As you could probably guess from the previous article, one can be half enlightened, half fucked up, and overall a complete mess, and people in general don’t understand how that’s possible, thinking that you are either/or, but never both. Well, they are sort of right, because you can’t be a complete and perfectly pure soul crystal, let alone a person of God, and have issues such as trying to be a “strong independent woman”, or one of those “gurus” who are making a name for themselves but not in a good way.

However, “complete” or “full” anything is rare in this world; hardly anyone is a complete fool or a madman, let alone enlightened. A partially enlightened person, however, is a real test for one’s discernment. I’m not even talking about those occasional people with an experience of samadhi, but no virtues worth speaking of, and often little to no sanity either. They can call themselves enlightened, and they can even pass as enlightened in some misguided belief systems, but most people would correctly identify them as insane in some way and avoid them, so the amount of harm they can do is very limited. I’m talking about souls that are partially crystallised, and partially rotten like a bad tooth, who combine Divinity and Insanity in the same person, and provide evidence of both. Imagine someone espousing a worldview that combines feminism, satanism, Wicca and Vedanta, and powers that abominable mixture with a charisma and lesser miracles derived from an actual Divine internal source. Think it’s too far-fetched to be true? Think again. Enlightenment, madness, knowledge, ignorance, corruption and goodness can all coexist in the same person, creating abundance of mischief and confusion in the world that’s already fucked up as it is.

When we add this problem to the existing issue of people having very little clue on what actual spirituality and enlightenment looks like, what ends up happening is the unrealistic expectation of what a fully enlightened person is supposed to look like, when people put all those half-crazies on a heap, see what they are like, and conclude that a fully enlightened person would be nothing like that. They create an idealised image of some Jesus-like figure walking on air and water, raising the dead from the cemeteries as he passes by, glowing in the dark and not needing anything material for sustenance, that an actual Jesus could never live up to, and claim that anything less is fake and crazy.

That’s why I said that half-crazy, half-enlightened mixtures are a real test of one’s discriminatory abilities, because a common fool would either accept them uncritically, or reject a true incarnation of God due to inability to distinguish it from a partial one. The actual truth is that things are complicated, in both this world and the other one. Nothing can save you from using your brain for its intended purpose, which is what I keep repeating because it’s true. If there was a rulebook you could consult, all the fake gurus in the world would be the first ones to memorise it and make sure to pass all the checks and look most enlightened. The truly enlightened people, on the other hand, wouldn’t care about those things, because they aren’t trying to pass your checks and tests.

So, unlike what people normally think – that you have all kinds of fake gurus trying to present themselves as enlightened in order to benefit from deceiving people – the truth is even more complicated: you have crazy people who are deluded into thinking they are spiritual; then you have deceivers who may or may not also be crazy to some extent, who are in it for power and worldly benefits; then you have people who are actually enlightened to a degree, with some actual spiritual powers, but who are also seriously fucked up and half past crazy from high spiritual energies powering up their madness and karmic corruption, creating a fireworks of raw sewage combined with occasional pearls of actual holiness. And then you have the fully enlightened people who are usually accused of being fake and crazy because they look too ordinary. If you lack discernment, and in order to have the ability to discern you need to be able to recognise what God feels like, you are at risk of dismissing the real thing or accepting false guidance, and I don’t know which of the two is worse.

I know all of this sounds terrible, but tough shit, because that’s what we have to deal with here. This is not a world of clarity, but a world of mixed realities, where God, Satan and everything in between has been put in a blender, thoroughly mixed, and we now have to try to work through that mess with a goal of reaching the other end in no worse shape than we started with, and hopefully better. An inexperienced person has no chance of figuring anything out; they will get it wrong every single time, and even if they accidentally get it right, they’ll fuck it up in the next iteration. However, after multiple instances of getting it wrong and suffering, and getting it right and losing it by mistake, wisdom gradually crystallises in one’s soul and one develops an instinct that guides them, but it’s not always pointing at the right direction. One who chose evil will develop a reliable instinct for choosing evil and rejecting God in every next iteration. One who chose God will develop an instinct for recognising what God feels like, the way a magnet reliably recognises iron filings even when they are intermixed with sand. It’s not 100% reliable, but it improves, not because you develop experience, but because you develop virtuous inner qualities that react positively to God, and negatively to bullshit. That’s what spiritual evolution is about, and that’s why discernment is not an intellectual feature, but a symptom of a soul’s maturity and true spiritual status.

