Frequently thought questions

Wait a minute, if you say you are the same now as you were at the time of birth, that your essential consciousness is the same, what about the practice of yoga? Didn’t it change anything?”

Of course it changed things. I learned that things, that previously appeared to be merely states of consciousness, are in fact planes of reality. I carved pathways within my physical brain that allow me to do things that are so far out of ordinary human experience, I am loath to even discuss them outside the circle of trained initiates who are able to verify or falsify my claims. But the thing is, higher initiation didn’t feel like expansion, it felt like removing limitations. So, basically, the advanced practice of yoga, and things that I do in the last two decades, that are not really yoga, but rather wielding of spiritual power, had the effect of enabling me to do some things, while incarnated, that I would much more easily and naturally do while discarnated. Essentially, it allowed me to get around some of the bodily limitations. This means that it didn’t produce spiritual evolution or expansion, but rather that it neutralized some of the zombifying effects of physical incarnation. Essentially, yoga is less effective than death for removing corporal limitations, but has that convenient peculiarity of not having to die in order not to be completely useless. Yes, I still see my physical incarnation as a stupid hairy ape-like creature that is the cause of all my problems, but unlike before, I now have a certain degree of control, awareness and knowledge. The ape-like thing causes inevitable mistakes in everything I do, which is humiliating in a way, but I try to keep it on a short leash.

You are often saying that you have to suffer in order to spend or transform evil global structures. Isn’t up-stream kriya of Kundalini-yoga supposed to do that?”

Well, no. What kriya does is destabilize your energy system in order to make it fluid, and remove resistance. It also creates a strong upward flow of energy which is a close relative of orgasm. In regard to transforming, breaking down and spending energy blockages, larvae and, in lack of a better word, accumulations of past sins, what kriya actually does is allow you to detach from a structure, guide energy towards it in order to dissolve it, and when it releases the traumatic content, it allows you to mitigate the trauma. You still experience suffering, but you are in a state of surrender to God while you are suffering, so to speak, and this makes it possible for you not to simply close the damn thing off in another larva, but to deal with it permanently. Once you’ve faced the traumatic emotions, they lost their harmfulness and you can deal with them as you would deal with anything. So basically, it’s the suffering that spends bad karma in any case. Everything else is there just to make it easier to bear. If you’re not suffering under the onslaught of traumatic emotions, you’re not really spending anything, by definition. I recently used a comparison with brakes on a car. What they do is equivalent to suffering: they take the kinetic energy of the vehicle and spend it by taking it onto themselves, by transforming it into heat. The molecules of the material of the brakes are accelerated by the transfer, and then this heat slowly dissipates into the environment. Similarly, any transfer of karma disturbs your spiritual body on the kalapa-level, changing its specific energy. With a combination of suffering and surrender, in other words detachment, you absorb the energy of the impact, integrate the additional karmic mass into your own on a kalapa-level, and raise the energy of the resulting mass onto your previous energy level. If you’re not a high initiate, meaning if your spiritual body isn’t made of vajra, or to be technical, if it is not made of a substance that is qualitatively higher than the substance you are absorbing, the process will actually change your soul-structure in such a way that your entire motivational structure might change. The additional karmic mass might end up transforming you, and not the other way around. You need to be made of higher quality stuff, so to say; so, the karmic transfers are a different order of magnitude of a problem compared to dealing with your own personal issues. If you’re very strong, you can do small things without any apparent effort, like Earth absorbing space dust in form of small meteors. It just makes a passing glow and then it’s absorbed into Earth’s mass. However, something big can make quite a mess, and can take some doing to recover from. Since my official job title seems to be “garbage reclamation unit”, I’m basically very close to 100% of the maximum load that I can sustainably take. It’s not enough to wreck me, but it’s enough to seriously ruin my day. Sometimes the load exceeds 100%, which means that it would cause serious damage if it were kept on that level. Sometimes it falls under 80%, and then I feel great and recover quickly. I can’t really remember it going under that level, though.

Can’t someone help you?”

