Monthly Archives: January 2017

Religion for children

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I don’t believe that one should not explain religion to children and instead wait for them to grow up and “make up their own mind”. It’s as stupid as saying one should not teach them maths or science and should instead let them grow up ignorant and uneducated and then, when they’re 18, they can make up their own mind about how much 2+2 is. However, I don’t believe in filling their heads with dogma, either. What I do is wait until they are old enough to understand the real explanations, the real theology, and then teach them as I would adults. The thing is, religion is demanding, much more so than science. I could explain forces and vectors to my kids at a very early age; I could teach them how to code in Logo almost as soon as they could read and write. But religion requires a much more advanced and mature ability for abstract thinking, and although you can fill children’s heads with formulaic explanations, in my opinion that would be worse than useless. As a result, I had to start by giving them a very good foundation of rational thinking, problem solving and, essentially, breaking down complexity into solvable parts. At the age of 13, with my older kid, I’m still not sure whether he quite gets is, but I did explain quite a lot about Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, in the sense that I explained how they approach similar issues from different standpoints and provide valid answers, and how different theologies can produce essentially identical ethics. Also, I try to strip down the superficial and get to the core issues; for instance, I explained Christianity as a top-down approach, of a revelation of deep truths from God’s perspective, that’s essentially identical to what was later revealed in the near-death testimonies. Buddhism, on the other hand, is the bottom-up approach by a man who figured out the fundamental problems and worked out ways of solving them, figuring out some of the most sophisticated spiritual truths in the process. Hinduism, however, is a mixture of both top-down revelations through scriptures and bottom-up processes of Yoga, and isn’t as much a religion as a set of religious paths wrapped together by common culture and civilization. Judaism is a history of one tribe’s process of figuring out transcendence, with varying degrees of success; if not for the magnificent phenomenon of Jesus, which required knowledge of the backstory and context of his teachings, it would be historically irrelevant and nobody would care about it; transformed and reshaped by Christianity, it reaches great sophistication and value, although most parts of the traditional Judaism are useful primarily as examples of the things people tried, before Jesus, and failed. But not all religions are good. Islam, for instance, is a product of a deranged mind of a madman, who heard a few things here and there about Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, it all got mixed up in his head and spewed forth in form of psychotic hallucinations. Unlike good religions, Islam is spiritually worthless and exists only for ill. If Satan ever created his own ideal religion, it’s Islam. It makes people dumb, unquestioning, deluded and violent. Essentially, it’s a false religion, trash that needs to disappear. It’s a spiritual virus that reduces everything it touches to shit.

At one point, I tried to explain the concept of prayer, and you might find my explanation interesting, so I’ll repeat it here.

Prayer is often misunderstood, by stupid people who aren’t trained in abstract thought, as a wish-list one recites in the direction of God, expecting him to deliver. However, that’s not how intelligent people understand it. To them, prayer is not about asking God to produce material benefits to the believer, it’s not even about talking. In fact, it’s the process of focused and directed listening. In the process of prayer, you attempt to focus your mind on the best available approximation of God you can reach towards, with the highest, most sophisticated parts of your spirit, and trying to sense what it’s telling you. It’s like sensing a magnetic field with a compass; you watch the needle move and it helps you sense the lines of magnetic force, and thus you scan the topology of the magnetic field. In the process of prayer, you learn about God; where He is, where He is not, what do you need to be in order to feel harmony with That which is Out There. You learn how to feel alignment, and you learn how to feel discrepancy. You learn to live in such a way that you feel approval from that direction, you feel you’re doing the right thing. You do talk, but you talk in order to feel out the direction, you feel which words align with it the best, which thoughts align with it the best, and later, which actions align with it the best. Even learning science and maths, or poetry and literature, can be a form of prayer, if it helps you extend your mind’s reach, make it more flexible and powerful, allow you to think clearly, to feel clearly and remove confusion. Prayer can be a sophisticated and subtle thing. Of course, it can be an act of brainwashing yourself by mindlessly repeating phrases which you don’t even understand. Different people, according to their level of comprehension, understand prayer differently, but that is so with everything; people also understand gravity differently, according to their intellectual prowess.

