(continuation from the previous article)

There are several important issues that need to be addressed regarding soul-growth and spiritual evolution.

The first is why some soul-types cannot be saved. There’s one interesting thing about astral substance, and that is its non-linear behavior in the low-energy spectrum. In high energy spectrum, when you expose an astral entity to “light”, basically to aspects of God, it absorbs them and “glows”, it is enhanced. When you expose a low-energy astral entity to the same kind of “light”, it disintegrates and “dies”. One would expect the astral particles, or kalapas, to use the proper term, to respond linearly to the influx of energy, in some predictable thermodynamic pattern, and on the level of individual kalapas, I think this is actually true, but apparently the larger structure seems to be destroyed when its constituents are exposed to the light of God that they need, and the larger structure rejects and avoids. Apparently, the individual astral kalapas refuse to put up with that shit anymore and go their own way, refusing to be bound into the darkness that is the choice of the dark entity to which they belong. As a result, when a dark spiritual entity is exposed to God’s light that is stronger than its own dark will that holds it together, the tangential momentum of the individual kalapas exceeds the already weak cohesive force of the structure, and it goes poof. Essentially, this shows that the existence of spiritual darkness is so against the basic laws of nature, that it is opposed on the kalapa level.

This law apparently holds even on the higher levels of reality, because if the level of God’s light a soul is exposed to significantly exceeds the power of its internal energy bonds, essentially if the level of love, truth and consciousness one is exposed to from the outside exceeds the level of love, truth and consciousness that bind his individual ego-structure together, he is at the risk of breaking up at the seams, metaphorically speaking, where “seams” are the weakest energy-points of his spiritual body, similar to the inclusions of weak material in a stronger rock. Those “seams” therefore limit the amount of spiritual energy one is able to take, and in order for that limit to be raised, the inclusions need to be transformed into higher-energy substance, and the disjointed fragments of the spiritual body need to be integrated. So, how does one do that?

If you’ve read the reports of the spiritual experiences of the saints, as well as the NDE experiences, which I hope you did, you will remember that the experience is usually a combination of joy and pain. Joy is because of God, and pain is because of one’s sins and flaws that light up in the consciousness as the overall energy level rises, and the soul instinctively tries to handle those weaknesses by either remorse or understanding. Both approaches work, depending on the specifics. Healing of the inner spiritual fractures and inclusions is usually done by a combination of remorse, acceptance of forgiveness, release of resent and blame, and understanding of truth. The low-energy substance is not released, it is absorbed into the rest of the spiritual body, which temporarily lowers the energy of the entire structure in the same way absorbing ice would cool down your physical body. This means your entire soul will feel pain of some kind during the process of absorption of the inclusions. The process is similar to the absorption of traumatic content encapsulated within a “larva”, where low-energy substance one was unwilling or unable to deal with was encapsulated within a membrane that isolates it from the rest of the spiritual body. Those membranes are inherently impermanent, and when they burst, the content is released into the spiritual body, creating trauma. If this trauma is absorbed and suffered through, the structure recovers and reintegrates on a higher level of functionality, because now there is no fragmentation and isolation of parts of one’s being into inaccessible regions. However, if trauma is unbearable, and one tries to shield oneself from it, another larva is formed in order to block the undesirable things from one’s consciousness. So, essentially, by accepting spiritual pain, living through it, with a combination of acceptance, remorse and understanding, one regains parts of oneself and is released from the necessity of existing in the energy spectrum that is lower than one’s maximum, because of the fact that higher energy would stress the larvas and inclusions to one’s breaking point. When those breaking points at the lower energy levels are removed, the entire structure can experience and absorb much higher levels of God’s light than was previously possible. Essentially, this reintegration and removal of low-energy inclusions, and raising the energy level of the entire spiritual body to the level of the highest-energy structures within the body, is what takes place in the process of evolution of the higher parts of the astral world, inhabited by the beings who already possess significant sophistication, complexity and purity. When the entire astral body attains uniformity at the highest energy level of the astral substance, apparently the entire structure crystallizes, it compresses into crystalline vajra form as it transcends the limitations of the astral world and goes beyond. This is basically the point I tried to lead my students towards, because once they get there, they are essentially out of the woods. Sure, there is spiritual growth even beyond that, but after that point one’s position is no longer precarious.

