What does it feel like? I know people think about it when I describe darshan, especially if they haven’t experienced it themselves.

It depends, you know. Depends on who it is – which person of God; depends on whether you know each other already and have an established relationship from before. Depends on what they are there for – to warn, to ask, to teach, to comfort.

But if I had to generalize, I’d say it feels like being restored to your true self. I usually have all sorts of anxieties and stress around me when I’m spending karmic matter. It feels like taking other people’s sin, but in atomic form, so it’s not a coherent thing. When I spend it, I feel pain, and I mentally repeat “I’m sorry”, without knowing exactly what I’m sorry for, because it’s too fragmented and garbled to carry any kind of information, but I’m sincere regardless. But after being immersed in that for some time, it feels terrible. I’m no longer sure of anything, because everything in my consciousness was sin, suffering and remorse for days, weeks, months… sometimes years. If it’s years, I no longer know whether it’s karmic transformation or have I been lost, fallen and rejected by God, and I can always think of reasons and rationalisations, and this anxiety makes me focus, makes me try to do everything right, cross every t and dot every i. I can’t tell what God thinks about what I’m doing, but I can at least try to do everything properly, trusting in what I remember of the truth that I saw, when I saw it, long ago, and trusting it’s still the same, that nothing changed; but I don’t know. I’m never sure, and this uncertainty is amplified by the pain and remorse and suffering of karmic transformation.

And when I am in the presence of God, it’s always sudden, without any fanfare or introduction, or announcement. One moment there’s only myself and the misery of what I’m processing, and the next moment there is a presence, and the quality of that presence is like having a long, sharp thorn removed from my body – all the anxiety, the uncertainty, not knowing what God would say, what he would think about things I had to do in the mean time, about the terrible condition I’m in because of all that stuff I’m processing – it all vanishes instantly, because I know. Sometimes I feel information being passed, and sometimes not, but the presence itself is a truth of a higher order, and it makes me know things without words or thoughts.

What can you know without words or thoughts? Well, I can know that I worried for no reason. If my old friend still sees me the same way, it means this shit didn’t really stick to me, it didn’t corrupt me, change me into something He would not want to be associated with. There’s that sense of being with someone who was there with you before the world, before the stars, before all those things people assume were forever here, but we remember them being born or made. It’s the sense of just being there and knowing that if one of us needs to go to hell to deal with some business, the other will watch his back, in such a serious and dedicated way that he’ll have absolutely nothing better to do until I’m safely out. That’s what Lord Vishnu feels like, to me. There are limits to what He can do here. However, the feeling of His presence alone tells enough – to Him, it doesn’t matter that I’m dying under a terrible burden, that I’m all shades of fucked up, deprived of power, memories and my true being, trying to feel through darkness and remember who I am. He knows who I am, and He treats me as if I’m my old self, in my full power, with all the stuff I can’t even remember properly now. He doesn’t treat me any differently – He’s the same as when we had coffee up there, before the world. In a sense, He’s the complete opposite to how humans treat me; they see my limitations and barely anything beyond them, and think I can’t amount to much. He sees much more of me than I can even guess in this state, and shrugs the limitations off as incidental and irrelevant. No words exchanged, but all of it is felt, and the effect is profoundly restorative and healing. Just that feeling that He remembers me in my complete form, and this here – He understands it, and understands what will be when it passes, and looks forward to us having that coffee.

That’s what it feels like.

I am aware of the fact that I upset some people by very clearly suggesting that most things practiced under the collective umbrella term of spirituality are, in no unclear terms, delusion and fakery, while others are genuine but modest achievements.

Yes; when I was a beginner myself, I thought every person with a spiritual-sounding title and an orange robe is enlightened, everybody talking about spiritual experiences is genuine, every “spiritual book” is genuinely inspired or at least useful, and so on. That was before 1997, when I started experiencing things that were completely unexpected and for which I had no theoretical framework in anything I’ve read or experienced before.

Before, it seemed logical that all the enlightened people are basically saying the same things, in essentially the same terms, and that their experiences confirm what they were taught. It seemed logical – if it’s true, of course it’s confirmed by experience. Since my own experiences confirmed the same things, I considered myself one of them – one of people who experienced the truth.

But as my experiences started to diverge wildly from anything others talked about, I became cautious. It took me a long time to actually change the theoretical framework, because I wanted to be sure it’s true, and that takes time, especially when you’re not copying anyone’s homework.

Now, I am very skeptical of people whose spiritual experiences confirm what they were taught, word by word; the entire dogma. That’s just not how things work when you’re based in reality, like I was. It took me decades to even interpret some experiences properly, that’s how radically they departed from everything I thought I knew.

That answers the next question people have: how come I’m the only one talking about certain things, such as Sanat Kumar, or this world being a weaponised VR, God manifesting as multiple persons, manifestation as a person of God being the goal of personal evolution, and so on? The answer is as simple as it is uncomfortable. No, in fact I’m not the only one talking about those things. There were others before me who figured it out. It’s just that there were so few of us throughout history. All the “spiritual authorities” you know of? Yeah, they are saying the same things I was saying for the first few years into my sadhana. That’s because they are where I was for the first few years of practice. However, I moved on; they haven’t. They didn’t transcend the first phases of understanding, and are basically regurgitating what they were taught and copy-pasting traditional teachings. They had some spiritual experiences. That’s all fine. But there’s more; much more.

The true meaning of the question isn’t that what I’m saying is surprising; it’s that people underestimate who I am by multiple orders of magnitude, and then their questions make sense. If you know who I am, the reason why I’m the only one who managed to understand certain things here becomes blatantly obvious.

I got some things because I remembered them, and that was possible because I was there. Why others didn’t? Obviously, they weren’t there. They couldn’t remember the cat in their lap playing with the pendant around their neck, or that special tone of consciousness of their friends; they weren’t there. Those people aren’t their friends. They were probably born eons later. I can remember how Sanat Kumar got the Jewel, because I was there, and it’s my fault, in a way. There are, let’s see, five people that I know of who have those events in personal experience, one of them being Sanat Kumar and he’s dead, the other being the Sentinel, who is also dead. Six, if I count the Jewel, and I should. That’s why I know those things, and all kinds of “spiritual people” don’t. I was there. I participated in cooking up this mess, and I am here to clean it up. I’m not some phase in spiritual evolution, the way people imagine those things. I’m not some guy who practiced yoga a lot. It just took a lot of effort to remember some of these things here, in this mud, and to repeat initiations from below, in the body.

Why was Buddha the first one to ever figure out Sanat Kumar down here? Because he seems to have been the first one to actually do anything Sanat Kumar minded enough to try to interfere. Why all kinds of “great teachers” completely failed to figure him out? Because they never did anything he had a problem with, probably. It’s interesting how Jesus had all kinds of issues with him, and “great saints” like Ramakrishna and his disciples had none. It kind of tells you something. Why did Satan interfere with me so much? It kind of tells you something, doesn’t it? If a dog is growling at the woods, you tend to wonder what is it that he’s seeing there that you aren’t.