I occasionally had weird experiences when strangers who found out that I “practice yoga” ask me if I can do this or that thing – can I slow down my heart rate, stop breathing, and so on.

Never have I been asked a question to which the answer would be “yes”. Whatever they could think of that they associate with achievements possible by yoga, I couldn’t do any of it; or, even if I could, it worked in a completely different way from what they’d imagined.

I never volunteer what I actually can do, however, because if I did, they would think it outright impossible. The things I can do are not even on the spectrum of what they would think of, not even the most ordinary things, such as being able to adopt and process foreign karmic mass and integrate it into my soul-structure, suffering greatly through the process, but retaining the ability to write in a sophisticated, calm and detached manner about very intricate things, while enduring emotional pain on the level that would make an ordinary person go instantly crazy, scream and kill themselves just to make it stop. To me, it’s a Tuesday. Also, this is a rather extreme case of a very fundamental set of skills acquired by yoga, and required in advanced practice: detachment, emotional control, mind control, perception and focus control, concentration and ability to direct energy, emotion and action separately and precisely. Also, faith, because faith is absolutely necessary when you lose control and direct insight of what’s actually going on, and that’s absolutely going to happen during this process; the first thing you lose is spiritual sight, and then you gradually lose your own normal spiritual state, as you are overwhelmed by foreign, extremely loud trauma. If you don’t have faith, you’ll panic. If you panic, it does not have a good ending.

It’s actually interesting how people expect circus tricks to be possible and attainable, but their reaction to anything real and actually useful is “no fucking way”. Unfortunately, that severely limits my ability to have a constructive conversation with people, because most of my experiences and abilities lie in the spectrum of “no fucking way”. They would expect me to be able to fart and whistle at the same time, or not close my eyes while sneezing, but I’m afraid I always have to disappoint them.

One of the interesting things people expect me to be able to do as a yogi is not care, and that one is almost universal. They expect me to not be touched by things, to be indifferent to anything that’s going on around me. I know how they got there – they are negatively affected by so many things, that they perceive being able to not care about any of it as huge relief. Of course, that’s not how it actually works. You actually get to care more, only about different things. You care about how a cat feels. You care about whether some person managed to achieve important milestones in their life when you hear that they have terminal cancer. You don’t care about living or dying, but you care about purpose, about important things being concluded, lessons being learned, temptations being resisted and higher things being accepted. You don’t care about neighbours getting a new car or local gossip. You care about global politics in a sense that it reflects spiritual choices and realities that will eventually trickle down to things like children being taught nonsense in schools, truth being persecuted and evil being mandated. You care about opinions of others, but that no longer works the way it did; now it’s a complex thing where opinions matter in a sense where it’s good that they are aligned with reality and lead to transcendence, and it’s important that they are not of the kind that is illusory, deceptive, ignorant and degrading. Essentially, you look at those things the way an angel would see them: things are good if they praise God and lead to God, and they are bad if they lead away from God. So you definitely always care, just in a different way. There’s a complex landscape of energies, spiritual states, destinies and trajectories that matter, and then there are the things people ordinarily care about, that you don’t even register except as noise.

In essence, serious yogic practice leaves normal human experience very soon after its onset, and soon after that your experience starts to differ so much from the normal human stuff, that communication becomes difficult at first, and impossible after several further steps. The development is not in the direction humans would expect, or even in the dimensions they register. I never talked about experiences that followed my first darshan, not even with my brother, because the experiences were either too far removed from the common ground that makes communication possible, too private, too subtle to put in any kind of terms, or I didn’t feel like it because his existence just lost any overlap with mine by that time. Not throwing pearls before swine is a thing. If I talk about any of it, the reason is usually to encourage others on the spiritual path, to show how those things work, what exists and what is possible; basically, to map the previously uncharted space, mostly because people would normally never think of any of it otherwise.