Everybody keeps saying how love is the most powerful force, how it conquers all, how it’s more powerful than this and that… and yet, how come I can find no good examples of love as a powerful force in literature?

It’s always weakness and heartbreak and a thing that creates its own problems, and things that are powerful are basically all other emotions; persistence, courage, focus and so on. You can say that what makes them powerful is the love they are based on, but honestly, the way it is all described is incredibly unconvincing. With one exception. No, it’s not the Lord of the Rings, where the good guys win more by accident than by power, it’s not Star Wars where the light side of the Force looks more like the hysterical side of a bipolar disorder, nor it is the Amber Chronicles where Order and Chaos look more like two selfish beasts fighting for supremacy than anything else. The exception I’m talking about is the Salvos series, whose author unfortunately doesn’t seem to be up to the task of actually finishing it, so I can only guess what he had in mind as the eventual ending, but from what I felt reading it, Salvos as a character is the only one in literature that is a convincing description of love as a tangible, powerful force. What’s most interesting is that Salvos the character is a Demon of Pride, at least nominally. She’s supposed to be motivated by vanity and narcissism, and to a degree that certainly seems to be true in the beginning, where her first motive is to survive and be stronger and greater, the second motive soon asserts itself – she cares for her companions, because they are the ones she can feel most alive and present with. At first, it looks as if this is merely an expression of her vanity, because what’s greatness without an audience, but that’s actually not the case at all. What she feels for her companions is the best description of love, despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to understand what the word actually means, especially since it seems to mean different things to different people, and I can very much identify with that. But what she does for her companions is, consistently, selfless courage and sacrifice where she puts her life on the line, repeatedly, against more powerful foes she has no hope of defeating, but saving a companion is such a powerful urge that she fights like a literal Demon, with complete disregard for her own safety, despite the fact that she always claims her life comes first.

The first such instance is her fight against Lucerna, the demon who captured her companion Haec. Lucerna is twice her level, and easily defeated both herself and Haec in their first encounter, where she had to escape and let him capture the unconscious and bleeding Haec and take him into his lair. She then followed their trail, freed Haec behind Lucerna’s back, and when Lucerna figured her out, fought him to allow Haec the chance to escape, and she and Lucerna fell together through a portal to the Mortal Realm, whereby she was separated from her companion and got stuck in a world completely alien to her. Yeah, a supposedly selfish Demon, fighting a battle she can’t possibly win to save her brother. If love in its purest form is to give your life for your friends, that was it, and she survived by pure chance.

The next similar instance is several books later, when she and her two human companions roam the Plaguelands, and the invincible Lich who is the core of the calamity captures Edithe, her female companion, after soundly defeating herself and Daniel, her male companion, who was left frozen by a curse and clinically dead. She first revived Daniel by every combination of magical fire and potions she had, and then she basically forced him to follow the Lich with her, despite his reasonable objection that they are just going to get killed since they already fought the Lich and they got their asses handed to them; they are just going to their deaths. She looked him in the eyes with a look of focused ferocity and said “he’s got Edithe”. It’s not a choice. The message was obvious – we don’t leave her. We either free her or die trying. There are no other options. She basically dragged Daniel on the power of her insane will to track the enemy, and then they fought him. She fought with an absolutely insane savegery, half her body frozen or torn away, tearing away her own arm to use as a weapon to strike at her foe. Eventually, Edithe figured out how to destroy the phylactery that preserved the Lich’s life force and they won. Again, a supposed Demon of Pride who supposedly doesn’t know what love is supposed to be, puts her own body, power and life as a shield between her companion and death, not just by accident, but in a very calculated way, tracking the superior enemy and fighting him with incredible ferocity and motivation, wounded to an inch of her life.