Another important issue is the motivator and mechanism of evolution in the astral plane. Incarnated human souls usually assume that without motivators present in the physical world, the souls would stagnate indefinitely in the astral world, and so the physical is useful as means for accelerating spiritual evolution. That, however, is not only false, but is in fact the direct opposite to the truth.

The logic goes like this: one feels comfort and is disinclined to change anything. At some point, discomforts and dangers of the physical world make him think and do things to avoid dangers and to assure his survival. The problem is, the most effective way to assure your survival in the physical world is to be the worst kind of a Darwinistic satanic animal, which by the way is also an excellent way of assuring your spiritual degradation and destruction. So, the only way to spiritually evolve in this world is to do all the wrong things, judged by the worldly criteria, because if you do all the “right” things, you’ll end up a spiritual abomination. In the astral world, however, the motivation isn’t negative. Theoretically, an astral “vegetable” can sit in the light all day and feel good, and this could theoretically go on for millennia without interruption. However, this astral “plant”, a simple aggregation of kalapas without much structure, which is able to experience only the basic, primal emotions, can also experience the existence of more sophisticated beings, who are able to interact, communicate, merge, share ideas, and eventually experiences discomfort due to its inability to do the same. This discomfort with one’s limitations is the main motivator of spiritual growth. It begins with perception, proceeds into empathy, and then into emulation, and with practice one acquires new abilities. Also, although God’s light is perceived by the simple spiritual beings as primal emotions – joy, pleasure, gratitude, fulfillment etc., it’s never just that. This light is also reason and intelligence and promise of greatness if you know more of it, and it is inherently motivating, it sort of pulls your toward and into itself, so basically the more you have it the more you desire it, and by “more” I don’t mean more of the same, but primarily the expansion of quality. There is pain, but its origin is in the awareness of one’s limitations in knowing more of God. So yes, this pain is also a motivation, because a spiritual being feels a special kind of pain when it sees that others can take from God something he’s yet unable to grasp, but it isn’t jealousy (defined as a desire for someone not to have more than you do) but its opposite (defined as a desire to be as good as those who are now better than yourself). You don’t want to allow others to be better than you, but not by limiting them, but by growing to match their high standards, and possibly even more, to be the shining example of God’s beauty and wonder for others to aspire to. So yes, there is a competition of a sort, between the spiritual beings – who will know more, who will do better, who will say the greater truth, do a greater deed, feel the purer emotion, and when one excels, others rejoice and applaud, and strive to do one better.

There’s a thing in the last article that I think was not understood by most: “You become good, actually good, by appropriating aspects of God’s spirit, and thus participating in eternity”. What do I mean by that?

Let’s first clarify what is usually believed about the soul, and then I will specify points of contention.

People either believe there’s a soul, or not. If they believe in it, they usually believe that all humans, and in some cases all beings, have an immortal soul, whose destiny after physical death is influenced by its choices and actions during life. This destiny can be either temporary or permanent; essentially, those who advocate impermanence of soul’s destiny believe in some form of reincarnation, where conditions of the soul constantly change depending on its spiritual qualities and choices. Those who advocate a permanent destiny essentially believe in a heaven/hell dichotomy, where good souls go to a good destination, and evil souls go to a bad destination, where both destinations are permanent and eternal.

The main point of contention that I see is in generalization. For instance, I don’t believe in a soul as a Boolean (either exists or not, and if exists, it’s eternal), I believe in a soul as a range of possibilities, because I have a very empirical position based on personal observation of souls of various qualities in various conditions, which happens to match the Buddhist understanding of the subject matter very closely. You have spiritual substance which can be aggregated into structures of varying complexity, size and something you can call the difference in energy, similar to the difference between photons of infrared light and gamma radiation, or the difference between a rock and a black hole, where both are matter, formally speaking, but the differences in structure, density and behaviour are enormous. Well, in the spiritual sphere the differences between spiritual entities or beings, you can call them souls if you want, are comparable to the differences between material entities, such as for instance between a cloud of water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere, a cloud of plasma on the Sun, a cloud of dust on Mars, and a cloud of methane on Titan. Then you have the next order of magnitude of difference, between clouds, liquids, solids, and even denser things like protons pressured into fusion, neutronium and singularity. Finally, there is a difference in complexity, such as the difference between a super-simple things like clouds of hydrogen, or a lattice of carbon atoms, and super-complex things like human brain, or the newest microprocessor.

