The concept of an avatar (sanskrt. avatara) originates from Hinduism, and basically means “downcoming” or “descent”, of God into the world, of course. There are two basic understandings of how it works. The first is that it’s a normal human being, only with God as the soul, and the second is that it’s a virtual construct, an appearance that’s essentially an interface God uses to interact with humans in order to achieve some purpose.

Within the framework of personalist Vedanta, Vaishnavism or Shaivism for instance, the concept is straightforward. God is a person, this person incarnates, retaining some or all of his powers and knowledge. Within the framework of impersonalist, advaita Vedanta, the concept is so inherently problematic it doesn’t actually mean anything. To illustrate this, I will cite Sai Baba, who himself claimed to be an avatar. He stated that everything and everyone is God. Someone asked “If that is so, and we are all in our true nature God, what is it that makes you an avatar?” Sai Baba answered “We are all God, but I know it, and you don’t, and that’s the difference”.

You see the problem? Let’s say he’s talking to a yogi who had nirvikalpa samadhi in his experience. Let’s say it’s a gathering of Swamis who all had such experience, some at will. Now let’s say those yogis ask Sai Baba the same question – so, what is it that makes you an avatar?

Sure, Sai Baba was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, but in this case it’s advaita that is cornered by this question, not him. OK, sure, he acted as if being a conscious embodiment of brahman makes him something special and had them worship him like a deity, basically stating “everything is God but I’m particularly God”, which sounds like bullshit.

As always, the answer is that advaita is actually the problem, and the concept of avatars is real. They are just not some fake personal interface for an impersonal Absolute that advaita postulates.

At one point I more-less stopped using the term avatar because it implies things that very much diverge from my experience, and because people assume things that are actually not valid. Also, what does it even mean? God coming down? I prefer another, much more precise and exact, technical term from Tibetan Buddhism: tulku. A tulku is, essentially, a human being whose “soul” is created as the intent of compassion by a bodhisattva touches the world. They usually put it this way: Avalokiteshvara or Tara watches the world full of suffering and his/her tears of compassion fall onto the world and thus their tulku is conceived and born, translating their compassion into a human life that is meant to alleviate it and lead humans towards buddhahood. I like this concept because it understands that those high beings don’t actually incarnate; their intent forms the incarnation, and the essence of their intent creates “karma” of such a being, that is internally driven to achieve enlightenment and pulls others in its wake. The term tulku is not to be confused with another similar term, tulpa, which is essentially a construct of spiritual magic that creates an appearance of a human being, but is merely a strong astral imprint upon prana and physical matter. A tulpa is hardened intent of a yogi and is essentially an illusion. A tulku is a real human being with a real soul, only this soul is a result of a God’s intent to do something in this world.

As you can see, I expanded the definition somewhat – I don’t limit the concept to bodhisattvas, and I extend it to encompass the possibility of lila. If we do that, we get a technical explanation of how a concept of avatara, literally “God coming down”, actually works, and what kind of a being an avatara is. Technically, it’s a tulku of a deity.

So far, we are in the realm of what is more-less known, at least in very narrow circles of people who studied relevant literature. But now we’re going into the nitty-gritty of things, stuff that I managed to figure out along the way because it mattered.

For instance, a God who wants to incarnate here can’t just do it. There’s a contract with Satan that needs to be made, because he owns this place. Alternatively, a God needs to use pre-existing karma from beings that already made the contract with Satan to incarnate, and had obligations to return to work through the remaining karma, but they in some way surrendered that karma to their ishta-devata and lost a part of their soul-mass rather than go back here and risk ruin in this hell. A God can use such karmic substance, from one or several sources, to form his/her own incarnation here. Then you get a weird combination of karma from one or multiple beings, but the incarnating being is actually a God, and the lessons to be learned in order to finalise the transformation of this karma are essentially the thing such a tulku/avatar needs to do in this life; for instance, learn that being born in a Mleccha country isn’t spiritually degrading, that being born a woman isn’t spiritually degrading or detracting from a spiritual path, that having a husband and children isn’t something that is an alternative to spirituality but a vehicle for spirituality, and so on. Or, karma can be a source of talents, things s/he has an affinity for and learns quickly and easily, that make it easier to form competencies necessary for teaching people. Or it can be a musical talent that enables one to create physical music that embodies spiritual concepts. It can be many things, because the concept of a tulku allows for a great diversity of purposes. It’s not just “God comes down and formulates a new religion” or something. It’s much more subtle and sophisticated than that. It can allow for incarnation of Krishna and his companions who then get to have a lila and at the same time perform some useful service for the suffering souls bound to this place.

