Lady Kay turned to her husband. “A jewel, that is a whole complete soul, with memories and personality and everything, full of worship of Lord Krishna as Govinda and Lady Lakshmi as Radha the Gopi, it just integrated with me and I’m… more”, she smiled at him blissfully. “I have a whole new lifetime of devotion to my Mother and Father in me now”.

“Ah, so it’s not just me”, Zee smiled. “I had the same thing happen to me today but I was still trying to figure it out and didn’t want to mention it before I had the whole picture, but I think I do now”, he nodded. “Mine was a Sufi mystic, contemplating what he thought was the endless depth of Allah, but the seed of it was in fact my own worship of Lord Shiva, and the mystic was born out of my tear, and carried in itself the dominant trait of my soul, which is worship of my Father. I also got a crystal that became a part of me, and yet distinct, a whole soul and personality full of memories that is an expansion of myself into that life. I think we need to talk to the elders”, he smiled and kissed his wife.

…

“Ah, so this is the fruit of those good efforts on Earth. Our tears are combining with the newborn souls, and achieving enlightenment, and yet they for some reason don’t become independent angelic beings, but increase the power and glory of the existing Gods, thus participating in God’s manifestation and destiny”, nodded Lord Vishnu. “Thank you for letting us know. My wife and I have received similar crystals, but we didn’t know that the rest of you did as well”.

…

“This is an interesting development”, Lord Shiva smiled at his wife. “So far, they would either become independent astral beings, or angels, or in some cases, Gods in their own right. I don’t know whether this choice to join into us is intentional, inevitable or a natural consequence of their sadhana and origin”, he mused.

“I don’t know, but I can guess based on what my crystal feels like. It feels like someone who merged their destiny and existence with mine, doesn’t want to be anything but me, and has a whole life of worship and love that are now mine”, Shakti smiled. “But what happens if such a soul-crystal carries bad stuff along with the good? What if there are inclusions and impurities to be purified, along with the holy memories that make that life mine now?”

“Then it becomes our problem, I would say”, Mahesh nodded. “We would need to understand and resolve those spiritual lessons from their own perspective, or we could use this karma for an incarnation on Earth, that would be ours, and yet have karmic lessons to learn and things to do in the process. It opens up interesting possibilities which we might explore at some point”, he nodded and embraced her.

“I wonder what the exact rules are?”, she whispered into his ear. “Do they come only to those who cried tears of compassion over human suffering, or also those who invested efforts into helping, and are those tears and energy investments thus departing from the world, or are they just bearing fruit once they fall on fertile ground of nucleating new souls? I wouldn’t want the world to be depleted of the energy we invested there to make it spiritually richer, because it would make it a barren wasteland once more”, she sighed.

“I think it’s more complex than that. I see permanent spots of light where they nucleated, and where the tears used to be. It’s as if devotion and meditation that formed those crystals formed permanent traces in the very tissue of the world, like scars of light. It’s nothing I would have expected; a whole new phenomenon we haven’t seen before”.

…

“So, you say it’s a double gain? Our tears caused the nucleation, new souls were born, permanent traces were cut into darkness, and we got karma and memories back?”, Vishnu mused, after his friend shared his thoughts. “The tears and the good karma combined to form a specific crystal, that contains both the soul-signature of the caster, and the sprouted and enriched seed of their intent and devotion. Also, there’s a possibility of bad karma to be included, but we didn’t have anything special, other than the cultural peculiarities. Some gender-related weirdness, some cultural rigidity and framing things in a certain way that’s not necessarily quite right, some particular desires and tastes, an experience of a complete human life. All of it informative and enriching, in fact”, he nodded.

“But if this unexpected phenomenon is good, it leaves open the possibility for other unexpected phenomena that might not be as good. We must have our eyes open, and investigate”, Lord Shiva scratched his chin.

“By all means. We knew our tears and the energy conduits will do something. We also knew the souls started to nucleate. These were merely the best outcomes, the souls that attained fulfilment by joining the existing Gods as their destinies of choice. It is only reasonable to assume that this is not the only possible outcome of the process”, Vishnu frowned.

…

“Oh wow”, Kay winced, as her jewel flashed gold.

“What is it?”, her husband turned to her immediately in alarm.

“We just lost an astral sub-plane”, her face was incredulity itself.

“How do you mean, lost? It disappeared?”, Zee wondered.

“No, it’s still there. It’s just lost to the Throne of God. It switched allegiance to Sanat Kumar and is now an astral extension to his world”, she couldn’t even believe what she was saying.

“How is that even possible?”, Lord Azazel stuttered.