You need to understand that the requirements for this shit are rather high, so high that in order to be able to do any kind of a karmic transfer, of any quantity, you need to be a high initiate and a decently skilled yogi. Not many people throughout history have been able to do it. I’ve seen high initiates who are decently skilled yoginis start the process of breaking apart and dying because they carelessly “looked” at what I was spending when I was spending something particularly nasty, and a few tiny specks of that attached to them. The result was devastating, because not only were they not able to absorb and transform it, their efforts had no influence whatsoever on it, and the stuff simply kept shredding them. I fixed the damage simply by paying attention, spending those stray specks in a second, restored their lower bodies from their core karmic template, and proceeded to feel like shit under 110% load. No, nobody can help me, because I’m uniquely powerful and skilled, and the second most powerful person ever to have lived would be merely a helpless victim whom I’d have to patch up. But I can be helped in other ways, that’s true. The entire logistics of my effort are made possible through others’ help. I’m not doing this alone. In fact, one of the “hacks” that makes the entire thing possible is that others willingly assist me in every way possible while I personally am under “attack”, because there are “immune responses” that were set against me and would have blocked my effort years ago had there been no help from others. So, nobody can help me with my part, but my part is only a piece in a wider puzzle, and without the other parts, it alone wouldn’t do much.

Justification of evil

There are two main schools of thought in regard to surviving trauma.

One, of modern “psychology”, seems to think that any kind of trauma necessarily damages you and nothing can be either healed or overcome, only avoided.

The other, older and especially espoused by Nietzsche, states that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, basically saying that trauma is the main instrument of personal growth.

It’s easy to respond to unpleasant experiences by whining and adopting the attitude of perpetual victimhood – woe is me, bad shit happened. This is the most useless attitude one can possibly have and it simply keeps you stuck in a position of perpetual impotence and incompetence.

It is also easy to overcome trauma and rationalize how it was actually good for you because it made you into who you are now, and you turned out fine. That’s how people who were beaten up as children learn to beat up their children, and the circle of evil persists and propagates.

It would be very easy for me to say that the bad things that happened to me forced me to overcome them and thus develop an incredible amount of mental strength. It would be easy to justify everything from my past in hindsight, and say it was all for a good purpose, and now I finally understand. But that would be to adopt falsehoods and to rationalize evil.

The only purpose of that evil was to destroy me. It wasn’t there to help me do anything, and it wasn’t designed so that I would grow by overcoming it. It was designed to prevent me from incarnating my full potential, to cripple me in such a way that I would never become capable of even believing who I actually am. It didn’t make me into what I am now – my consciousness is the same now as it was before. It’s only my knowledge and abilities that grew. If you knew me then, I couldn’t say the things I now know. I couldn’t do the things I now can. My mind was uncomfortably tight and lacked power and reach. My consciousness and essential character, however, were the same then as they are now. I am aware how the events in my childhood and youth were designed to gradually destroy me and put me out of circulation. I know that Sanat Kumar did it on purpose, because he actually bragged about it. It was also designed in such a way that if I overcame, he could claim the credit, he could say that he set everything up just so to make it possible. But I saw the pattern, in myself and in others. He trains us like one would train lions to believe they are sheep, to love eating grass and to hate eating flesh. He trains us to fear, to be small, to be vulnerable, to be alone and unprotected and threatened, and he does so in order to permanently, fatally cut our personal connection with God, to cripple us in such a way that connection with other humans, within the confines of his plan, would remain as our only option.

He trains us to be weak, crippled and damaged, because that is how he wants us. That is what the God of this world has in store for us if we just believe in his plan. We get to be the bonsai kitten, a part of the human caterpillar.