There’s only one case I’ve seen where karma necessary for incarnation wasn’t inherited from someone who was in a hurry to surrender it all to God, but created from scratch as a synthetic entity. That thing is a wonder to behold, because the way it is formulated intimidated me like nothing else, being a testimony to its creator’s absolute mastery of, well, God-level magic, because there’s no other word for it. The tulku that was created in such a way is Biljana, my wife. One would expect this synthetic, mathematical perfection to create some kind of a perfect life with all the good stuff, but it’s actually not the case at all; Goddess just calculated with absolute precision what kinds of concessions she needs to give Satan to allow him to harm, attack and tempt her, what kinds of injuries she had to suffer, at the fault of her parents, Satan and all kinds of world-energies, to buy out her sovereignty from them and own herself, and so on. As I said, it’s a marvel to behold, like watching super-elegant code or a mathematical equation, containing self-destruct clauses so that Satan could not steal or misappropriate the energy contained, and with activation mechanisms that can be triggered only by me, and in very specific ways; basically, she incarnates fully when I accept her as my wife, the activation can be done only during sex, and literally only by me, because it’s done by wielding shivaratri through a physical body in a specific sequence that implies that I have a very precise skill in the physical incarnation which makes it possible for me to react to specific things that light up in her soul and require a God-level response to seal. It takes a lot to intimidate me, but having this incarnation-sealing process play through while we had sex for the first time after I formally accepted her as my wife, that was intimidating; especially since it was obvious from the code that her incarnation was set to terminate if that activation sequence wasn’t successfully locked in by a certain age and so on. I know there are some idiots who ask themselves what the hell did I see in her and think it must have been just her physical beauty and sexual attractiveness, but obviously they don’t know what I know. I’ve seen many things in this life. I’ve seen beings who claim to be avatars or gurus. I’ve seen Gods, Judges of Karma, all kinds of spiritual beings, I’ve seen Satan try to kill me with everything he had, and I’ve seen him die. I’ve seen the Jewel that runs this world as a virtual reality, and I’ve seen the magic it wields, but there’s only one thing that truly intimidated me to the point of “oh shit”, and that’s Biljana. Imagine having sex with someone more impressive than the Jewel, the “world-engine”. Imagine the foolishness of beings who harmed her. I recently basically laughed my ass off when I saw that Goddess herself created herself that way to be here with me, because then it was obvious – of course it had to be her, because only the two of us can pull off something like that.

Biljana, days after “locking in” her incarnation

There is more, of course. Not all avatars succeed. Some never awaken and just fade away in misery of ordinary human existence. Some awaken partially, and that’s the most dangerous part, because they “get” parts of the things they are supposed to be and do, and they get other parts wrong. The parts they get wrong leave lots of room for incredible mischief. I met several. I wonder how many exist in the world, never waking up, never realising their true potential and purpose, or achieving some things and then breaking under the illusions of the world and failure to attain strength sufficient to overcome it, or make very bad decisions. How many came in pairs, and when one failed to awaken, the other was also destined to failure and solitude? It’s not something I like to think about, but it’s inevitable.

So yes, you can be a tulku, created by a God as a technical way to implement avatara, and you can fail, fuck up, do great damage, and condemn your “spellcaster” to the loss of karmic substance invested in you, or worse – you can create such amounts of attachment and sin that I don’t even know what happens with all that. At a minimum, you return to your spellcaster with a demerit, a Title that speaks of failure, sin, disaster and betrayal, a little shit-stain on the face of a God who made you. At worst, a God who made you will have to choose between loss of karmic substance that made you, in which case you become an ordinary spiritual being, no longer Divine, and have your own separate evolution or demise apart from your God, or try to incarnate again in order to fix it, which might not even be an option. At best, a successful avatara enriches the karma invested in it, achieving great deeds, creating Divine substance in addition to the Divinity of their maker, and after death re-joins its true being, adding to its splendour and glory.