What’s interesting is that at first, when they just met, Edithe was very hostile and skeptical of Salvos, because she’s a Demon. She assumed all the worst things about her, and didn’t trust her as far as she could throw her, which meant not at all. But later, when they were in the Plaguelands, the worst place in the world filled with nothing but stench and death, when Edithe and Daniel went to sleep, Salvos would stand guard, and the implicit undertone is that this then became the safest place in the world, because Salvos will stand in the way of all Gods, Demons and monsters in the world to guard them and keep them safe. On her watch, the worst thing that can happen to them is that they get woken up from the sounds of accidental explosions as Salvos in her boredom experiments with creating weapons from magical fire. Salvos is the most powerful of the three of them, and she loves them, and this love is the most powerful shield they can sleep under. To her, love isn’t just a word, or some romantic idea that makes you feel good about yourself. She doesn’t even get what people mean by it. It’s just that her basic instinct when a powerful magical attack is directed at her, and her friends are behind her, she chooses to take the full impact of the strike instead of evading it and allowing it to reach her friends. It’s nothing sugary or syrupy, mind you; she is ferocious, focused, skilled and sometimes powered by incredible amounts of anger to the point of hatred that would melt steel beams. She’s not fucking around or treating love as an emotion. No, love is when you threaten her friends and then you die, or she dies trying to kill you with every Joule of energy she can throw at you. She will cut you to pieces, incinerate you and then nuke you. And when she’s done, she’ll smile at her friends and be very pleased with herself and check her stats. Sure, she’s motivated by pride, but that looks increasingly like an excuse, rather than the actual motive, because the worst fights she got in were never to show off, they were always to protect the loved ones. Also, despite her claim that she loves herself the most and her life always came first, that’s not what actually happens when push comes to shove. She is very strategic about avoiding fights she knows she can’t win when evasion is a possibility, when she can escape, grow stronger and revisit the problem with improved odds. However, when her companions and friends are threatened and being strategic is no longer an option, she always fought against all odds and chose to stand her ground and save her friends without any regard for her life, and survived mostly by pure chance or fate, rather than calculation and greater power. That’s how love works; you don’t know it’s going to end well for you, but you know you have to do it, because “he’s got Edithe”. It’s no longer a calculation at that point, it’s not a situation where odds matter. Surviving when you didn’t save your sister is not a worthy outcome.

What I find most impressive in those descriptions is that Salvos doesn’t use love-based energies or some light side of the Force bullshit to fight for her friends and family. No, she uses absolutely everything at her disposal – curses, magic, physical weapons, tricks, space magic, or tearing off her own arm and beating her enemy with the bloody end. She uses her brains, focus, courage, anger and skill. She doesn’t use the power of love to influence the enemies with white light, she tears them to shreds, and then burns the shreds to ash. And yet, often she will show incredible kindness to apparent enemies, and convert them to allies, once they are no longer in a position to hurt her friends and she has the luxury of kindness. One of her most powerful skills is called Truth Divination, and it basically removes all barriers and deception between souls, allowing the other person full access to her own feelings, and allowing her full access to the other person’s feelings. When the other person feels her true nature, the kindness, protectiveness and purity of her soul, it is invariably transformative, because you can’t hate her if you know what she truly is and how she truly feels. This allows her to heal broken and hurt souls and mend broken hearts, and it’s implicit that this happens because her own soul is so pure, honest and whole.

So, this character, nominally the Demon of Pride, who feels more like a Goddess of Loving-Kindness, is the best literary description of metta I ever had the opportunity to read. It’s not a description of a loving being as someone who fights with a “power of friendship” or some other bullshit; it’s someone who will spend a whole day watching butterflies and caterpillars and talking to wolves and birds like Snow White, but if you threaten her friends, you are dead. She worked all her life to become strong, and she probably broke the all time record in speed of advancement, just to be able to protect herself and her companions from dangerous foes, and is an equivalent of a super-soldier who is an expert in all possible forms of martial and magical arts, and is perfectly happy to smell the flowers and admire the clouds all day with her friends, but if you’re a threat, you get to find out why she spent all that time practicing the various ways to dismember and murder.

I love that. I’m sick of all the wimpy “positive” characters and this is very refreshing, to see a supremely loving and kind person who basically turns into a nightmarish killing machine on a dime, and then back again when the threat is dealt with. Light side of the Force isn’t the gay side of the force. It’s the “oh you’re so fucked now” side of the Force.

I don’t know if the author actually meant it this way, but I decide to read it this way and since I’m smarter than anybody and I’m always right, that makes it final. 🙂

I was thinking about something for the last few hours; about what strikes me as the most important things about Gods, their mutual relationships, and the nature of heaven.

Religions speak about God’s love, but love is a word I don’t like because it means whatever anyone wants it to mean, and most of it is something I don’t like at all. Sure, it can mean putting yourself as a shield between those you love and harm. It can also mean the state where you feel good. Or it can mean some hedonistic, selfish nightmare. Rather, I’d tell you a few stories from the Hindu scriptures, about Gods.

