People often implicitly assume that when things take an unpleasant turn in this world, that it’s an aberration, a wrong that needs to be righted. However, according to both Buddhism and Yoga, things going wrong is normal here. If you want to attain buddhahood, you are swimming against the current, trying to calm natural fluctuations of the mind, and fight against the nature of this world. This world is designed to be as bad a place as can exist and still allow souls to be bound to it, and human body is a very poor vehicle for the soul. For all intents and purposes, it’s a vicious animal bound by instincts that almost always go against one’s better angels, and you need to be constantly in control, or the waters will close above your head as you are pulled in. This is not a cheerful prospect, of course, but it’s not intended to amuse you or lift your mood, but to describe things as they are. In fact, it is my opinion that the optimistic worldviews, that tell you that it is normal for things to be great, will actually make you feel terrible, because they will make you think that things going wrong is somehow your fault, and you will feel both guilty and ashamed for what might appear as your personal failure. The truth, however unpleasant, will lift his burden from you.

Catholics have a term for one of those terrible things that seem to be designed into the world – they call it “the dark night of the soul”. It is a state where a saintly person, through no fault of their own, is separated from the presence of God, while Satan and the worldly forces are allowed to tempt, test and molest them. This seems to be so common, it’s a rule of the world rather than an exception: it might be one of those things God conceded to Satan, allowing him to test souls here, according to the original contract, and a saint who is constantly in the presence of God seems to defy this rule. Of course, God is allowed to have a presence here and to be able to argue His point, because that too is part of the test, but God is not allowed to prevail by offering such an overwhelming and constant support to those who had chosen Him, that all further tests provided by the Prince of this world are made to look insignificant. The tests must be real, and in order to test someone really highly initiated and holy, and in order for the test to be valid, they need to be brought to a very real breaking point. Forty days of fasting in a desert, followed by temptations by Satan, remember? But compared to what some others had, this looks very easy. Some had decades in a spiritual desert, separated from any kind of a transcendental vision, having to rely only on their intrinsic nature in order to overcome the entirety of hell conspiring against them.

I once heard an interpretation of the “dark night” as a depression. This is completely false. The dark night of the soul is not a depression, it’s what humans call being human. It’s the existence separated from the vision of God, devoid of transcendental experiences, but immersed in the world and the senses. Yes, what a saint calls a dark night of the soul, humans call human life. So, while the condition itself is not depression, to a saintly person it can indeed cause depression, but this is not helpful in any way and is to be avoided, because nobody is going to pull you out, and depression causes damage you’ll eventually have to fix, on your own.

It’s interesting that only the Catholics had sufficient wisdom and experience to recognize this phenomenon, although I am quite certain that it is not limited to their membership. The rest, probably, think it signifies some personal failing, a spiritual fall, a sign of being impure and unworthy of God’s presence, and this is why I said that optimistic and positive worldviews can actually cause suffering, because if you don’t understand that such conditions are a necessary part of worldly existence and not a sign of personal failings, it will actually add to your misfortunes.

People reading my books and articles are usually under a misapprehension that I must be in some kind of an ecstatic trance, either constantly or at least while I produce such spiritual artefacts, but they couldn’t be more wrong. I have been enduring a “dark night” ever since 2007 or something like that (I don’t precisely remember); one of the “guys up there” showed himself to me, apologized that they will have to keep the distance until the very end because it is necessary (I didn’t quite understand the reason at the time, but it had something to do with the open fight against Satan, that I started around that time) and went away. I didn’t think much of it then, because I had no idea that it will be decades, and not, for instance, months. The strongest texts I ever wrote were made after that point, from the position of me whirling up spiritual substance from the human position in order to reach what has been taken away from me. Some of those texts were written during sickness or karmic transformations that include terrible suffering. It’s all incredibly unpleasant even with the more-less good knowledge of what’s going on; if I had to endure it while thinking it’s all my fault, that I must have done something to cause it because I live in a perfect world made by perfect God and everything bad that’s going on here must necessarily be my fault, it would have been much worse.