So, what I understood, decades ago, is that souls don’t actually appear to be some point-like abstract eternal entities, and that they don’t appear to be all of the same kind, and I mean that in a sense more radical than you can probably imagine. There’s spiritual substance which exists in a spectrum of, well, energy, if you can call it that, but this “energy” is also self-awareness, mentality, joy, beauty, and other things. Low energy of spiritual “particles” makes them feel “evil”, for the lack of another word. Evil, hatred, anger, spite, arrogance, cynicism, roughness, malice, stupidity, ugliness, that’s what I sense from observing the spiritual substance of low energy. Another thing about it is that low-energy particles don’t bond well with each other, because apparently an aspect of low energy is that there’s not enough power in them to form bonds that would allow creation of large and complex structures. So, when you have a being that’s made primarily of low-energy spiritual matter, it’s very unlikely to hold together for long, like ephemeral phenomena such as the dust devils in the desert. The low energy entities can attempt to prolong their existence by trying to steal energy from somewhere, but it’s always a losing game, and eventually they all disperse into basic constituents. In fact, it appears that spiritual matter behaves the opposite of physical matter: when energy of the physical atoms is sufficiently raised, the connections between them become looser and eventually impossible. With spiritual matter, the particles behave that way when they lose energy.

The higher-energy spiritual particles behave differently; they have more color, brightness, cohesiveness and ability to form complex structures, but we are still dealing with something that looks like a gas; a collection of particles that are held together in a larger structure due to some mutually attracting force, and they don’t tend to dissociate on their own, but their density and solidity is still low. This range, between low-energy gas, and high-energy gas, is mostly how I perceive the lower part of the astral spectrum. It’s all low density, and simple structure, comparable to clouds of various kinds. On the higher astral spectrum, things get very interesting, because the higher, more complex beings display much greater complexity and diversity of structure, comparable to the difference between, let’s say, some colloidal suspension or aerosol on one hand, and a computer, or a living being on the other hand. Lower astral entities are capable of simple energetic emotions, where the lower spectrum of entities are capable only of the low-energy states such as hate, fear, anger, spite etc., and the higher-energy entities are capable of higher-energy states such as joy, admiration, love, pleasure, fun and acceptance, but they are still in both cases only very simple emotions, and compared to the higher astral spectrum, they look like the difference between happiness of a mouse who is happy when he has enough food and there aren’t predators around, and happiness of a man who listens to subtle and beautiful music and thinks about some wonderful character in a book that he had read recently, and wonders what it would be like to fly without physical limitations and absorb sunlight as food. Essentially, it’s like a difference between a pocket calculator and an iPhone, where both can be the same size and general shape, but they are vastly different phenomena. Because of this vast difference in complexity and structure, you can somewhat understand my take on good and evil, where I perceive lack of development, sophistication and structure as the greatest evil, where spiritually speaking it’s much better to be the worst man than it is to be the best cloud of generalized emotion. Spiritual evolution, therefore, means greater structure, complexity, cohesion, density and each spiritual particle carries within itself some form of self-awareness, mentality and other forms of “spiritual energy”. Greater and more sophisticated structures have more permanence, and they have greater capability of capturing the qualities of the Absolute, of God. It’s like transistors, where each on its own is little more than a switch, but several of them together form logical circuits, like AND, OR, NOT etc.; put thousands or millions of them together and you get a CPU. Increase complexity and sophistication of the structure, and you increase their capability to process instructions in increasingly smaller slices of time. You can say that each transistor has some small inherent capacity to do something with information, which increases when they are intelligently aggregated in greater structures, and when the structure grows large and sophisticated enough, you get a kind of magic, with entire synthetic worlds simulated within the machine.