So yeah, that’s how I teach children about religion. 🙂

About sin

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People have strange ideas about sin, and usually the accompanying imagery is sexual. I assure you, the concept has nothing to do with sex, and it is far from being trivial or arbitrary. But let me explain.

When you don’t know what is right, and you stumble around trying to figure it out, it’s a process of learning. You always make mistakes. It’s the normal process of figuring things out, of breaking through the wall of your limitations.

When you know what is right, you decide to do it, but you occasionally fail, it’s called a lapse. It’s not hypocrisy to know what is right and still occasionally fail to do it. It’s called imperfection. Only God is free of those. The rest of us fuck up, fix the mess, pick ourselves up and try to do better next time.

When you know what is right, and you decide tu bury this feeling, change it and change your concept of right and wrong in order to justify a different course, it’s called sin.

As you can see, sin has nothing to do with mistakes, errors or lapses. It’s a completely different phenomenon. Mortal sin is the kind you refuse to let go until you are destroyed; the kind that makes you stubbornly go the wrong way, defend the wrong choices, until there’s nothing left of your soul to redeem.

You can make mistakes and be free of sin. You can make occasional lapses and be free of sin. You can be deceived or deluded and still be free of sin. It’s not difficult to be free of sin, it’s not something only Jesus could do. It’s as easy as recognizing God, choosing the direction that leads to Him, and be forever loyal, choosing repeatedly, over and over again, the path of renunciation of all that is worldly, illusory and binding, the path of choosing truth over lies, of having your mind’s eye unclouded by desires and deceptions, of being always ready to let go of your life in order to follow God wherever He leads you. And it’s not even difficult, because God is such a great and wonderful prize, that casting everything else aside is no sacrifice. The only sacrifice is enduring this life, being delayed in joining God.

Who’s the enemy, and how to win?

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Watching Alex Jones on his YouTube channel, one would get the impression that “the globalists” are the enemy.

Or is it the leftist liberals, the neo-Marxists, feminists?

Or is it the neo-cons?

Or is it the Muslims and their fifth column in the West, which tries to weaken our resistance to shitty civilization-forming ideologies and the shitty cultures that they form?

If you ask the liberals, it’s “bigotry” and various “oppressions” that are the problem.

So let me tell you what I think.

I think the problem is several levels removed from the place where humans usually look for it. As St. Paul said, it’s not the flesh that’s the enemy, it’s the evil spiritual structure that dominates over it. The war is not against human bodies of this or that group, it’s not against hardware. It’s against software, against the spiritual power, against ideologies and belief systems that contaminate the minds and cause evil and suffering.

Buddha would say that the problem is suffering. The cause of suffering is projection of spiritual power into illusory and ephemeral things. The solution is to detach and withdraw. When the inertia of the flywheel is spent, the result is nirvana.

Jesus had a different take on it. He said that the problem is that Satan basically has power over the world, and is an active force that lies, binds and destroys souls. The solution was to redeem the world from his power by offering sacrifice of sufficient value, and simultaneously forcing Satan to administer the deathblow. It’s a complex equation, but it’s elegant and it had a good chance of actually working.

Because, you see, I think Buddha got one thing wrong, the one Jesus got right. The world is not a passive place where you just happen to invest your energy in form of projections and desires. The world is intentionally designed in such a way as to delude you regarding your true nature and the nature of reality, and to continually sing the sirens’ song of attraction, that provokes attachment and binds your fate to its own. The world is not a passive factor in our situation. It’s in fact the determining factor, exuding influence of such magnitude, that almost any degree of individual choice is outweighed and overshadowed. To say that the world is merely a given and that our attachment to it is our own problem to solve is like stating that gravity has nothing to do with the fact that we don’t happen to just spontaneously fly into space, and that we are holding on to the surface of the Earth by some act of our own volition. In a word, it’s false.