If someone wanted me to manifest my power, I know exactly what was to be done, and it is essentially the opposite of what my life looked like. You don’t train someone to be a king by giving him over to psychotic people with servant-mentalities to teach him how to be a broken servant. You don’t isolate him from knowledge and truth. You don’t bombard him with humiliations every single day and teach him by bad example. No, that’s what you do when you want to destroy someone so permanently and finally, that he never, ever has a chance to grow to wield any kind of power, and if he does, he will retain fatal vulnerabilities that you can exploit to either control or neutralize him. I have no illusions about that, and although I went through the events of my past considering the possibility that it was the only way that would realistically lead to the present-day results, I quickly saw that it wasn’t so. In fact, I learned more useful things from those rare few positive things that happened to me, than from overcoming any difficulty. If anything, having to overcome difficulties convinced me that I’m alone and without help, that I’m unimportant and that I don’t matter. Those were all things that I had to deal with later, with help from above, but they were the actual intended result of what this world and its maker had in store for me. That I overcame is not something he rejoiced, as he would have had he indeed designed it all as temptations to provoke growth. No, he saw it as a disaster, a peril and a grave threat. There is never light at the end of the tunnel he digs for us, and it’s not a tunnel, it’s simply a hole in the ground he intends to close behind us when we get to go deep enough. It’s a grave for souls.

The main difference between myself and most people who have had shit happen to them, is that I saw a great deal more, as it happened. I was not as blind as most. I was, however, very much inclined to justify everything in hindsight, but I saw that as an emotional response and I stopped it in its tracks, and proceeded to look into things calmly and rationally. I saw the design of the trap. In hindsight, I was supposed to see how it’s all designed to produce great things, if I succeeded to get out. If I failed, I would get to see how it was all my fault, because I did things that broke God’s perfect plan for me. I would then try to fix my mistakes in the next attempt, where I would be further weakened and damaged, and so ad nauseam, until there’s not much left. The mechanism that is supposed to weaken the captives is completely ridiculous now that I broke it on the global scale, and actually keeps bombarding me with “failure, mistake, sin, failure” emotional charges, without any sense or pattern, only because it’s what it’s designed to do and its guidance is broken so it does it randomly.

I actually get to see the inner workings of the system; my analysis isn’t merely a theory. I see the metaphorical cogs and wheels. It’s interesting how you can’t really believe it’s all for some greater good once you’ve seen the inner workings, once you’ve seen the guidance scripts and their triggers. It’s even more interesting how you continue desperately wishing to forget what you saw and rationalize it all away, to believe that some good God designed this world for the purpose of evolution, to help us grow and know his greatness in the end. It’s interesting how we have the desire to attribute our victories to God’s prescience and plan, and how desperately we desire to interpret everything bad as our fault, our willful action that broke God’s perfect plan.

And it’s even more interesting to see how this motivation is external, how it’s the result of a script running in the system.

There is a danger of people seeing me as an example that spiritual evolution is possible in this world, if only you are good enough. This of course implies that everybody who failed did so because they weren’t good enough, and I am certain the scripts of the system will make sure that everyone self-depresses with this thought. There are two problems with that, though. First is that I haven’t changed much, my consciousness is the same as it was when I was born, so the theory about me evolving is questionable. The second thing is, how many others like me, who started as equally good, didn’t make it? How many had killed themselves, or died in despair, or were so damaged that they kept running in senseless circles trying to heal themselves unsuccessfully?

If this is a place for evolution, why does an NDE experience of the astral world have greater positive transformational effect than all the things specific to this world? Wouldn’t the opposite be expected if Sanat Kumar’s story were true, if the higher worlds were those of stagnation, and if you want to evolve you need to subject yourself to the rigors and temptations of this one? How is it then that a brief experience of the astral world does more for one’s spiritual condition and is more transformational than the rest of one’s human life? How come the spiritual people aren’t seen as more spiritual because they had more experiences of matter, but because they had more experiences of God?

I read a story once, that hit incredibly close to home. It’s a story about a prince who angered his father the king, who disowned and exiled him. He spent years and decades of his life as a beggar, forgetting that he was once a prince. At one point, his aging father changed his mind and ordered his servants to find his son, reinstate him and fulfill any wish he might have.

When they found the former prince and offered to give him anything he wanted, the beggar begged them to give him a meal.

Overcoming empathy

Whenever people talk about empathy, it’s always positive, as if were the single most desirable spiritual quality to have. It is seen as weakening the limiting effects of ego, or some other bullshit.

Let me tell you a true story.