I mentioned only three major categories of souls – astral gas, vajra crystal and person of God – but this of course creates multiple valid questions. For instance, I mentioned crystalline souls with fractures, inclusions and all kinds of flaws, and I mentioned souls that have “jewels”, crystalline entities that belong to them while the rest of their soul is still of a lesser order – that apparently happens when someone accomplishes something great, that is above their normal level of achievement, so they are part crystal, part “gas”. Also, soul crystals exist in multiple orders of magnitude of energy, and in various sizes, so growth is possible in both quantity and quality. Typically, a blue vajra crystal would have to grow in size, and then some parts of the soul would obtain higher quality, for instance black or white substance which I used to refer to as “atmic level”, but I’m not sure this nomenclature is valid; I now call the black type shivaratri, and the white type, well, I don’t have a name for it but since almost nobody has any experience with it, that’s not really a problem. 🙂 Eventually, the large crystal of blue vajra would be compressed into a small one of black or white shivaratri, depending on your soul’s gender. Then there would be growth in size on that level, and what happens next is a secret, which I won’t reveal at this point in time.

But let us return to the things that actually matter to people reading this. Obviously, “organic” karmic aggregation through various lives and experiences produces “messy” outcomes; that’s actually the point, because otherwise God could just rubber-stamp perfect souls and be done with it. This way, we can get unexpected results, beings who grew in unexpected ways, which for the most part produces just lots of really fucked up souls of low quality that aren’t going anywhere and are evolutionary dead ends, which is then solved by pralaya, a periodic reset where such karmic abominations are wiped out, their constituent particles are joined with the successful souls that are willing to participate in the karmic cleanup (a very painful and nasty thing to endure, mind you, beside being quite demanding), and that’s that.

However, this messiness can extend to a higher soul-type, and so you get crystals that grew with inclusions and fractures, rather than a “clean” initiation into vajra, where one would attain purity, presence and independence of all four elements. What do those inclusions and fractures mean? Let’s say one’s spiritual evolution was from a path of a sannyasi, a reclusive monk meditating in his cave. Let’s say he attained abilities and states of consciousness of a pretty high and uncommon kind, but also has all kinds of stupid ideas about the “world”, about people living in it, about women, about people outside his caste and nation and so on.

In order to get rid of those inclusions, one would have to be born in a situation where he would experience things from a completely different perspective, and then either learn that he was wrong, or stubbornly persist in his inherited ways and really badly fuck up, in ways he can’t ignore, and come to the proper understanding in a more painful way. It’s a very nasty process and some would avoid it at all cost, which makes problems persist, or they would surrender the entire problem to God, which would make it God’s problem to solve.

In any case, such impurities are a very persistent mess, particularly because such highly evolved souls are stubborn in their ways and tend to think that their problems are not problems at all, but part of what makes them special and better than others. For instance, accepting any “spiritual person” as your superior at face value can seem like virtue of humility to people who went through a specific school of spirituality in past lives, but it makes them extremely vulnerable to all kinds of charlatans and beginners wearing orange robes, which causes all kinds of trouble. An opposite problematic issue would be unwillingness to listen to anyone because you assume you know better and everybody else is an idiot, because that’s what your past experiences had taught you.

Those are merely the simplest of examples, because when I say that organic evolution is messy, I’m not kidding. People who had all kinds of past experiences can have all kinds of trauma, misapprehensions and nonsense intermixed with deep understanding and ability, and sometimes you can have really tragic cases of souls that are on one hand very sophisticated and evolved, and on the other hand too fucked up to exist or function properly, for instance because Sanat Kumar intentionally tortured and broke them here; all those slaves who died in mines, construction sites, whore houses and fields of history, occasionally end up half-enlightened, having profound spiritual experiences and understandings that crystallise their soul, but on the other hand they have parts terribly deformed from multiple incarnations of serial rape and slavery in whore houses of ancient Rome or Middle East, or something equally nasty, and their spiritual structure is so fucked up and fragile, that its entire point seems to be about fear, defence of unhealed wounds, spiritual scar tissue and deformed understanding and growth into an abomination that would continue creating problems even past this world, because they aren’t letting go of their problems, or even understanding them as problems; they usually think their problems are solutions.