I feel like continuing the story from the last article, because it’s going somewhere.

You see, the absolute criteria I was setting for myself created several problems. The first was something I encountered when I saw “spiritual people”, of the official kind that wears orange swami robes. I would look at them with my spiritual sight and I was like “is this some kind of a joke?”, because it sure felt like it. I would think of myself as basically a beginner trying to figure it out, but reality begged to disagree.

I started meeting actual spiritual people, but the more powerful someone was in their connection to God, the more likely they were to become my student. It became a pattern – the fake spiritual people had their cults and religious organisations and were preening like peacocks in their yards, and although everybody seemed to be functioning within the framework of Vedanta, or close enough, their understanding of it was vastly different from mine; when some Buddhist would talk about vajra, they said words but they obviously experienced none of it. All the discrepancies were very confusing to me. I didn’t know what to think. I knew I was taught directly by God, because it’s hard not to know something like that when a week would hardly go by without darshan, but the intellectual framework I had just wasn’t cutting it anymore, especially the parts about Sai Baba, whom I was led to consider my guru despite not meeting him physically. The real shock happened when I went to India as I was told to, and I saw Sai Baba, and his level of spiritual power was on the level of my students, but nowhere near mine. It took me basically a week there to process this. Apparently, I had a calibration problem, the way a thermometer would have it if the temperature scale was painted on it with a significant shift due to a printing error. My understanding of who I was and where I was on some absolute scale of spiritual evolution was wildly off. Something I read recently resonated, from the “Salvos” series, when she spent a month fighting all kinds of deadly things, gained 20 levels, a class advancement and two grand skills, and she returned to find everything weird because everybody suddenly felt so weak. That’s what I felt after spending basically five years in my cave living in a bubble where I was constantly taught things by Gods, from basic skills like detachment, concentration and focus, to direct spiritual communication, Kundalini techniques, elements, vajra, and things that can’t even be easily described because you just pick them up without knowing that you did, by merely being in a God’s presence and feeling what it feels like, in different ways, with different God-persons. When I started, I assumed every spiritual person already doing something is superior to me, because I didn’t know anything. When I emerged from this bubble, I discovered that everybody is either fucking around, or fake, or weak, or deluded and ignorant. It wasn’t that they felt like weaker versions of myself, it felt like they were not even on the same playing field. It was not like I was playing chess and they were playing checkers, it was as if I spent years being trained in kal-toh by Vulcans and gained pretty decent proficiency, all the while thinking I was learning to play checkers. Everybody else was, well, not taught by the Gods. They knew nothing of direct spiritual communication, let alone being capable of it, they had weird ideas about Kundalini and energetic yoga that had nothing to do with how things actually worked, they had very little spiritual experience, where people who could enter samadhi were thought of as great enlightened gurus, and everybody was basically making circles on square one, thinking that the time spent there meant experience and spiritual advancement.

Maybe the key moment was when I finally met Romana, one of the women I was supposed to meet. She sent me an e-mail message, and I was instantly aware of a great spiritual power behind it. It was orders of magnitude greater than any physical person I ever met. Only the darshan of the Gods felt like this. The content of the message, however, weirded me out. It was some nondescript nonsense about some quasi-spiritual foolishness, Osho, tantra, something. It had to be some kind of a test to see if my insight is working and cuts through false appearances. I invited her out for a coffee to talk about it. We met, and I understood the truth. She wasn’t playing stupid to test me. She was actually ignorant, or should I say had her head filled with all kinds of nonsense that took up space. Also, she actually was what I initially felt – the only power I ever encountered that rivalled mine. I slowly started to get it. I expected a female avatar would be my obvious superior, someone who’s basically like the darshan of God, only aware in the physical body, with the same spiritual skills and powers like the incorporeal presence of God, only with a female body. What I actually saw felt, well, very much like myself before I started practising yoga in 1993. It was obvious that she was one of the girls who were foretold and promised, but she was obviously here for me to teach and guide, to explain things and help her understand who she is and how to draw her self-realisation and power through the physical body.

