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.

I am occasionally asked whether one can be enlightened without practising yoga.

This looks like a simple and straightforward question, to which I was initially inclined to answer “yes”, but something about it bothered me and I’m not really happy with this answer, so I thought about it more.

You see, there are obviously people who embody and manifest very high spiritual states, and produce artefacts that are the peak accomplishments in their respective genre, for instance Mike Oldfield, whose example I usually cite. There are also saints of various religions who didn’t practice yoga in the narrow sense. There are also people who had spiritual experiences without any practice whatsoever.
On the other hand, every piece of spiritual skill and knowledge I possess is a result of some difficulty I had to overcome, problem I had to solve, attack I had to survive, and so on. It’s not like those things are a luxury, defined as things you fuck around with in free time because you’re bored. It’s either that I had to learn how to deal with spiritual trauma without going crazy, or deal with high spiritual energy without going crazy or dying, or clean up some nasty karmic structure, create an energy structure, survive a spiritual attack by a malevolent entity, communicate with high spiritual beings, learn when I am being deceived by Satan and demonic entities, and so on. Every failure to develop and use things that can only be qualified as spiritual yoga, would mean failure to overcome an obstacle, failure to solve a problem, failure to receive and interpret a message from above, failure to see through a deception, and basically get wrecked in a really bad way. Even while developing all kinds of skills and understanding, I still got wrecked occasionally. I have absolutely no doubt that without developing such skills, my path would have either ended or gotten sidetracked.

So, what about Mike Oldfield and similar people? Well, I will only remind you that Mike Oldfield spent a large portion of his life being brainwashed by psychiatrists, who convinced him that he’s nothing special and he’s very careful to mention that his major flaw is to think he’s God. Having this in mind, I will hesitate to consider him an example of spiritual success without yoga. More likely, he’s an example of someone who would have greatly benefited from both yoga and proper understanding of spiritual theory.

It’s unfortunate, but my answer to “how did person x attain great results without yoga” is “they probably didn’t”. Yoga isn’t just a method of attaining a spiritual state; were it so, I would say that people can attain spiritual states of all kinds in various ways that only occasionally include yoga by any definition. However, yoga is also a weapon and a shield. It is a weapon in the sense that skill and knowledge allow you to do things to the world and to other beings and entities, and shield in the sense that it gives you skills that protect you from both the world and other beings and entities. It allows you to successfully navigate hostile territory, and this world, if any, meets the requirements splendidly. Have in mind that I started yogic practice in 1993, and attained initiation in Vajra – let’s not mince words, and instead call it attainment of buddhahood in the body – within four years. The rest of my time here was spent doing things that required great purity, skill and persistence, and this resulted in acquisition of great knowledge. Can I imagine someone like Oldfield solving a problem such as an explosion of a contaminated “jewel” that created deadly black shards of super-concentrated karmic matter? No. Can I imagine someone untrained figuring out how to “open” a structure that requires “bombardment” with immense number of mental objects in order to overwhelm it, throw it out of balance and find a “key” that opens it and allows it to dissolve, and then actually cleaning up the mess of poisonous karmic substance that resulted from its dissolution? Not really. Basically, I can imagine untrained people trying to deal with complex spiritual issues by failing repeatedly at them until they eventually die depressed and defeated. An untrained person can have a spiritual experience and learn from it and be inspired. If this inspiration is serious enough, this will result in attainment of yogic skill and formulation of theoretical knowledge. Basically, you can attain knowledge of yoga without previously knowing any yoga, to which I can personally attest. However, if you don’t develop skill, there’s only so far you can go and so much you can do, and you’ll most likely keep bouncing off the same level 1 obstacle in front of you for your entire life. So, the answer to “how did the saint x manage without knowing any of this”, the answer is “he didn’t”. He didn’t get far enough, or did and failed. Maybe some people’s lives are simple, and they merely focus on one aspect of God in meditation, attain enlightenment and don’t have to de-mine Satan’s pit. Good for them, I guess, but the corrupted jewels I had to deconstruct usually came from good and gentle saints who had insufficient skills and knowledge to protect them from some kind of deception, they got killed, their energy was used to power some trap here, and I got to clean up this mess, and my level of skill just happens to be what it takes. Anything less, and you can’t solve problems. Much less, and you get killed and recycled. So, it is true, you don’t need yoga to attain realization of God. Maybe you’ll never encounter any problems you have to solve, maybe Satan will never try to trick you, maybe his scripts will not try to deceive and destroy you, maybe you’ll just happen not to get confused about anything because the right answer will just happen to be the only one you encounter. Maybe, but not in this world. In this world you need weapons and shields or you’re absolutely guaranteed to get fucked.

