Something global recently unlocked for me to spend, and I understood that it’s all related to all kinds of non-transcendental religions and quasi-religious systems. You can already guess what I mean – all kinds of pantheism where “God” and “Universe” mean the same thing; astrology where things happen because “the stars align”. Systems of belief where there are no “good” and “evil”, only “positive” and “negative”. Such systems don’t have a place for the Devil, because they don’t have a place for God either.

That’s not what got me thinking. I understood all that already. I am very familiar with those systems. What got me thinking is the fact that the “taste” of it, when I’m spending it, feels identical to the content of that hell for the godless people I processed earlier.

Initially, I thought it can’t be right. Most of those people may be ignorant, but they have a yearning for the transcendental; it’s just that they have silly ideas about it, like everybody else in this world. And then the next thought was: “Oh really; then why did their godlessness annoy you so much when you talked to them, and complained that all they are interested in was some kind of astral manipulation and energy exchange with some self-serving material purpose?”

Oh.

Indeed, I used to have impersonalistic ideas about the transcendental, mostly because I was told that was the correct way to understand spiritual experience, and it wasn’t until quite recently that I was forced to revise it all. My understanding of it, however, was profoundly transcendental. I mapped transcendence onto a flawed understanding; I didn’t paint a rosy tree-hugging mask onto the physical world and pretended it’s spirituality. I never had a “holistic” view, where body, mind and spirit are a unit, and should be treated as one. No, I felt that the physical body is just something the soul is locked into, and forced into a limiting and humiliating experience of the physical plane, which is an illusion and a lie. I didn’t think this damn place is God. I mean, sure, in one sense it is, because ultimately everything happens in the mind of God, but that doesn’t mean that a video game is God in a very literal sense, the way those pantheists perceive the physical world. And I surely didn’t think that good and evil are merely “positive” and “negative” things, or that things happen “because the stars align that way”.

I believed that God wants us to be free and to inherit the eternity in Him, and I believed that Satan wants us to be enslaved and destroyed in this world of illusion and humiliation. I believed that wanting the things of the world enslaves us by means of projecting fulfilment into things that lead only to misery and suffering. I believed one should desire only God, because only God is eternal and true, and everything else is a dream and dust. To me, things and ownership are a necessary thing in this world, but not as means of fulfilment, but rather as means of avoiding terrible suffering that looms in this place, like a predatory beast in a dark cave.

This is why I never truly got along with the New Age people and their worldview of impersonal energies, world-worship and self-serving attitudes. I understood that they mixed the physical world and astral “energies”, called it “spirituality”, and as far as they are concerned, being one with God and being one with the world is one and the same. To me, God is a brilliant, super-personal consciousness compared to which this world is but dust, a video game designed to devour your life. Worshipping the world, to me, made as much sense as worshipping Satan – an obviously deluded and self-defeating idea. And then I thought – what if we’re dealing with an issue of semantics. Replace their word “God” with “Satan”, and suddenly all their ideas about the world, its creator, its energies and worship thereof suddenly make a whole different kind of sense, and it’s suddenly clear why I went along with them like oil with water.

They want to be one with Satan, and they worship the world he made. They just call it God, the way all kinds of false religions call all kinds of false or evil things “God”. There used to be a hell that was full of godless people, and most of them used to be religious. It wasn’t a hell for atheists in the narrow sense; it was a hell for people without transcendental desires or interests. A religion can be wholly non-transcendental. Just remember the cult of Dionysus, a Greek “god” of wine, debauchery and madness. There’s not a single transcendental thing about it, and yet it used to be a religious cult with many devout followers. All those fertility deities – they are as transcendental as a pile of rocks. Worshipping life, worshipping “Mother Earth” and so on – it’s all non-transcendental. The fact that it’s often all mixed up into a broader term of “religion” doesn’t mean it’s all the same. No, not all religions are rivers that lead to the same ocean. That’s bullshit. Most religions, apparently, are of this world and they don’t lead anywhere, other than perhaps into a desert of this world where their followers die of thirst.

And then, eventually, the remains of their souls end up being the trash I’m currently spending, because something needs to be done with it all.