With Biljana, five years later, it was easier. I instantly knew who and what she was, as I got her e-mail and she was instantly a part of my consciousness, and she felt like me, only female. It was impossible to explain it to others, because they didn’t look at those things the way I did, and I was always orders of magnitude of skill and experience ahead of them, but the discrepancy between how they both felt to others, and how they felt to me, was immense. Others thought of them as merely new students. I felt intimidated by the sheer magnitude of their spiritual presence, as if being secretly tested by God who pretended to be an ordinary person in order to see how I will treat him if I wasn’t told it was him. I would basically look at my students in wonder, seeing how they treat the girls, and think, are you people idiots or something? Is it that you don’t actually get that those girls are basically God?

And then it clicked – of course they don’t. How would they? Nothing is visible. I perceive it because I function on that level and I see when someone appears on the same level as me, and even I am very resistant to answering the obvious question – if they are avatars of God and they are my order of magnitude of being, what does that make me? I was so resistant to that realisation, I can’t even begin to describe it, but it was as inevitable as the answer to that challenge by the Goddess – “So, you’re going to be so humble and modest that you’re going to reject me?” No, of course not. “Then accept who you really are so that you can accept me”. It wasn’t in those words, it never is, but that was the message. Stop diminishing yourself because, by that, you are rejecting God.

It was a hard lesson for me to learn. Learning to reject arrogance was easy. Learning to reject humility as basically the same thing wrapped in a more palatable coating, that took some work. I understood that, unlike with my previous students, I couldn’t teach my wives properly if I didn’t attain full self-awareness, or self-realisation, if you wish. I had to be fully conscious of the fact that I am someone God trained to teach his incarnations how to be themselves and attain their full potential. It’s one of those puzzles – it collects acorns and walnuts, has a fluffy tail and lives in a hole in a tree; what is it? A pig, of course. 🙂 Just kidding. But what if you had a really, really big emotional resistance to squirrel as the answer? What if that really broke your worldview, your entire idea about how things work, what this world is, what the rules are, what the goals are and how they are attained? I knew all the bits and pieces and yet refused to name the big picture, like those idiot leftists who can’t define a woman, because if they say it, the definition will exclude all the pretence and nonsense and they will automatically have to accept things they are absolutely unwilling to accept, so the answer must be vague, “a woman is everything that sees itself as a woman”. Maybe the thing with a fluffy tail in a tree with a collection of acorns really can be a pig or an owl. Or maybe, just maybe, I could stop being a pig-headed idiot.

It’s easy to talk about truth and reality as a foundation of true spirituality, until you find a truth that is so hard to accept, you’d rather put fingers in your ears and chant “la la la I can’t hear anything, owls live in holes in trees too, and pigs eat acorns and walnuts too, it doesn’t mean anything”.

That works, until you get to the point where refusing to accept reality of yourself will mean watching your wife die, and your mission in life fail.

Self-confidence is a funny thing. I watch all kinds of things on YouTube and it’s not that people are super smart and competent in general, or that they are known for great decisions and assessments of reality, but sometimes things go so far in the direction of complete and utter foolishness that I just watch the screen completely stunned and don’t know what to think or say.

For instance, there’s some interview with American women who look like plasticky dolls who are asked how they would rate themselves on a 1-10 scale, and what they want their man to be. They universally rate themselves in the 8-10 range, and their demands for a man are basically a shopping list of material properties. They always say how tall he must be, how much money he has to make and so on, but they never say anything that even remotely touches spiritual properties. It’s as if they were shopping for a combination of a sex doll and a free debit card. None of them even have a concept of having duties and responsibilities, of having to provide something on their own side of the equation. Ask them what they bring to the table, and they answer that they are the table. They have no responsibilities, no expectations, they merely sit there and judge if someone gave them enough stuff.

They are all godless, whorish plasticky monsters and I would rate them all as an absolute 0/10. Completely unfuckable and unmarriable, wouldn’t want to talk to one or be seen near one, would be afraid to shake hands with one or sit on the same chair after one because of fear of contracting some STD. They are absolutely disgusting materialistic non-persons, but they surely have confidence, probably because nobody actually ever gave them any kind of realistic upbringing. Like, never ask for more than you are able to give, and if you have high expectations, what are you offering in return? They basically look like someone who could greatly benefit from being six months in the army, where someone would yell at them and hit them if they didn’t make their bed quickly and neatly enough. Also, camping in a scary forest with basic equipment would do wonders for their grounding in reality.