Today I was cleaning a lot of window blinds on my home using very slow and inefficient method of dish rag and soapy water, cleaning the lamellae individually and from both sides, and I remembered something that might be useful.

In 1993, when I was a complete beginner in yoga, I thought that my odds aren’t good – I don’t have a guru, I don’t have a sadhana, I don’t have a technique of yoga other than autogenous training, and my environment is the exact opposite of what is recommended in the scriptures as a necessary prerequisite for success. Considering how, according to authorities, most practitioners fail, and by that they mean practitioners of an effective yogic technique taught by an authentic guru, by all standards and expectations I was fucked.

I thought about that for a moment when I was cleaning my father’s car, and I had a very weak vacuum cleaner powered by car battery, and the carpets were filled with sand particles. However, I very slowly and meticulously passed through the carpets with the vacuum cleaner, and in five minutes they were perfect. And then it dawned to me that consistent, diligent practice of anything that has effectiveness greater than zero will result in perfection, and it will in fact take a much shorter time than one would expect – insignificantly longer, in fact, than if one started with the most effective technique. If one does nothing and merely despairs about odds, probabilities and inadequacies, he will remain firmly entrenched at square one. Basically, in the overall equation of yoga, desire for God and willingness to work consistently with whatever means you have at hand play a huge role. Figuring out techniques and theory is on the result-side of the equation; those are the fruits of labour, so to speak; the result of consistent application of spiritual focus on God, or, as the Christians would say, the fruits of the Holy Spirit. It took me four years from that point where I washed the car thinking my odds aren’t great, and the point where I had all the techniques, experienced Self-realization, and had undergone initiation into Vajra. Now, 30 years later, those four years seem like nothing, especially considering how people I know manage to waste decades sitting on the fence, thinking whether some technique, teaching or guru is good or bad, and whether they should do anything at all, because it’s hard and who knows what will come out of it.

Well, I can guarantee you one thing – if you don’t do anything, you won’t achieve anything, and no technique, religion, philosophy, guru or God will help you. If you have enough desire for God, you will start doing something, and even if you were to die at that point because the Americans or Russians nuke you or an asteroid strikes or the Sun explodes, the momentum of that desire for God will carry you further and influence your future outcomes after death. If you don’t do anything, the momentum of inertia, cowardice and ineptitude will also influence your outcomes after death. Pick your poison. If you truly want God, God will give you everything you need to reach Him. If you want to screw around, you will eventually run out of time.

People in the 19^th century had strange ideas about evolution (the theosophists, among others), and I guess some of those ideas are still here. Basically, the idea is that species evolve from a more primitive to a more sophisticated form. What happens in reality is that the species “fork”, they branch out, and each branch is then subject to outside pressures, under which it either goes extinct, or survives. This creates an appearance of evolution of the species, but species don’t actually evolve. They just go extinct, or not. The fact that we still have billions of years old single-cell species, as well as hundreds of millions of years old multi-cell species is evidence enough that species don’t evolve. Yes, they branch out and diversify all the time, but sometimes all of those modified branches die out because they are less resistant to extinction than the original version, which persists. A horseshoe crab is one such example; a shark is another.

Evolution is an illusion which is perceived when you have several mutated branches of a species, and one such branch survives the extinction pressures, while the others do not; then you get the impression that the species evolved to survive.