For instance, the way Shiva calls Vishnu his Divine Guru, or the way Vishnu calls Shiva the Great Lord, and how when they talk about the other behind their back they can’t stop singing praises to the other one – how he’s magnificent, transcendental, omnipotent, omniscient, and wonderful, they’ll tell stories about how the other one saved them or did some magnificent deed nobody else could, and so on. Once Shiva got in a pretty big fight with his wife, because she heard him praise Vishnu and then wanted to test Vishnu to see what that is all about because she didn’t believe it could be true. The level of respect they all have for each other is absolutely insane, and when there’s talk about Divine love, I don’t imagine unconditionality or any such thing humans would think of; rather, I feel this level of respect. Each praise the other above all, they marvel at each other’s feats and achievements, and if they want to match them it’s not out of envy or competition, but out of admiration. If one needs to go to hell, the other will volunteer to go with him to watch his back. None of them is ever alone, because the other one is his shield and his sword.

That’s what heaven is like, and what relationship between two different persons of God is like. The Christians talk about Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, but this imagery doesn’t resonate with me. Other persons of God illustrate what I feel much better, for instance when Krishna thinks Rukmini got a bit conceited he pranks her by telling her what a loser he is and that he’ll leave her and go to the forest to practice austerities; and then she simply passes out from shock. Then he gets scared for her, apologises and tries to wake her up, and when she does, she praises him endlessly and the undertone is “don’t mess with me like that because you’re my whole life”. The second undertone is that she might be just a bit conceited about him loving her more than anyone else, but beneath that is the unimaginable level of connection, sincerity and depth that surpasses anything usually called love. That’s how a female person of God feels about her male counterpart. It’s the level of devotion, connection, trust, respect and adoration that makes those two a Divine dyad. When some idiot brahmana thought it was a good idea to test how sattvic the Gods are, first he insulted Shiva and then Shiva got pissed and his wife had to stop him from killing the dumbass. But when he went on to insult Vishnu, Vishnu merely smiled, but his wife was not amused and cursed both him and his entire line to never have happiness and fortune. Nobody is insulting her man. To that, Vishnu just smiled again, in a sense, yeah, actions and consequences, those tend to go together. Fuck around, find out. As Christians would say, offend the Son, and he might forgive you, but the Father might not, because he loves his son and you’re not fucking with him. One God might forgive you, but his buddies and wife are watching you and they love him more than you can possibly imagine, and you’re just so incredibly fucked. Pray to one of them because you dislike the other, and that one you’re praying to will make sure that people who want to find you need to take a shovel to hell in order to dig you out. Offend Vishnu and Shiva will make a battle flag from your hide. Offend Shiva and Vishnu will make sure you eat all the shit in the world before you’re forgiven. That respect, which is the manifestation of real, Divine love, is what heaven is made of. The Gods have each other’s back. They look out for each other, they watch over each other’s best interest, and they praise each other behind their backs endlessly.

Conversely, hell is the opposite. Hell is disrespect. Hell is where demons and evil souls slander and diminish each other, where they look for weaknesses and sins to exploit, where they betray each other to their enemies and laugh, and so on. In Heaven, Gods each praise the other as the ultimate and supreme, while demons in hell diminish others and tell them they’re worthless and sinful and they need to die in their sin.

I keep hearing human idiots talking how heaven is boring, and hell is one big party. No, that’s not what it is. Hell is a nightmare where your peers will stab you in the back and laugh at you with your other “friends” while you bleed, mocking you for your foolishness and trust. Heaven is where Gods worship each other’s greatness and if you want to hurt one of them, you will need to go through all of his friends to get him; where you can’t attack one while he sleeps, because his friends stand guard, and they never, ever have anything better to do. Catch one at a point of weakness, only to find out that it’s protected by either his friends, his wife or both. Slander one to praise the other, and have the one you praised that way punish you. Heaven is a place where Gods are bound by connections of such immense love, trust and respect, that you can’t even imagine it if you didn’t feel it firsthand. Hell, on the other hand, is a party of the kind where everybody will laugh at your expense in the most hurtful and damaging way possible, and each of those laughing will stab the others in the back as soon as they sense any weakness.

Your choices in life will, of course, determine which “party” you will join.

There are a few more things I want to talk about, regarding all that mess with students and failed student candidates I was involved with over the early years.