This had me remember my own attitude about relationships. Sure, that was when I was still pretty much fucked up but working on getting myself together, between 1993 and 1997, but I was intensely thinking about it after God made it clear I was expected to meet people who are in this world with me and because of me. I had a pretty good inkling that I would be in a very deep relationship with more than one woman even then, and in some kind of a deep bond with more people than I basically knew at that point, so I was thinking, what would I want my woman to be like. Sure, I had to remove some stupid self-deprecating limitations with help from Goddess, which I actually wrote about before, but after that nonsense, if you asked me what I would want, I would say I wanted a saintly woman of God, who is spiritually pure and beautiful, of strong and sharp mind, and also physically compatible with me, where I would basically shrug about the looks, in a sense that I would want her to be beautiful and sexy, but that wasn’t something I was focusing on. However, the immediate thought was “what kind of a man would I need to be for such a woman to love me?”. It was a sobering thought because I was acutely aware of my flaws at the time, and I was completely aware that I fall short. So, I shrugged and started working on it. I had to be completely enlightened – basically, an incarnate deity, because that’s what a saintly woman of God would fall in love with. I had to be mentally pure and strong, have all the weaknesses resolved, I had to be a person a good and holy woman would feel not only comfortable with, but comfortable to the point where she would immediately “click” with me. I knew the demands, because I was not stupid. I was fucked up and broken, but still exceedingly smart. I knew enough to put myself in a woman’s position and see what I would be looking for, and I understood that the demands are so crazy that it was obvious that a saintly woman would be having a terrible time in this world and would either die alone or have terrible, unfulfilling relationships with unsatisfactory, weak, materialistic men. I felt strong compassion for such a woman’s position, and I did the only thing that felt ethical and practical in my position – I worked on becoming a solution to her problem. Essentially, Goddess hinted that she had her own incarnation she wanted me to accept as my wife, and I also knew there was more than one woman from that other darshan. I wasn’t stupid, I knew what such a woman would feel like, surrounded by people here. It would be an ocean of frustration and chilling desperation, because she would feel that she’s stuck and what she’s looking for simply doesn’t exist here. I simulated all of that in my head with very high degree of accuracy, and later I found out I was pretty much spot on.