What actually behaves exactly like people in the 19^th century believed the species behave, is the soul – an aggregate of karmic substance, if you will. It starts as a simple structure, and if it continues to evolve (which is not necessarily the case) it can grow in both size and complexity, and it can respond to “evolutionary pressures” by changing into something that is better suited to the environment.

This is the greatest danger posed by this world – it creates an upside-down set of evolutionary pressures and criteria for success, and if you take it seriously (and you are very much motivated to do so) you will make spiritual choices that will re-shape your soul into something that is better suited for survival and success here. Not in the spiritual world, which is the home and the natural environment of the soul, but here.

Let’s see what that means. Let’s imagine that your physical body can evolve the way people think the species evolve – adapt into a more successful form when the environment changes. Let’s say you swim in the sea, and you understand that you’re poorly adapted for it, and you “evolve” into something similar to a seal, and then a dolphin. However, then something changes and you are pulled back to the land, your original home, and you have a little mermaid experience, being completely misshaped and crippled by your previously made choices to adapt to the sea, and you find out that you are now in essence a blob of dysfunctional, dying mess, because you can’t change back effectively, or quickly enough for it to matter. Basically, this world is “the sea” to the soul – unnatural environment with laws that don’t make sense in the real world your soul had evolved for. If you adapt to be successful under the rules of this place, you’ll have to evolve into a dolphin or a jellyfish, and guess what happens when you return to “dry land” of the real world. You discover that you turned yourself into a monster, unfit for anything. The idea from the New Age movement of the 1990s, that the purpose of this world is to help you evolve by providing evolutionary pressure is not wrong – however, the idea that your evolution will go into the direction that will be recognized as improvement according to the criteria of the spiritual realms is highly dubious. By “evolving” you probably think being prodded to turn into an angel of God or an enlightened being; however, the creator of this place had other ideas and priorities. Basically, you think the pressures of this world will help you be a better person, while in fact it is designed to help you become a better jellyfish.

That’s why Christianity is so much better a religion than Judaism and Islam; it understands that criteria of success, as defined by this world, are on a completely unrelated dimension, in relation to success as defined by God and the spiritual realms – basically, what this world casts away, God embraces, and what this world embraces, God casts away. Judaism, Islam (and heretical forms of Christianity such as protestantism) think in terms that God is the ultimate power here and everywhere, He makes all the rules everywhere, and if He likes someone, He rewards him with treasures and success of all kinds, and if someone is seen as unworthy, God punishes him by denying him success and all the good things of the world. The revolution of Christ’s teaching is that this world is in fact not ruled by God – “the Prince of this world” is the title that belongs to Satan. Satan can bestow worldly gifts, either as a temptation or as a way to make one stray from the true path of God, and God can expose those dearest to Him to great trials, deprivations, suffering and death in this world. Basically, what Jesus revealed is that the criteria of this world are not the same as the criteria of God – in fact, it would be proper to say that they are almost perpendicular. Success in terms of the world means to acquire more wealth and more control over other men, and produce the greatest number of most successful offspring. Success in terms of God means to acquire spiritual qualities that are of God – basically, to look at the light of God, and see it as your own, and radiate it outwards into other beings and things, to the greater glory of God. This light of God is the light of spirit, and of understanding that God is the supreme, most fundamental reality of all, and to shine this light means to make it grow in other beings, make others grow in awareness of God, in spiritual beauty, consciousness, bliss, power and reality. As you can see, intersection between those two criteria-sets is very vague, and trying to attain full success under one set of criteria all but guarantees failure according to the other set. As Jesus also said, it might not be the best idea to completely disregard the criteria of this world, and it’s good to “give to Caesar that which is of Caesar”, which is something that was all-but-ignored in the dark ages, when Christians neglected the worldly sphere to a fault, but the fundamental lesson is that you should think twice before you envy those who have great success in this place, because they might be a jellyfish in heaven, having evolved to thrive in this world but to fail in the real one created by God, and also think twice before feeling pity for a pathetic beggar because that might be Milarepa, or for a condemned criminal on a cross of execution, because that might be Jesus. If a world is designed to humiliate God, it would be foolish to expect God to be the greatest of winners in all worldly things.