“Because that was a sub-plane I created for the souls that were so loyal to Sanat Kumar and so Earth-minded and lacking in any transcendental substance that Azrael and the rest of the Judges didn’t know what else to do with them, and asked me to make a special sub-plane. And apparently, there was a lot of them. Really, really lot of them, like most of everything that actually originated on Earth”, she reminisced.

“And let me guess, they all share allegiance to Satan, they all want just Earth as the only true reality for them, and they either reject God’s will, or don’t even perceive it as a thing that exists, or deserves a thought?”, he offered.

“I would say you’re spot on. We essentially offered sanctuary to beings that are not of God, and don’t recognise His kingdom, and as a result, that place is now no longer of God”, she looked at him in horror. “Have I made a horrible mistake?”

“No, I don’t think you did, but it’s still an ominous and potentially very bad thing. We need to talk to the elders again, immediately”, he hugged her.

…

“Oh”, Lord Shiva frowned.

“So that’s the downside”.

“I’ve been reading up on Hinduism lately”, Lady Lakshmi massaged her temples, as if nursing a headache. “It looks like a whole civilization that practiced only addition and no subtraction for thousands of years, and it’s the worst, most disorganised, internally contradictory chaos I have ever seen, and yet it contains some of the best ideas that have ever been conceived by humans on Earth”.

“I’ve been having an eye on them a bit, but nothing as thorough as you’ve been doing, so I would appreciate it if you could summarise it for me”, Lord Vishnu smiled at his glorious wife.

“The basics are simple enough. There was the Dravidic original religious system. Then the Aryans came and introduced their own Vedic pantheon, that also spread to Greece, Rome and with the Slavic tribes. You know, Indra the king of Heaven, elemental deities of earth, water, air and so on. That was then slowly integrated with the Dravidic pantheon and branched into a zillion sects and followings, and the hermits developed the upanishads. Then came Mahavira and said it’s all unimportant, because nonviolence is the only thing that ultimately matters. Lord Buddha built upon that and basically ignored the entire Vedic system, said that suffering is the cornerstone issue, delusion and attachment are its cause, they need to be addressed, and complete detachment from the world is to be sought. His philosophy came to be prevalent and completely sidelined and eventually extinguished the Vedic system of perpetual sacrifices and rituals that cost money and feed the parasitic brahmanic caste. Hinduism kept evolving in the background, developing a system of puja and bhakti in place of yajña, all based around the newer, much better scriptures such as the Bhagavad-gita and Bhagavata-purana”, she nodded.

“Then tantra appeared, based partly on the upanishads, partly on yoga, partly on a cult of Shiva and Shakti, and mostly on frustration caused by the sexual repression and insistence on purity and mental and social rigidity of other systems”, she sighed. “Also, everybody is trying to present their sect, cult or following as a logical interpretation of everything else, so they just keep inheriting and modifying the whole traditional structure, which at this point means that every single imaginable thing or practice is the right way, and also that its diametral opposite is the right way. They think celibacy is the way to achieve enlightenment, and they think sex is the way to achieve enlightenment. They believe faithful marital union is the only way to achieve spiritual progress, and they also believe that sex with laundry maids from the lowest caste is the way to achieve enlightenment. They believe Lord Shiva is the foundation of all Reality, and they also believe he is a weirdo practicing dark magic on cremation grounds, worshipped by demons”, she massaged her head again.

“To be honest, they got some things right. Lord Shiva is indeed the foundation of all Reality, and he is indeed worshipped by demons, ever since Azazel; I think the story got around and he’s now their favourite deity”, Vishnu smiled.

“You should see how they see you. For the most part you are a cute chubby baby, but you also have 16108 wives, and you are also half the characters from half the epics and other scriptures, while I’m both a princess, a dairy maid and a spiritual metaphor. Lady Shakti is both Shiva’s wife, but she’s like ten different women, and I’m not kidding you here, she’s a celibate, a mother, and a monstrous deity of death, chaos, madness and indiscriminate slaughter that drinks blood”, she snickered. “They manage to see Lord Shiva and Lady Shakti as both metaphors for male and female sex, for family life, liberation from the illusion, and as primordial principles of consciousness and energy”, his wife sighed. “The last part, at least, is actually true. They even included historical humans such as Alexander of Macedonia as Skanda, the general of the army of Gods or something, and the most confusing part is, they don’t actually distinguish between physical and spiritual realities. Every character from a book that has a spiritual purport is seen as an existing deity, or a child of existing deities. Everything they’ve read about must be real, and if it’s real, it must have actually happened physically. On the other hand, if something actually happened, they mythologise the historical persons to the point where they become a part of their theological narrative and pantheon. It’s an incredible mess where you can’t tell cause from effect after a few iterations, and my head hurts”, she concluded.