The first thing is the concept of “testing”, that arose multiple times in two forms – them testing me and me testing them. That’s one of the first concepts you read in those silly books about zen and what not – you know the drill, the guru leaves the student candidate waiting in front of the locked monastery doors overnight and tells him to leave multiple times, to test his resolve, and taking him in after he persists. I find that both stupid and offensive, to be honest, and I would never do that. It’s like a girl telling a guy “no” multiple times and expecting him to continue pursuing her to test his resolve. Today, in “no means no” times, that would be grounds for imprisonment. Also, I’m not a person who messes with people and tells them falsehoods in order to test them or fuck with them. If I tell you “no”, it means “fuck off”, not “do try again”. However, testing is important since you don’t want to end up with people who are not serious, especially if you’re doing things that cost you and are potentially damaging. Also, you don’t want to be involved with people who are not serious, because they might get hurt doing things they aren’t supposed to do, and then they’ll blame you.

I honestly have to admit I didn’t even think about any of this, because it’s not like I had an idea about teaching people and had to figure out how to attract students and reject wrong candidates. I was basically blackmailed by God into the whole thing. I wanted to take students about as much as I wanted to get crucified, which is to say not at all. I was an introvert who meditated and read books for fun, and after the first initiation I was so serious about attaining enlightenment that humans never even crossed my mind, except as something that causes disturbances that I want to avoid. I didn’t even know how to express complex ideas in form of a rhetorical narrative, because all the serious talking I did was with my brother, in form of our internal shorthand with abundance of telepathy. How would I even approach teaching people? It was a ridiculous concept that I never gave a single thought. However, after getting that offer I couldn’t refuse from God, I started practicing thinking in ways that would be conducive to explaining complex spiritual concepts to people, and combining it with my telepathic abilities in ways that would do more guiding than explaining. Still, the concept of testing people didn’t even cross my mind. The reason for that is simple: I expected God to do that part for me. What I had to do is become a visible target for them to find, and I expected God to basically send the right people to me. Of course I expected the wrong ones to be attracted as well, but I had a very simple way of filtering them out; I expected them to hate me. I formulated thoughts in very straightforward terms that was meant to be attractive to people who have a transcendental longing or connection, and repulsive to everybody else, basically mantrically charging my speech so that it sang of God and transcendence. Basically, my approach was “if you hate me, excellent, and please tell all your friends to hate me as well so that none of you would bother me in the future while I focus on what’s important”. Basically, I wanted to look like an angry porcupine to all the wrong people, so that they would fuck off, while at the same time looking exactly like the goal the right people were looking for. This worked well enough, in a sense that none of the right people were rejected, but I got plenty of false positives from people who found my bristling style attractive for wrong reasons. The second layer of filtering happened when I would meet them in person, enter a meditative state where I was God’s presence, and opened this to the candidate. If they didn’t react well, or at all, I would consider the filtering process complete. If they reacted and experienced some degree of spiritual awakening, often if not always accompanied by Kundalini awakening, this would mean that they accepted God’s offer and became official student candidates. I would consider someone a proper student once they did the next level of acceptance of initiation, and actually made effort to keep and deepen what they received; basically, I defined a student as someone who is not only open, but accepts what’s been offered and applies their will and effort in order to retain it and go in that direction by their own power and choice, actively holding on and working rather than being held.

The third level of testing was something both God and Satan did and I had nothing to do with it. Basically, Satan provided temptations and tricks, and God created situations where they would actually make choices that were just hard enough to be workable, and withheld “candy” so that he could tell that they actually chose him, and not merely to feel good. As you can expect, that minor test created a wall that was impenetrable for people who didn’t make right and serious choices. Also, all seem to have been offered things that embodied their worldly desires, and they could get all the things they seemingly wanted God for, and the test was whether they were here for those things alone. Also, super easy test, and also, total failathlon.

So, no, I didn’t do any testing, at least not in the way you would read about in spiritual books. I was serious and straightforward, offered everything I could and expected people who came claiming they want God to act accordingly. The actual tests were done by God, who has no habit of allowing undeserved spiritual promotion, and Satan, who has no habit of allowing anyone to escape him if he can at all help it.