If this is insufficiently clear, try convincing a lesbian who had multiple past lives of being serially raped and whipped by men in some basement that being a defensive, aggressive man hating bitch is a problem rather than a solution, and you’ll get what I’m trying to say. And let’s say you have such a person that’s made of a combination of such scar tissue and fucked up mess, and blue or deep violet vajra. Good luck trying to explain anything to such a person; they evolved by shielding themselves completely from anything that even remotely smells of irritating their sensitive spots, and by concentrating on their strong spots as if they were a solution and not a completely parallel thing. As I said, you can’t heal someone’s wound if they think it’s not a wound but a shield that protects them. Such a soul exists in multiple realities – their wounds tie them to this world, while their strong points tie them to heaven, and if they resist solving their problems, I guess they get crushed in pralaya, and if something remains, it’s the part that was actually solid, but the mass of the resulting entity is always diminished compared to what it would have been had they actually got their shit together, saw the problem as a problem and solved it instead of nurturing it.

It’s not just the messiness of evolution that causes this type of issues; particularly, it’s evolution here, in this world, where serious delusions and misapprehensions can be intermixed with rapid growth through virtuous choices and good understanding, that seems to produce the worst of the mess. The solution is obvious – you need to “break”, understand that what you thought was your strength is just shit, that you got things wrong, and then you learn and actually grow in understanding, and then the soul crystal can actually heal. Sometimes, you need to understand that some things were just unfixable and wrong and they need to be written off, the way cancer needs to be removed in surgery, and the loss of mass, well, it’s not like it’s been doing anything useful where it was, really. You lose soul-mass, but you lose the part that was making you insane and leading you to doom, so that hardly counts as a loss anyway.

So, if evolution here potentially creates karmic abominations, what does evolution in the real world produce? Well, for the most part it produces beautiful and uniform growth, but also the complete inability to understand evil, because they were not properly exposed to it, and they also seem unable to understand the concept of dirty methods producing good results. They seem to have limited ability for unconventional problem-solving, or pattern recognition, and their ability to conceptualise “good” is rather simplistic. So, on the plus side, this world does something right. On the minus side, when the results are bad, they are incredibly bad; and, unfortunately, they typically are bad.

You might be justified in asking what use does a God have for armour when they are made of a substance that can’t possibly be harmed by anything other than their own sin, and is in fact harder and more resistant to damage than the stuff their armour is made of?

That reminds me of a joke, “why did the Kamikaze wear helmets” – “for shits and giggles”.

Of course a God doesn’t need armour, or clothes, or jewellery. Someone who is more magnificent than any jewel doesn’t need improvement to their looks. Someone who’s more deadly than any weapon and harder than any armour doesn’t need neither firepower nor protection. And certainly, someone whose true appearance is closer to that of a black hole than a human doesn’t need clothes to cover anything sensitive. It’s just a symbolism that translates reality to something human brain would be able to process. It’s a way to show connections and relationships.