“Thank you for suffering through this to provide me with your blessed insight, my Lady”, Vishnu smiled and kissed her head, which instantly relieved her headache and made her feel great. “But this is not really a Hindu specialty, after all. The Greeks mythologised actual historical figures to the point where you can’t really tell what’s going on there. The Christians are very new, but they already managed to mythologise Christ into some kind of a king, they turned you into a sexless virgin and his holy wife into a repentant prostitute exorcised from demons. They mythologised some garbage dump where they throw carcasses of diseased cattle into a transcendental hell, and they think that Simon Kefa is literally standing there in the reception room of Heaven with a set of keys, reading from a literal book of life. Failing to distinguish between allegory and actual reality is just how their mind works. Also, it’s not really far from how the reality of that place works, if I’m being honest”.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, after Lord Shiva initially cracked that place, and after I did my own thing later on, permeating the spiritual undercurrent of that place with actual spiritual realities, there’s not that much of a difference between some mystic having visions of the actual spiritual beings, states and realities and then writing a holy scripture describing those realities as fictional persons, and actual physical beings embodying those same spiritual states. In both cases, transcendental reality was reached and it bore good fruits. Also, a difference between an imaginary character devoid of spiritual significance, and an ordinary human being devoid of spiritual significance is equally moot”, Vishnu shrugged. “Also, complexity and multi-faceted reality of how things actually work is something that’s easier to describe in complex imagery, and the reductionist philosophies that believe that the simplest and the most elegant explanation must be true, are self-defeating”, he concluded, rubbing her shoulders as she relaxed.

“I like the bhakti cults”, she murmured. “When they are combined with actual high spiritual states, they resemble what we do to each other, seeing and worshipping each other’s virtues and glory”, she smiled blissfully. “But then they replace that with hysteria and vacuous emotionality that I find revolting”, she frowned again. “It’s as if they alternate between interpreting something from a high spiritual vantage point, and interpreting the same thing from the base human vantage point, depending on who’s doing the reading”.

“Unfortunately, that’s the nature of that place. Imagine someone writing something, or reading it, while being attached to some of the conduits of spiritual power I installed there, building on Shiva’s work. They will describe a God’s glory and drink bliss and wisdom directly from the crack in the darkness of that world, through which they perceive the true light. And then someone else reads it without being attached to a similar conduit, and it’s merely a fairy-tale”, he shrugged. “Also, tantra starts as casting away the rigidity of the brahmanic ethos, and this creates the liberating spiritual impulse. However, it eventually degrades into debauchery and spiritual darkness, as one is lost in the chaos of the worldly energies. Control and surrender need to exist in a balance, and people forget that, and tend to think it’s one or the other exclusively. The understanding that there are different phases in spiritual development of a person, where one thing needs to be accentuated, only to be let go of after the goal of that phase has been accomplished, is important, and it’s also important to understand that not all people are the same, or at the same point in their spiritual life. This understanding of plurality and the need for complexity is important, which is why the rigid, simplistic theologies create more problems than they solve, with their ‘one size fits all’ recipes. Hinduism is chaotic, that’s true, but it’s also rigid for those who need rigidity and discipline, and it’s plural and relaxed for those who need spontaneity and freedom. If you see it as a singular theology, it’s a mess. If you see it as an encyclopedia of all theologies for all people in all circumstances, it is amazing”, he nodded.

“So, you’re saying that some people will worship you as a king with me as your queen, and some will worship us as a shepherd and a dairy maid in Vrindavana, depending on who they are, and where they are in their life? Or they will worship Lord Shiva meditating on a graveyard, being done with the world, or they will worship his holy wife as a celibate ascetic, if they are a woman in that phase, or his wife having a sexual meditation with him, if they are practicing tantra, and so on?”, Lakshmi’s tension released as she started finding her way through chaos.

“Exactly. Or they will worship Christ being whipped and crucified if they are in a hard part of their life, or they will imagine him at the peak of his power or risen from the dead if they need inspiration and an ideal to worship. They will worship One God if they need clarity and simplicity, or they will worship multiple Divine aspects simultaneously or consecutively, if they need complexity that corresponds to complex ideas and situations they are facing”, he nodded and kissed her. “Of course it’s not all true, or all false. Some of it is false, because it’s conceived and understood by worldly and false minds. Some of it is holy and true, because it’s conceived and understood by holy and true minds. And regardless of the chaos, the fact that you can reach into that huge library and find something that will fit who you are at the time, is important”.