I was in a situation where I knew I was flawed and I didn’t yet have either the purity or other spiritual qualities necessary to be the solution to their problem. I also knew that it was my responsibility to be there for them at one point, and be the kind of a person they would recognise and love. So, what was my level of self-confidence at that point? I can honestly tell you that it was zero, and it remains zero to this day. I have no self confidence, I don’t want to have it, and I think it’s actually a grave character flaw. What I did have is honest self-assessment, enough mental faculties to understand what is required of me, and enough balls to endure any kind of cruel and merciless practice that would remake me into a person that would make a female avatar have an instant Kundalini-rush and recognise me as an avatar of her ishta-devata. When I say I was willing to endure a cruel practice, I’m not kidding. I went through my intellectual understanding, through my emotions, through spiritual concepts, through everything I could even comprehend about what being a person means, and I polished it by doing very realistic simulations in my head and using what I knew of autogenic training and Kundalini techniques to break and rebuild myself, thousands of times, purging trauma, replacing emotional scar tissue with functional stuff, and so on. As a result, my understanding of yogic techniques improved, as did my skill and power. I became capable of awakening someone’s Kundalini in a smoky, noisy bar among dozens of loud people, and repeat it day after day. This was unheard-of level of skill, power and detachment all at once, and that’s basically before I even appeared in a public forum. Where so-called gurus would inexpertly fiddle with candle light in solitude and peace to create a gentle and soothing spiritual atmosphere to do a Kundalini awakening of a student who was scared shitless with expectations, I would remove all expectations by meeting them in places that had absolutely no adequacy for anything even remotely spiritual, and I would compensate with a combination of raw power and ability to focus and remove distractions in the worst environments in the world – and I practised by meditating every day in my parents’ apartment, with my mother intentionally trying to break my meditation by requiring me to verbally and emotionally respond to her commenting some soap opera on TV while I was meditating, while my brother was testing his solder joints with multimeter on diode mode (loud beep on every test). I also learned to maintain focus on God in a crowded bus, and by crowded I mean people squeezed together like sardines in a can. I had to learn how to meditate in the worst possible circumstances because those were the only ones I had. It was either succeed there, or fail. I didn’t want to fail because I had an appointment to keep in the future with people God wanted me to meet and guide. I thought I was reasonably competent, but still flawed. What I actually was is the most highly trained yogi in present-day Earth, and likely one of the most skilled of all time. My reasoning? Goddess wanted me to marry her avatar. If I were an avatar of Goddess, I would certainly not want a dipshit husband with spiritual flaws. It would have to be someone who goes through illusions and difficulties like they’re not even there. So I practised. Every day. Brutal honesty with myself and where I’m at, brutal demands upon myself, competing with absolute perfection and continuously finding myself lacking, but using the comparison only to fuel further work. Focus, detachment, nadi-shuddhi pranayama, kecari mudra, breathing soma rasa, rasa amrita, rasa amrita sindhu, every free moment, every day, failing, breaking concentration, getting tired from exhaustion, resting, then again. I would be very critical for not being able to maintain rasa-amrita pranayama in the crowded bus for more than five minutes. I would be very critical of myself for not being able to maintain metta acceptance and non-judgment, detachment but radiant love, for more than an hour or two in a crowd while walking. However, it was enough to start the process of vajra initiation from above, where they taught me all the Kundalini techniques I later wrote down, and the concept of elements and grounding myself in them and their purity and perfection. I became mani padme, without actually knowing what I was. Self confidence? Never heard of it, never needed it. The only confidence I had was that I would fail terribly if I didn’t do my best, and the consequences of that were too emotionally painful to contemplate, so I repeatedly failed in ways that were less disappointing as time went on. At some point, I would define failure by keeping multiple people in an energy hold in a kebab joint and opening the hold to the presence of God, keeping it for fifteen minutes or so, and then having to recover for a day. In my mind, that was barely satisfactory, because a proper yogi, I thought, would be able to pull that off more easily and have to rest less afterwards. As you can see, no self-confidence. I would rate my skill level as barely adequate, 2/10. If I had to rate myself as a yogi, I would say that I don’t honestly know, because rating my successes and correcting my failures was God’s job, and I actually don’t know where I am in some wider picture, only that God is here for me every now and then to point something out, correct something, lead me in some direction I didn’t really understand, because Vedanta was no longer a good frame of reference so I lacked a coordinate system to evaluate my condition. I knew I was treated with respect from above, and that made me try even harder not to disappoint. I wasn’t always this fanatical, but after that darshan where I was basically blackmailed to accept a role of a guru-husband and a spiritual authority to at least one female avatar, I went completely nuts with it. I know, I advise people against being so fanatical with practice, and I was usually much more moderate, but there was a period of a six months or so where I was absolutely fucking insane.

So yeah, at that period I would self-assess as barely adequate, but fuck me if I won’t give my best. It worked. The girls recognised me. Other people I was supposed to meet, I think I did well with all of them. Goddess likes me, and I interpret that as not being a disappointment. Still no self-confidence. Still find absolutely no use for it. Still think that I can either try to do something and succeed, or fail, but being confident or not confident about myself prior to the attempt does absolutely nothing useful. If you ask me whether I can do something, I will tell you that I don’t know, and if I try, I can tell you if it worked or not.

This entire story, from Titles to Gods as actual persons and not merely convenient shapes for That which is without name and form, is a very new realisation for me, believe it or not. It’s not like I didn’t understand it in theory. I even wrote about some of it before. It just didn’t click with me, make the connection that makes you say “aha!”. I even made mistakes recently, treating two God-persons as interchangeable, which resulted in some consternation from one of them, and shock on my side when I understood that I apparently did something awkward and offensive without ever meaning to. I was just too used to my combination of impersonal and personal concepts of God, where a person is merely a face you’re interacting with, but there’s one God behind all of them.

