There are often speculations about spiritual power – is God omnipotent, and if so, why is there evil and why God doesn’t just evaporate Satan and his demons and instead allows them to do all kinds of evil, and so on. There are also speculations on whether angels are more powerful than Satan, and so on.

This looks like a very complicated issue, and for a change, it is not. You see, the root of any spiritual power is God, or, more precisely, an edict from God on a certain issue. Those edicts are reality-manifesting truths, and seem to be irrevocable.

In practice, this causes a situation where workable solutions are limited by insurmountable walls of God’s edicts, sometimes forming a labyrinth. How this works is most eloquently elaborated in Hinduism, where God’s edicts cause problems that can only be solved by complex workarounds – and even God can’t just revoke them and make things simple. No, God often has to take a form of man/lion and kill a villain with his claws, on his chest, on house threshold at dusk, in order to satisfy complex terms of a blessing, whereby a villain has previously been granted a boon whereby he can’t be killed by either a man or an animal, indoors or outside, during either day or night, and on neither land or in the air.

This creates an interesting dilemma: God is omnipotent, yet His edicts limit practical applications of His power. He also granted power to other beings, so there is a tree of power of divine/angelic beings, and there are inviolable rules that make even the least powerful of beings impervious to any kind of outside force, even by a much more powerful being, unless their protection is forfeited due to sin. Basically, if you are a holy person, you are inviolable. Not even God could hurt you, regardless of the power differential. Also, if you were given a legitimate boon through a legitimate tree of Divine authority, this can make you invulnerable (or at least very hard to kill), even if you are an evil person and God himself is trying to deal with the problem.

This explains literally everything. You see, the Christian explanation that invokes free will doesn’t really do it – the only beings whose will is truly free and unconditioned are the perfect saints in heaven. If you’re incarnated on Earth, your freedom is very limited, and the reality is that for the most part you are an observer, who is tricked into believing that his choices are actually his own, in order to claim sin and retribution, and for the most part it is all Satan’s trickery. Truly, you made a choice to sign a contract with Satan according to which you were born here, and after that, your rights and freedoms are for the most part forfeited. However, you still have just enough spiritual sovereignty to be a danger to yourself and others, because you feel you’re powerless, and your choices don’t matter, and sometimes you’re not and they do, and you can make things incredibly worse, for instance by selling your soul to Satan for material things, or opening yourself up towards spiritual influences you don’t really believe in, “for fun”. Also, your spiritual sovereignty is reducible to an edict by God, who willed it to be so. Also, there is a superior edict that defines righteousness as both a source of power and a shield therefrom, so you can both gain more power and authority, and you can also lose everything, depending on your spiritual choices.

As for Satan, he was a continuos source of annoyance for me, because he seemed to be untouchable and inviolable – as if the very power of God protected him from my wrath. However, when he would commit an offence against me, I could “scrape” bits off him, but only to a degree that repaid for the offence, and not a bit more. Obviously, he was protected by an edict from God, which defined and limited his rights and jurisdiction. As soon as he committed an overreach, his protections were reduced to allow for punishment, but not a bit more. However, when his sin was conclusively proven, his protections vanished and he was instantly evaporated by the force of karmic retribution. This is an interesting warning – you see, when you hear that sin is deadly for the soul, you probably imagine something less literal and immediate, but it is my experience that souls can indeed die, if they committed sin, this is proved to them by authorities, and karmic retribution is enforced. This basically destroys bonds between kalapas of a spiritual aggregate, and doesn’t necessarily cause destruction of the whole being, only the sinful part, because, yes, the beings are not necessarily of homogenous build and they can have a pure, uncorrupted core, that doesn’t participate in sin in any way, and this core will survive, but the being will be greatly reduced in stature. Also, beings can be stripped of powers if they are deemed unworthy – for instance, if an apostate disciple of a saint was given some blessing in life, of which he was deemed unworthy by the judges after death, this blessing can be stripped off, the apostate can be degraded and blessing returned to the saint.

So, basically, your protections are great, but the law of justice takes precedence. Also, goodness and virtue are power, and sin is deadly. As a result, the good beings are very powerful, and evil ones barely cling on to life. This might be a surprise to fans of heavy metal bands who tend to think that black vicious things are powerful and gently fluffy things are food, but in spiritual terms, vicious things are manure, too weak for spiritual survival, and usually compost away in some dark recess of lower astral worlds, and the light and beautiful things are powerful, sometimes so much that you’d count yourself lucky if you survived taking even a short look at them. The root cause of the difference in power, of course, is the difference in their respective relationship with God. The evil ones, who hate and resent God in their sin, have very weak cohesive forces between spiritual particles that constitute their souls, and the good ones, who love and worship God in their purity, have very strong cohesive forces between constitutive particles, because it’s the love and light of God that binds them together, and promotes growth. The light of God is the source of spiritual life, and its absence is the source of spiritual death.

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.

I see lots of preparations for death in the global astral.

No stupid “horror” stuff with zombies and the grim reaper, and also no high spiritual stuff with prayer to God and meditation; rather, mournful memories of moments of beauty in the world, things from childhood and youth now gone.

The energy resonates with this:

“Written by Nashville songwriter Curly Putman, “Green, Green Grass Of Home” tells the tale of a condemned prisoner who is longing to escape to the green, green grass of home. At the end of the song, it was revealed that the man is facing execution, and he will be coming home only to be buried.”

“This is an adaptation of an older song, this version we written after the Jacobite rebellion about 2 soldiers, one who was sentenced to death the other got to return to Scotland. The meaning of “ye’ll take the high road and ill take the low-road” is based in an old belief that if someone dies out of their home country ones soul returns home after death to pass on this was called taking the low road while the one who survived took the high road (the road on earth to Scotland).”

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.