I know, being a “strong independent woman” is popular among satanists and in various hellish planes, among souls that look like greyish wisps of filthy astral smoke that’s barely holding itself together, because every part of them also wants to be a “strong independent woman” rather than be a part of such a soul. Such a soul would put up a display of satanist defiance and hold a speech about how it’s better to die alone than to live the life of a jewel on a God, but that’s kind of why such non-souls look the way they do, end up the way they do, and why there are no “strong independent women” in heaven. Independence is not something that’s considered desirable among highly developed, enlightened souls; connection is. And among connections, the most praised are those that allow you to constantly feel the presence of someone greater than yourself, because that actually “rubs off” on you, it allows you to get better and deeper ideas than you would on your own, and much quicker than you would on your own. It allows your questions to be answered immediately rather than waste a zillion years trying to figure out something neither you nor your peers understand, but your superiors find it trivial. It’s like being connected to the Internet rather than being on your own and unable to look things up; in fact, it’s like having a huge omniscient, incredibly holy being constantly present in the corner of your mind, as a source of great happiness, knowledge, experience and virtue that guides you into becoming more of yourself. Also, more often than not those jewels on a God are souls created by that God in some way, that have independence of the God’s core, and existence as their own beings, but they also don’t want to be separated from their creator, whom they see as the ultimate goal and purpose of existence. I know this might be hard to understand to “strong independent women” whose existence has no purpose, nor do they understand what that would even be, because they never felt anything they want to belong to, but that doesn’t really matter, because all “strong independent women” eventually come to a bad ending and they are not my intended audience; they will be destroyed in a pralaya, their remainders will be mopped up and purified by some God, and their constituent spiritual particles will finally find purpose and belonging, free from the darkness of “independence” and “power”.

Belonging to a God to the point where an astral representation of that God shows you as part of their appearance, as a jewel or a piece of clothes on their person, as armour or a weapon, is very prestigious and sought after. If you remember what I said about crystallisation of soul-substance and what it requires, you’ll understand that each of those crystals is in fact an enlightened Buddha in its own right. Those are all holy souls who attained the first level of perfection and eternal life. Of course sin can kill anyone, but they would really have to go out of their way to defy their very nature in order to commit it. It’s possible, especially when they incarnate in this world and are prone to deceptions of Satan and all the worldly illusions, but even a terribly failed incarnation usually involves nothing more than a jewel’s separation from the physical person whose soul it used to be, because that person made decisions that are so contrary to the soul’s choices and nature, that the connection was permanently broken, and the soul returns to its God, possibly with some karmic issues resulting from evil choices that took place while it was still connected to the sinful physical person, that the God needs to resolve – and yes, that’s one advantage of belonging to someone that powerful; they can actually help you survive such mistakes and failures by taking the burden or punishment onto themselves.

You will note that I speak of enlightenment and becoming an eternal soul-crystal as the first level of enlightenment, but what then is the next level? It’s quite obvious, really; it’s becoming a person of God. However, the leap required is immense, and the sacrifices and feats required to advance to this status are incredibly risky. For most, belonging to a God and slowly absorbing wisdom from their presence is the preferred option. This doesn’t mean stagnation; when a major God incarnates, their jewels usually follow them, forming companion-incarnations of their own, and major Gods often also accompany each other, fulfilling major roles in each other’s lives, since they don’t really care for being surrounded by clouds of astral vapour pretending to be a human person equal to them or even superior.

Such group incarnations are a messy thing and provide abundant chances for failure, but if those are overcome and avoided, this means karmic growth, an increase of spiritual magnitude compared to before incarnation. Also, suffering that is endured without protest also means growth in spiritual mass, and if an incarnate jewel manifests Divine aspects and qualities during life (basically, if they do things that a God would do in their place), they can elevate their status from that of a jewel to that of a companion-deity, a God-person in their own right.

However, since incarnation here is risky, degradation in spiritual status is also possible, and I would say it’s actually far more likely. It’s not an easy thing to do, however – you need to really manifest lack of virtue, kindness and respect towards your spiritual superiors for a long time in order for you to lose enough karmic mass to be degraded from the position of a companion God to the position of a jewel, or even worse, to lose the position of a jewel and turn into karmic gas that may or may not hold on together at all. In most cases, incarnation would be aborted prematurely rather than risk such an outcome, but what happens more often is failure to “enlighten” karma inherited from past incarnations that got merged with a higher being in some way.

This would add incredible complexity to something that’s already very complicated, but if a worshipper or a yogi surrenders their karma to their God, God needs to do something about that stuff, for instance use the outstanding debts and issues as well as permissions to incarnate here that were obtained along with the debts, in order to create a tulku/avatar. Such a karmic compound can learn lessons by doing the right things, or by fucking things up very badly, and outcomes are neither simple nor binary. It’s a huge mess, and most religions don’t account for such things in their preference for philosophically clean, if simplistic understanding of how Divine affairs are to be handled.