You see, it seems that one of the rules of this place says that anyone hostile to Satan that is incarnated in this place, who intends to undermine his rule and defeat him, can have no help from God, in a sense where he would be guided from above in his actions, or be spiritually maintained by God’s presence that would help him endure. No – those fighting him have to do so in a desert, without “food and water”, without hope or encouragement, using only their own human resources. Satan also has some limitations – he can’t, for instance, directly kill his enemy, because that’s an instant loss. He can, however, go about it in indirect ways – “inspire” other humans, for instance, marking his enemy with something the Romans called “aquae et igni interdictio”, barring anyone from giving access to water or fire to the excommunicated person under a threat of death penalty. This is done using various “scripts” of the world, in order for the order to kill not to be traceable to Satan – it’s cloaked as a command to “not support enemies of the Lord and the good worldly order He installed”. Also, if the saint made fatal mistakes while under misapprehensions caused by Satan fighting back, that would be too bad. If other souls were persuaded by Satan to fight against such a saintly person, thinking that by doing so they are serving God or something, that would also be too bad. Those seduced and deceived souls would of course get all the karmic punishment for such an act, which would also be too bad (insert animated gif of Muttley snickering).

Basically, an open fight against Sanat Kumar, while incarnated here, is designed by the intrinsic rules of the system to be a death penalty by withdrawing all support from the system, and invoking all kinds of hostility from everybody that is in service of Satan. This is a self-defence mechanism built into the word-illusion, and in normal conditions it dooms any attacker. Historically, the effectiveness of this was such that Sanat Kumar got complacent, and, when things didn’t immediately work in my case, he got nervous and eventually made a mistake. It happened to have significant consequences for him. However, the things he set in motion remain in motion until the scripts receive a contravening command from the person in command. If this seat is vacant, a valid command can’t be issued.

Basically, what Satan tries to do to his enemies here is layered – first, try to deceive and seduce, to get them to willingly join their power with him. Second, try to cause them to make mistakes, so that they get in deeper trouble, and also have nobody else to blame. Third, deceive other souls to be an instrument of evil – this is a double whammy, because if those souls end up destroyed, that’s all par for the course. Fourth, deny support from the world system, deny access to resources and energy of the world, deny access to God. In my case, and I think in my case alone, he had to tweak and micro-manage this last one, because things didn’t seem to work – for instance, there didn’t seem to be any apparent result from cutting my connection with God, because I am God, for all intents and purposes – mani padme, if you will. I just don’t have transcendental vision and power. Also, he cut me away from means of earning money (which is very deadly here), and very successfully sabotaged all my business plans, however I saw a hole in the script-logic and exploited it: if people just gave me money, without promise of anything in return, and without me directly asking for it in such a way that it would be a transaction, that would work. Basically, if they volunteered, and I shrugged, this would go under the radar.

What does this say about me, again? That I’m obviously not quite human? True. However, what absolutely nobody seems to understand is that this means that my capacity for suffering far exceeds that of a human – or, surviving prolonged, extreme spiritual agony, at least. I can suffer much more, and for longer, without going insane, evil, atheist or simply dying. Basically, I wasn’t nailed to a cross, because that’s merely one bad afternoon. No – I had the maximum level of suffering that I can possibly take, which in my case is caused by being separated from God, and that was extended for decades. The condition Jesus was in on the cross, immediately before death, where he lamented that God had forsaken him, couldn’t endure it, and died? That moment is every moment of my day, every day. Only I don’t get to die.

That is the condition in which I wrote all of my best work; and I would take my suffering over the greatest joy the entire mankind derives from this world – every single time, every single instance, because in order to be able to truly suffer, you need to miss something, and in order to miss it, you need to be there, in a way. This is why “dark night of the soul” is sort of a misnomer; there is a different way to state this: “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”.