As for the humans, I would divide them into several groups. There are the ones who are aware of the situation and are actively working to counter it. There was about a handful of those throughout history. Then there are those who are aware that there’s some serious problem here, but are unaware of its exact nature, and are doing things that are sometimes useful, sometimes harmful, and sometimes useless.

There are those who don’t see it as a problem, but a great thing, who completely align their spiritual vector with that of the world, and who see attachment of spirit to matter as a great thing, and not a problem. And in the end, there are those who are unaware of anything, and just stumble around life like idiots.

The biggest problem is that the last group forms the vast majority of mankind throughout history. The vast majority of humans are as stupid as rocks. They merely want to preserve their existence as they see it, they want there to be more of things similar to them and less things that are dissimilar or threatening in other ways, they want to reproduce and they want to gain more influence. Tantric yoga would call them “the pashavi”, from pashu, which means “animal”, so it’s roughly translated as animalistic ones, the ones who are stupid animals who fight, feed and make little pashavi. In tantric yoga, the opposite of a pashavi is a yogi. A yogi understands that there’s a problem, he understands that he has to do something to get out of the problem, and he takes active measures, such as gaining knowledge, finding a guru who can teach him, and practising yoga with the goal of attaining liberation from the world.

So, essentially, the humans are divided into staunchly different groups according to the software that runs in their brains. They can be stupid cattle, they can be Satan’s henchmen, and they can be beings who strive for spiritual perfection and freedom, with varying degrees of success. In rare cases, they can be the agents of God, who possess true knowledge and power and are actually able to do something about it all.

As you are probably able to tell, my perspective differs significantly from anything that is widely believed.

My perception of the current state of worldly affairs is that the evil humans are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, wishing to do some evil, but without a supreme guiding evil force to direct them, and so they often contradict each others’ efforts, while increasing chaos, suffering and the overall amount of evil. The stupid ones are as stupid as they always were, only in greater numbers due to the exponential population growth, and the good ones are so outnumbered and they feel so dispersed and powerless, they are on the verge of getting completely confused and going crazy in this mess.

The thing is, the evil ones are not clearly divided according to ideology. You can’t just say “separate a certain ethnicity or religion or a political group, kill it off and thus solve the problem of evil”. You have evil globalists, but you also have evil nationalists, and evil Christians, and evil atheists. The evil ones are not all Muslims. Basically, there are different intellectual and emotional contents that exist on different spiritual vectors, and it’s the actual vectors that I find interesting, not the labels people put on them. I care whether someone has a spiritual connection to the transcendental or not, whether he understands the nature of the transcendental and the nature of the world, and whether he understands what spiritual choices and actions create what kind of a destiny for himself and others. Heinlein wisely stated that goodness combined with ignorance invariably results in evil, and I would express that as a mathematical formula, where intent multiplied with understanding determines the result. Good intent multiplied with shitty understanding equals evil. Shitty intent multiplied with good understanding equals evil. Only good understanding multiplied with good intent produces good results. Having in mind that people’s understanding of reality is shit, for the absolutely vast majority, you tell me if their intent matters. They are as likely to do evil deeds if they have the best motives, as they are if they have the worst ones. Having that in mind, I’m rather cynical about those who think they have a recipe for fixing things. The communists had it, the Nazis had it, everybody had it. Every damn fool thinks he can make the world a better place, and Buddha would rightly say that the only result of that is being attached to the world, and I would add that the additional result is usually adding your energy to the exact force that makes this world such a terrible place to begin with, because multiplying ignorance with zeal increases the overall “heat” of the chaotic pot in which we are all being cooked.

It is my opinion that the solution is not in introducing more energy into the system, in form of various efforts within the world. It’s not in the attempts of self-control, as if we are the ones to blame for falling, and not gravity. It’s not in trying to magically extract and transform evil that is contained in the world, in hope of making it good. The solution is to break the pot in which we are being cooked, even if we are to fall into the fire at first. This world needs to die.