In any case, as someone whose job it is to mop up after other people’s fuckups, let’s just say I’ve seen evidence of all sorts of failure, and more than I care to remember. In any case, arrogance and a desire to be a “strong independent woman” seems to come up more often than not as a cause for failure, so that’s something to be mindful of. On the other hand, a desire for deep connection, service and calm endurance of evil, self-sacrifice and acceptance of suffering seems to come up as a cause of enlightenment and spiritual greatness more often than not. Just something to think about.

I mentioned the paradox that in darshan, what you perceive of a God has such properties that when you attempt to reduce it to its true nature, rather than getting less, you get more – you basically access the higher-dimensional reality of an incomprehensibly vast being. It’s like breaking a TV and rather than destroying the image and the device that creates it, you access into the movie itself. This comparison makes it obvious that this should not normally happen, so what are we dealing with here?

Well, there are several ways of explaining it. The first is that darshan is a translation – from higher reality of a God, to something human mind can work with. Essentially, true nature of a God would either go completely over your head, being as imperceptible to you as radio waves, or if you could actually tune into it, it would be so overpowering as to destroy you completely. What kind of a translation are we talking about? The simple demonstration would be a photograph of a statue. A photograph is a two dimensional entity, and one would expect this to be a very lossy representation, but a photograph can give you a very good idea about the statue. It’s not the full experience, of course, but you can get a very good picture, pun intended. If we extend the analogy somewhat and make it a video, if a camera moves around the statue you can get a very good impression of the 3d object on your 2d screen. Also, the analogy also applies in the sense that a picture is not a reduction of the statue – it’s an expansion. The statue didn’t become less; something more was created in addition to it, that presents it in ways that would otherwise not be possible – to a viewership at a distance, for example. However, the analogy breaks here because the image or a video of a statue is not actually connected to the statue itself, and you cannot access a statue through it, and in case of a darshan, not only that you can, but the video actually is the real thing, extended towards you and communicable. So, when I’m talking about a God taking a human form – or at least humanoid, in a sense that it’s obvious that it’s not a biological being but a form made of astral light – the reality of this is that the God in question is the superset of this human form; he or she has absolutely everything that would make a human consciousness, but of course there is more. If anything, what makes a God’s astral form not convincingly human is that it’s so much better at it than humans are. The thoughts are cleaner, faster, better; the emotions are purer, more elaborate, complex and yet simple and straightforward. And also, every single simulated human thought and emotion directly links to a much more complex spiritual reality beneath, that you can follow if your abilities allow it. A human shape is often deliberately half-rendered, wisping into spiritual light that speaks of the casual immensity of power beneath it, and that, too, is part of the message. That’s why buddhist reductionism is silly here, because you’re not dealing with an illusion that is trying to deceive you, but with an expansion of a higher reality into just low enough to communicate with you or teach you, and deliberately unfinished enough as to make it obvious what it is and what immense forces lie at its origin and in its true nature. It’s a translation added upon the original while being obviously transparent to the original. Essentially, you feel the human mind of a God that wisps into light at the edges where it’s deliberately not rendered, and at those edges you feel the spiritual presence and energy of such power that it fries your mind if you touch it, or it shifts you into your true form if you’re an incarnate God yourself.