I was born with extreme empathy always turned on. Today I would classify it as strong involuntary samyama, but as a child, it took me more than a decade to even guess what was going on. I simply became a different person when surrounded with different people. It’s not that I absorbed the qualities of the environment, but more than what happened inside my mind changed; its flavor, emotions, thoughts, general attitudes. My entire existence was different when I was with my grandparents compared to being with my parents. School was a nightmare. It wasn’t so much a change as destruction and negation of everything I am in the incredible deluge of chaos. Too many children, all crazy, wrecked my my mind so badly I sometimes wonder how I was able to function there at all; but it was in the 7th grade or so that I started figuring out what was going on, when my technical drawing teacher expressed doubt that the drawing that I did for homework was done by me, because it was so much better than the stuff that I did in school; she thought I had my parents do it for me. I thought to respond “But of course it’s better, I did it at home, where it’s…” and then it clicked. It’s calm, at least compared to school. There were no thoughts of others, chaotically interfering with my own like very loud hissing of white noise. At home it’s not like watching TV signal without an antenna, in an area with poor reception.

To me, empathy is not some positive spiritual quality, as it appears to be to people who talk out of their arses and who never actually experienced what it means to have no personal boundaries, to have such strong perceptions of thoughts and emotions of others that it completely overrides and erases your own, to the point of taking decades to figure out who and what you actually are.

To me, empathy is a terrible, debilitating mental illness that I have to live with. It’s like having no firewall and no antivirus on your computer, and having it constantly hacked and invaded by others, only it’s not your computer but your mind, and it’s not only invaded by those who mean to, but by everyone, all the time. It never ends, it never stops. You cry with other people’s pain and laugh at what they find funny. When you dream, your dreams are mixed with the background noise created by others. When you’re surrounded by a mass of people, you’re flooded with chaos, completely disorderly and senseless, like hundreds of people talking at once. When you’re with one person, you simply adopt his ideas, point of view, way of feeling and thinking, basically you are an empty vessel that is filled by that person’s content. You cannot effectively argue a point, because if that person isn’t receptive, your mind simply stops working. When that person explains his point of view, it becomes yours.

That’s what it feels like to have no ego and to have extreme empathy.

I was completely and utterly confused in elementary school. I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t know that something was going on. I was just completely and utterly messed up. In the two last grades I started getting my shit together slightly, though, because I started to consciously perceive the differences in the way in which I exist when alone or with different others. Also, I started to self-medicate, so to say.

You see, this extreme sensitivity doesn’t just work for living humans. When I read a book, it recreates aspects of the author’s consciousness in me, in the exact same way the consciousness of living people overwhelms me in person, and I learned that I can drown one influence if I magnify the other. I could, for instance, read something created by a wonderfully organized mind, like Stanislaw Lem or Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert or Arthur Clarke, and basically “format” my mind with it as I would a floppy disc, allowing it to overrun the chaos and the inferior people’s influence. I couldn’t just turn it off; it never turns off, really, but I learned that I could change the channel, so to speak, and if I chose to fill my mind with one content, I could completely suppress the unwanted noise. I must have looked like a total weirdo in high school; I intentionally adopted a contrarian attitude in order to preserve my identity; I was intentionally reading things that nobody else was reading and doing things that nobody else was doing, just to create some form of a mental boundary between self and others. Also, since I became aware of the difference between self and other influences, I began to perceive my own consciousness under the influence of others as one would perceive a movie screen with movie playing. It took me a long time to understand that I was a movie screen, but then I started to consciously “watch the movies”, so to speak, and it confirmed a hunch I had for a few years at that point, that I was fundamentally, structurally different from all the others that I have met. My own consciousness, when I managed to put it under control, and that was never easy, went deeper than theirs. When I did samyama on deep thinkers and deep ideas, I found out that my own ability was always able to stretch farther than the object on which I did samyama; it was just that I ran out of deep templates on which to focus. I found several ideas in books and several pieces of music that stretched me to my limits and then I could feel things that were so far above my physical life it drove me crazy. I could also feel the Presence, the high consciousness that was always there, always aware, but never actually communicating. Between the violent hell at home caused by my mother’s quickly progressing madness and evil, and chaotic noise and constant bullying I had to suffer at school, and a bus ride in between, and a limit I hit in my attempts to find and explore things that were beyond this darkness and evil that always tried to swallow me and destroy everything that was me as separate from them, I became a combination of distress, frustration and anger, and, unable to find any hope or a way out, I tried to kill myself.