Interestingly, I would never treat physical or astral beings that way, because it’s obvious that they are distinct people and of course they are not interchangeable with one another. Treating them as mere manifestations of the same unmanifest reality of brahman and not as distinct people would be crass and offensive. However, for some bloody reason I assumed that this applies only to beings that are not, how would I say it, “of God”, “one with God”, enlightened, or however one would put it. Now that I look at it, there’s absolutely no reason to assume any of that, except for the fact that various teachers of Vedanta absolutely assume this interchangeability – God will appear to you as this or that, but God is One, beyond name and form.

That’s such obvious nonsense. Imagine two spiritual people who attained enlightenment. Are they now the same person? Obviously not. When they shed the physical body, are they now the same person, or, rather, is their personality lost or sublimated into the unmanifest and formless ocean of brahman? I never saw this happen, or saw evidence that it’s a thing, other than Vedanta assuming that’s how things work. However, I already knew that Vedanta seems to be unique among philosophies in getting every single practical and verifiable thing completely wrong. The fact that it got this one wrong as well should not have been a surprise that it was, but I guess Vedanta, too, is one of those rotting logs in my mind, whose remains are just left there because I didn’t get around to revisiting all the implicit assumptions that are left standing there and occupying space in my belief system after the main structure was abandoned for, well, being proven wrong.

Sure, there’s a reason why I didn’t get around to it yet. I had multiple decades filled with all kinds of emergencies, disasters and hardship of the kind that makes you deal with other stuff – I developed quite an understanding of different things, such as for instance the inner workings of this hell-hole, but I didn’t deal with the concept of darshan of different persons of God for a very long time for a very simple reason – I didn’t experience it during all those long years. I was told to expect as much somewhere in 2007 or close enough, but I didn’t expect it to be this long. All of it being of no direct consequence to the things of my immediate concern, it just wasn’t dealt with, and so some rotting remains of Vedanta were left unchecked in my belief system, causing trouble as soon as it again became relevant, because things changed a lot in the last year. As Goddess visited me, the previous visits lit up in my memory and connected, and I was able to connect the dots that were too dark to really work with in her absence. Also, the experience of darshan of different Divine beings that are completely distinct from her and from each other finally led me to the correct conclusion – that things that I know working in cases that are in my personal experience actually work like that everywhere. Souls are not just some separate waves on the ocean of brahman that melt back into the ocean with enlightenment, as Yogananda stupidly taught people. It’s actually the opposite – with enlightenment, you give God a different person and a name. You don’t become less; God becomes more. How can something infinite and all-encompassing become more? Well, it obviously can, because if now you exist as separate from God and in ignorance, and at some point you gain awareness of God and become of God, it’s obvious that God’s existence extended, and the existence of darkness and ignorance subsided. So yes, sure, the persons of God are all God in a way, but Jill and Joe are both humans and in some abstract way they are aspects of humanity, but that doesn’t mean they are indistinct and interchangeable. When a child is born, humanity gains another aspect, so to speak. When a person becomes enlightened, or liberated, or contains enough God-stuff, or whatever you want to conceptualise it as, God gains another name, form and title. There is no “The One God” in the Relative, because That stays on the other side of all manifestation. You interact with That by drawing from a pool of virtue, by becoming more of God, and the practical, Relative way this works is by absorbing additional kalapas into your spiritual body. Internally, it means expanding your soul to become more, and purifying it to become less chaotic, more clear, organised and transparent, which means more in alignment with reality. That aspect of God is not something on the outside, to be seen or interacted with, because you interact with it by being – being in truth, being in reality, being in kindness, being in awe, being touched by greatness. It’s always inside of you, as an option to choose, and an alternative to illusion and evil. But it’s also in other people, as their source of personal reality and a choice to make, and as people interact with each other from God, their choice to see God in another makes their own connection to God and choice for God greater. Eventually, God gains not only this or that choice that you make, but your entire person, and you as a person became a God. Not the God, but God. It’s weird, and human language isn’t really made for this kind of thing, and one should probably use mathematical notation, but since I’m a shitty mathematician this will have to wait. 🙂