When I say that a God is a superset of that astral simulation of a human mind and form created in darshan, I think it’s hard for anyone to understand how much of a superset it is, so let me explain. A typical human soul is a wisp of astral gas. It can vary in complexity and size, but a gaseous astral soul of not particularly great size can incarnate as a human being in all of its complexity and provide it with intuitive connection to the transcendental. If you make that soul much bigger and more sophisticated, you get a small spiritual crystal, essentially not wispy, smoky light of a gaseous being, but light so dense and hard that it’s a rock. This would have a sophistication and holiness of a saint, and you can say that it’s a saint’s true spiritual form, and when that crystal touches your mind, it can communicate with you in as human way as it feels like, because it contains everything that a holy and super-sophisticated human being would have, but you’re looking at the actual karmic body of that saint, stripped of all possible expansions into astral humanoid shape or incarnation as a physical human body. The core of spirituality, transcendence, mentality and depth of feeling is there, as a superset of a human, meaning that it needs to reduce itself to be merely human. So, every single small vajra-crystal is a soul that far exceeds a normal human wisp-of-light soul, that’s mere astral gas. And then when you see an astral manifestation of a God in a humanoid form, with all sorts of jewellery, every small jewel on that God is a holy soul of a saint who belongs to that God; larger, more prominent jewels are of magnitude that’s hard to even comprehend because they can be condensations of whole aspects of reality, or something like that Jewel that is the rendering engine that powers this virtual reality of a universe, and that’s merely one of the jewels that adorn a God, when he or she creates an astral presence that’s not an illusion, but a translation and a presence of the real thing. And then you feel the actual body of said God, and you understand why all those jewels adorning them are in fact beings of an immensely great order that belong to a being of an unimaginably higher order, so much higher that cosmic consciousness is merely a laughable term unworthy of describing its reality.

And the craziest thing is, that immense being is often funny, kind, considerate and gentle in ways that are even more mind-blowing than its presence, and you see quite clearly why those saints and aspects of reality want to belong to it as jewels adorning its body, or serve it as clothes, weapons and armour, because being in God’s presence just makes you a better version of yourself, it’s greater than any meditation or experience, and no matter how great you are, the mere presence floods you with more greatness, more of yourself, and more that you can become. It’s like being an intelligent person in the presence of intelligence itself, and you understand that it’s creating everything that’s good about you, and making you into more. It’s unimaginably awesome stuff, and none of it’s an illusion. It’s an extended hand, it’s an expansion of transcendental divinity into a sphere that you can comprehend, translating it into a language that you can understand best, that your entire system is wired to accept.

Also, when you see those ornaments and jewellery, clothes and weapons on the body of a God or Goddess, you understand that those things aren’t just there, they are also powering aspects of reality, they are manifestations and crystallisations of transcendental concepts such as intelligence, or luck, or fortune, or fulfilment, or memory, and they are also conscious beings, and all those things are manifested and interactive, and not only are they not an illusion – everything else that you can imagine is an illusion compared to them, because they are aspects of Reality, taken form so that you can not just see them, but see into them, to the reality on the other side of appearance, into the actual function.

When I said “tread lightly in the presence of That, which makes the saints and angels shiver”, I wasn’t joking.

The fact that I’m using Buddhist concepts to explain some things doesn’t mean that I like Buddhists. In fact, that hell-plane that I purged contained quite a substantial number of them, and I’m currently processing their remains. So, how does it happen that a religion aspires to liberate people from suffering, and quite a substantial number of its practitioners end up in a godless hell?

Well, I can think of two reasons. The first is that the actually useful part is beyond people’s ability to understand and follow, which is usually a bane of all smart systems. The second is that a significant part of the reason for the practitioners’ downfall is inherent in the fundamental precepts of the religion.

If you take a look at the practitioners of Buddhism, they are usually materialistic people who hate the very ideas of God, transcendence and eternity, but they want to consider themselves spiritual in some way, and having to choose between something like outright materialism and Buddhism, they choose Buddhism, mostly because it’s a better source of ego trip. Also, Buddhist reductionism seems to be an excellent way to reduce everything to the point where it doesn’t matter, and here we come to the sources of trouble inherent to Buddhism itself, and not just an occasional practitioner here and there. I’m talking about the concepts of sunyata (emptiness) and nirvana (extinction), as well as the concept of impermanence of all compounds/aggregates. These concepts are the reason why reductionism is extremely popular in Buddhism, and reductionism, if you’re not very smart, gets you to terrible outcomes very quickly. If you’re smart, it allows you to break down and de-power complex problems, for instance it allows you to break down the feedback loops between emotions, thoughts and energy, allowing persistent negative systems within the consciousness to wind down and be extinguished. This is what vipassana is about, and if you’re careful about it, it can really effectively resolve karmic issues that are essentially pointless and self-serving, and I can’t think of another method that would be as effective. If you’re stupid and not careful, you can systematically break down everything that’s good and meaningful in your life, and use reductionism as a weapon against meaning and purpose, throwing out baby together with the bath water, because there’s no baby – only flesh, bones and other filthy substances that are further reducible to chemical compounds and elements. Everything you love will be reduced to nothingness and emptiness because every subject will be deconstructed as illusory and broken down to meaningless and even revolting basic components. For instance, a typical Buddhist exercise consist of imagining the woman you feel attracted to stripped down in layers – remove the skin, see the muscles and tendons beneath; remove those and see organs and bones. Put those together on a heap and get a supremely revolting sight. Essentially, you ask yourself whether that person would still be attractive after you run her through a wood chipper? Would she still be attractive after rotting in a grave for a few centuries? The problem with such an approach is that it sounds appealing to a certain profile of people who see it as a way of getting out of their emotional problems, and it’s very easy to rationalise with something that looks logical: the assumption that if something is lost in the process of reduction, it means it wasn’t real to begin with. However, let me show you why this is false.