Most humans have souls that are no more than astral clouds, of some complexity to be sure, but of little permanence. You can call them souls, but it’s really an insult to the concept. Impermanent, ephemeral, contradictory, inconclusive, they amount to nothing and usually decay into basic constituents, which rearrange chaotically like atoms of gas. Unfortunately, when I say “most humans”, I mean a rather large majority. This majority was created when the world was populated by the extreme number of humans, far greater than the number of complex and sophisticated souls that could merge with the bodies and experience physical matter. Essentially, they are either the lesser souls that would normally be unworthy of a human incarnation, or merely whirlpools of astral substance created by the astral interface in the human brain, creating “something” in the place where a soul is supposed to be, trying to form connections and communicate information. Those clouds or whirlpools don’t persist long after the physical death. The minority are what I would call the normal human souls – complex high-astral beings with a differentiated, solid structure, with abstract ideas, sophisticated longings, deeper awareness and desires for great, beautiful things, attempting to form connections of love and companionship with other souls, and attempting to know more about reality in its various aspects. They admire things that are good, hate things that are bad, and they try to learn and grow. Essentially, they are self-aware, intelligent beings of complex emotions, frequently conflicted within themselves due to their various, often incompatible choices and ideas, and their structure has both strong points and weak inclusions, of substance of lesser energy and quality, and they either manage to gain understanding that turns weaknesses into solidity, or they, in some cases, break apart into lesser entities. I would assume that in some cases several souls can merge in order to form a larger, exponentially more sophisticated and powerful entity, but from my experience, the best path towards growth is that which both includes more spiritual substance, and compresses it into increasingly smaller space, at the same time purifying the structure, raising its “energy”, in an analogy to the processes that take place in the stars. This compression and exponential growth in sophistication can be partial or complete. An example of partial transformation are the astral beings whose parts have been transformed into spiritual “crystals”, or “jewels”, which are essentially parts of one’s personality that became much more pure, powerful and participating in God’s various perfections than the rest of their beings. In the beginning you have a sophisticated higher-astral soul that looks like an angelic being decorated by one small jewel which is even more beautiful than the rest of the soul. The next degree of progression is when more parts of the soul transform and it looks like it’s decorated with many spiritual jewels, who each tell a story about God, perfection and eternity. The final degree is when the entire soul is transformed into jewel-stuff, “vajra”, and since this vajra carries within itself the aspects of God’s greatness, it is impervious, permanent, pure and a state of salvation. There are of course higher levels of participation in God’s nature, states of Godhood where spiritual jewels are merely ornaments, weapons and “clothes” of Gods, whose nature is more-less indescribable, except by very weak analogy.

So, you can imagine why I cannot limit my understanding of the subject matter to the simplistic concepts of heaven and hell, or reincarnation. Sure, reincarnation exists, but it’s not an eternal process, and is often very messy. Beings can appear to evolve for a while, but then they break apart and dissolve. In other cases, they fail to form any kind of structure and dissipate quickly. In rare cases, they grow in complexity, but only up to a point, where they reach equilibrium, and then stagnate. In exceedingly rare cases they grow in sophistication to such an extent, that the results appear to be magical, and followers of most religions would consider it blasphemous to even consider the possibility of such fate for themselves, for such things are supposedly reserved for Gods. I, however, see it as some kind of physics, not unlike the thermodynamic laws of matter. It’s just that spiritual matter has spiritual characteristics that influence its behaviour; the particles interact based on how they “feel” and, lacking other terms, “react to the truth of God”.

So, that’s the very literal meaning of my original sentence. If you fail to know God, you fail to attain permanence and eternity. If you fail to know God, there’s no eternal hell for you, because hell isn’t the state of eternal suffering, it’s the absence of eternity, or, as Jesus aptly put it, the eternal death, death without resurrection. Entropy, decay into chaos, disorganization of a spiritual entity due to lack of internal cohesion, because only the longing for God, for eternity itself, creates cohesion and structure and solidity and, eventually, eternity of the soul. When I say there is no possibility of salvation outside of God, I mean it so fucking literally you couldn’t believe. It’s the actual, literal truth of the matter. Only God is eternal, and you’re either of God, or you are not at all. Eventually, only those two outcomes are stable, and everything else is just a temporary phase that precedes collapse into either of those permanent outcomes.