I noticed something that left me in a state of bewilderment. You see, I observe what religious people are doing and how they are dealing with issues, because I have a soft spot for everyone who is supposedly devoted to God.

This time I watched Catholic Youtube channels, and I noticed several main trends – the first is that their Church is basically the only good thing in the world, in order to be saved you better be a Catholic, obedience to the Church authorities is necessary for salvation, and any lapse in that might open you to temptation or even possession by Satan and demons.

On the other hand, they complain how Satan is enthroned in the Vatican, how Satan controls even the top of the Church, and how the current Pope is a heretic, apostate and an antipope. They are curiously silent about the nasty sexual scandals in the Church, but I can guess why they wouldn’t want to talk about that.

So, which is it? Is the Church the bastion of Christ in the very realm of Satan, or is it a corrupt bastion of Satan in the realm of Satan? When you hear the Christians talk about how good they are having it and that you should have some, too, you better be ignorant of what they are saying among themselves behind the curtain.

Hubris of that kind seems to invite trouble, I’d say. Also, they have that belief that they themselves are weak, but Christ is strong and they will call upon him to defend them. Basically, they will call Christ, and Satan and his demons will panic and leave. It doesn’t matter what your limitations are if you have a big daddy who will fight your battles. If Satan gets you to play chess with him, it doesn’t matter that you are a poor player if God is guiding your hand. Sounds good in theory. In practice, I have noticed that all religions that use this very argument – “not me, but God in me” – consistently and reliably fail, because things simply don’t work that way. The entire theory behind this looks flawed, in the same sense in which geocentric model of the solar system is flawed – it’s wrong in its basic assumptions, and although a flawed system can sometimes provide very good predictions, it is inherently unfixable, and in order to get past its flaws you need to throw the entire model away and change the way you understand reality. The problem with a wrong model is that you try to fit everything you see and hear into this wrong model, and thus you never truly see or hear anything. Jesus had the same problem with people (“Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?”), because that’s what happens when you say things and people interpret them in the context of their wrong paradigm – they don’t really hear you. Their minds are shackled by their wrong assumption that they have a good idea about how things work. Everybody else is either confirming their understanding, or is wrong. The concept that they might be the ones who are wrong, and that they are talking to someone who has a fundamentally better understanding, never even crosses their minds. They have Jesus and the Church behind them. In times of Jesus, they had God and Moses behind them. In any case, they are with God, the big daddy who makes sure they always win and are never wrong, because how can I be wrong if I’m with God?

Let me offer a different viewpoint – something from Mahayana Buddhism, although there is a similar story in Hinduism. I’ll improvise on the general theme, so it won’t be a direct quotation of anything.

A bodhisattva in his exalted spiritual state perceives this world and the suffering of all the beings that are deluded and bound here, and feels compassion. This feeling of compassion, while his spirit is touching this world in order to sense its reality, starts to whirl up the substance of the world-illusion, mixing it somewhat with the reality of nirvana, and where those two realities are mixed together, tulkus appear – something that is an actual human being that is conceived, born, lives and dies in the world as a very real being, not an astral artefact (tulpa). Unlike a common soul that inhabits a human body, that is bound to this world by desires and misapprehensions, a tulku is here because a bodhisattva wanted to solve the problem, and tulku appeared as a reality on the line of solution, a light that appeared in the darkness of this world because a higher source of light touched the darkness, and this light in the world feels strong, all-encompassing desire to return to its origin, because its true reality is the reality of the bodhisattva; it doesn’t remember what is it that it desires, but its desire to return home is so powerful, it tears a rift in the world-illusion, and creates artefacts of higher reality as it tries to remember, and thus allows other beings that see this to get some taste of the higher reality and choose it as their own. As the tulku returns to its “caster”, it realizes that it, truly, is the bodhisattva, and recognizes that as its true nature and being, and this blissful understanding of one’s true nature does not feel like you’re losing your individuality by melting into a higher being. No, it feels as if you’re free from darkness of ignorance and you are your true self again. Vedanta would formulate it similarly – one attains liberation by realizing that he is truly that, that he is brahman, not a limited being. As it was phrased in the Babylon 5 TV series from the 1990s, when trying to explain the Minbari philosophy, it is said that soul is a non-localized phenomenon, which looks like something the authors took from Vedanta, which usually uses a metaphor with one Moon, and many reflections in many bodies of water, where you can separate one body of water in many vessels and each will hold a reflection of the Moon, and the realization happens when you understand that you are that Moon; not a reflection, and definitely not a vessel.

Why do I seem to digress so much? Because I need this in order to explain why relying on someone or something else to save you from your own inadequacies might be a fundamentally misguided approach, and if you have fallen under such a misapprehension, you might nor be able to “hear” the truth, because you hear it from the context of your misapprehension. You might think that you are a small spiritual being that needs help from its heavenly father, and that every other understanding is blasphemous, or a sign of hubris, or “prelest” or whatever you may call it. In contact with a higher being, you might feel your own reality, bliss and consciousness increased, and you interpret this as a blessing of a higher being. You might even be right thinking this. However, things might be more along the line of that being pulling you into its own reality, and away from your illusions, by effectively making the illusion in your consciousness thinner and more transparent. The reality may be that Christ is a tulku of a bodhisattva, and the true meaning of accepting Christ as the Lord is to allow yourself to be pulled by the wake he created in the world, by mixing illusion with reality like a trail of bread crumbs through a dark forest, allowing you to recognize that you, indeed, are that; by making a choice of will that recognizes the light as something you belong to, by saying “not me, but light within me”, you are making the first steps that eventually lead to the realization that there is no “me”, that this was an illusion of the world, a darkness that obscures and misleads. In the light of God, there is no darkness, and darkness is what separates the identity of “you” from the self-realization that God is, and the blissful shock of realization that I Am, I Am that.