The second type of testing is the supremely silly idea that students will test the guru. I say it’s silly because God told me he’s sending me people who depend on me being there for them and who will instantly see me as the reason they were born here at all. So, if someone wants to test me, it means they are not one of those people and I will intentionally fail all of their tests just to get rid of them more quickly. The ones I was expecting had much better things to do when they found me, such as having instant spiritual experience and crying tears of joy. If someone wasn’t reacting that way, instead playing intellectual games, it means they weren’t the ones I’m here for, game over.

There was also a third type of testing – whether I will be able to recognise people who are super powerful, but super fucked up, and filter them out from people who were fucked up but because they are sinful and wrong. I think I passed all of those, but I can of course never be sure. You see, a rough diamond, uncut, looks like a piece of gravel. A piece of gravel also looks like gravel. Also, a piece of nicely cut glass looks like a diamond. Zirconium oxide also looks like a diamond. A diamond with inclusions that will make it shatter when you attempt to cut it can also look like a prime stone when uncut. Sorting those out caused me endless trouble, because I didn’t dare let go of possible prime people I was waiting for, to the point of keeping the wrong ones around for far too long, allowing them to create all sorts of mischief. However, sometimes the best people created mischief themselves while they were sorting themselves out, and had I been more strict, it would create all kinds of fail. This was the worst, most expensive and damaging part of the whole process, and I had to let some students create terrible problems to others, but I don’t think it could have been helped, because those creating mischief contained both some of the best and some of the worst, and those who were adversely influenced by them also contained some of the best and some of the worst. It was an incredibly complicated mess, and people looking from the outside probably thought that I handled things poorly, but that’s because they didn’t know what the stakes were and how layered and intricate the problems were. Yoga is a process where you start fucked up and gradually sort yourself out. Expecting people to not be fucked up in the beginning is both naive and dangerous. However, how do you tell who’s fucked up in what way and for what reason, and what’s going to prevail? You essentially can’t, you just need to support them all to the point of decision, and possibly somewhat further just to make sure, even if it costs you.

So much for the concept of testing. Essentially, I considered myself unqualified for it and outsourced it to God, and to the people themselves. They did it all for me, I just had to draw the line at some point.

The second concept that was sometimes introduced by some students, candidates and others, was whether this relationship was completely one-sided or mutual, in a sense of me getting something from them in return.

This one is tricky. On one hand, I had no personal desires in the matter. God told me he has a plan, that plan went completely against both my expectations and wishes, but I accepted it because, basically, my wishes are where God is, so that’s that. This produced a complex set of results. On one hand, it was incredibly taxing and hurtful for me, and on the other hand I learned about Satan, I got access to him because of his acts against me, I learned what this is actually about, and I grew so much stronger in the process it’s not even funny.

However, in a sense those people usually meant, thinking we’re in some kind of a human mutual relationship where both sides enjoy each other’s company and no side has debts towards the other, that’s not at all what was going on. The point where I would actually consider the relationship mutual would be where the other person would completely accept God, and then from this acceptance of God manifest Divine energies towards me as both a physical and spiritual person, manifesting towards me what God would do in their place. That would be a mutual relationship, and in Hindu terminology it would be called a lila. That’s basically what happens when two Gods agree to incarnate together, for instance Shiva and Vishnu who alternate as each other’s guru, because both have immense respect for each other’s transcendence, wisdom and virtue, and would hardly trust someone else with it. Also, when Krishna and his Goddess incarnate and she’s his wife, and that’s an actually equal partnership because for him to have a normal human female soul as a wife would be like marrying your dog. So, all kinds of things took place there, from relationships that are completely one-sided, where I’m offering everything and paying all the costs myself, and the other person is just benefiting from it because I thought I owe it to God, to relationships where the other person is so powerful I’m basically looking at my female counterpart, only with a physical brain that lacks training, and it’s someone who can actually help me and make me feel better and is an actual partner. So, the answer is, it depends – yes, no, first no then somewhat or yes, and so on. It also had nothing to do with how that person presented themselves; sometimes people assumed that someone is my partner and they were merely a very arrogant student candidate who mostly subverted me before outright failing. The most powerful person I ever met would act like a small kitten that you carry in your coat pocket. The more one would act powerful and independent, the more you could tell they are a failed candidate. I can honestly say I’ve seen it all, and for the most part I could only do my thing and let things sort themselves out, because chaos is always part of the process of growth and purification. It’s always messy, hurtful and nasty, like throwing a hand grenade into a septic tank.