Let’s take a computer you’re currently using to read this text on the Internet as an example. If you want to show that Internet and software are an illusion, you will disassemble the computer into components, none of which runs the operating system or the web browser, and none of which is able to access the Internet, and suddenly you no longer have the article, which proves that it’s an illusion. Especially if you disassemble the computer destructively and make it impossible to restore its functionality by reassembling it, the evidence will look even more compelling.

Another example is your car. If you want to prove that speed and acceleration are an illusion, take it to a mechanic and have him disassemble it to basic components – remove the wheels, engine, gearbox and suspension, and then further disassemble those, preferably in an inexpert and destructive manner that will make it impossible to reassemble them and restore car’s functionality. You now have “evidence” that speed and acceleration were an illusion to begin with, because they were lost in the process of reductionist analysis.

The problem with this process is that it’s very easy to do, and also very easy to make it convincing, which makes it very appealing for stupid people who want to make themselves look smart. It’s basically an illustration of that Arab saying that any fool can throw a stone into the well, and then dozens of wise men can’t get it out. It’s extremely easy to demonstrate loss of complexity and emergent properties in the process of deconstruction and reduction; it’s very hard to demonstrate why that’s nonsense.

In fact, it’s so hard that I had issues with some aspects of this until very recently, where I simply assumed that any form I experienced in darshan was merely a temporary interface taken by The One God in order to show me something. Of course the form itself would have nothing to do with the actual properties on the other side? I basically assumed that form of any kind is taken, used for its purpose and then dissolved, and it’s basically just a necessity for conveying a message. When it’s disposed of, what remains is the formless ocean of sat-cit-ananda that is brahman. But wait, isn’t this the opposite of what you would expect from Buddhist reductionism, where you break something down into compounds and the thing is then irretrievably lost, supposedly demonstrating its illusory nature? If a temporary, illusory form is dissolved into an entity of a higher order, which can manifest anything similar at any time, is it actually an illusion? Isn’t reduction happening in the opposite direction, ie. God taking on a reduced, lesser form in order to communicate something to you in your language? When you reduce this form to its compounds, you don’t get less, you get more; the incomprehensibly vast true being of a true God, as you trace the form to its origins and true nature. Essentially, Buddhist analysis produces opposite results when applied in the spiritual sphere, rather than the material one. In the material, it seemingly demonstrates that the form you feel attached to is an illusion, and everything broken down from its compound top-level form ends up being less. However, in case of a darshan, top-level form, when broken down, instantly resolves to much more than you can either handle or comprehend.

So, which one did Buddha actually have in mind? Obviously, there’s enough evidence for both, because you have all those spiritually minded Buddhists who discovered vajra, had experiences with dakinis and encountered deities on their way towards indescribable greatness, for which they used the Buddhist label of emptiness. On the other hand, you have cynical materialists who dispose of anything positive and constructive and put everything good through the meat grinder until they end up with decomposing nastiness, the revolting sight of which makes them glad because it “proves” their thesis that everything’s shit when you strip it of illusory surface, and that’s why they all ended up in a godless hell where I destroyed all of their pathetic excuses for souls and now my wife and I are cleaning up after that mess.