When that failed, I was completely wrecked, because I had absolutely no hope of ever having an existence that’s worth having. I was mentally assaulted by humans and rejected by God, I was locked up in a lunatic asylum, in complete power and control by people who perceived me the way a butcher perceives a pig, and I had nowhere to go. I would have sold my soul to Satan then, had he made me an offer; it was that bad. I gradually pulled myself out by mere contempt and hatred for humans: I simply didn’t feel like allowing the beings that were such incredibly pathetic pieces of shit to defeat me.

Can you imagine what it’s like for an extreme empath to be locked up in a lunatic asylum, among crazy people in a drug-induced stupor, and you’re given psychosis-inducing drugs that limit any attempt to preserve your own identity? It’s worse than a death sentence. However, I learned to adapt. I finally succeeded at learning AT, and I became so good at it, I could re-program my liver to neutralize the drugs they gave me. Having done that, I started to recollect my faculties and replay the strong points from books and music in my head, and I regained coherence. I finished highschool from there, basically learning the entire year’s worth of material from two subjects every week and giving exams. I had to take two weeks for maths and literature respectively but that’s the way I did it. I was so incredibly good at it, I used it as leverage to get myself out, because the false narrative that my psycho parents told the psychiatrists in order to shift the blame from themselves, and onto me, crumbled. The order of magnitude of the problems I had to solve gave me the level of self-confidence I later used to solve other difficult problems, and basically limits my compassion for other people’s whining, because whatever you had, I had worse. Some people may have had one worse week than my average, but that’s it. And I learned how to solve problems, how to shield myself from others’ influence, how to keep strong focus for a long period of time under unyielding, devastating pressure. I learned how to overcome my debilitating weakness.

And that’s how I view empathy. It’s my debilitating weakness, a mental illness that I was born with and have to compensate for in order to be able to exist as a person of distinct and separate identity, will, thoughts, emotions and intent. That’s why I don’t see ego as a spiritual flaw, and empathy as a cure. I actually see it reversed, I see empathy as a spiritual flaw that threatens me with complete negation and destruction of my identity, and ego as cure for that deadly disease. I see ego-boundaries as a shield I learned how to raise in order to first identify myself as a cinema and not as a movie, then to play other movies more to my liking, and then to create my own content, of a higher order of magnitude.

When I say that I learned how to meditate in a bus, in a crowd, while interacting with others, do you have any idea what that means to me, with my inherent weakness?

That’s the cause of my crushingly strong willpower and intent. That’s the cause of my ability to touch the consciousness of others, and then change it; I learned how to turn it the other way, how to influence others instead of being influenced. It’s just a matter of power, and the level of power that I had to master in order to merely survive the shit I was buried under, is essentially unheard of. I find it silly when some “spiritual people” talk about their more-less failed attempts at controlling their own minds. And that’s supposed to be difficult? Try controlling your mind that’s constantly open to every single form of outside influence, by design, from birth, so much that you have no distinct identity, then learn to compensate and overcome, while in a position of slavery, under  others’ total physical control, under extremely harmful and invasive psychoactive drugs, without any resources at your disposal, with everything against you. I see how people envy what I am now, and they think they would like to be me, but they certainly don’t want to go through what I had to in order to become me. It’s like sausages: the result tastes good, but you don’t want to know what went in there.

Spiritual evolution

I know I’m contradictory. Somewhere I speak about attaining salvation/enlightenment as something that is easily achievable for anyone willing to actually invest proper effort, and in other places I make it sound as if enlightenment is almost unattainable.

The fact that I talk about Gods is enough to conclude that there are beings who did in fact attain a state of Godhood. I don’t think any single one of them just happened to be created that way; they all created themselves with their choices and actions. Also, most of them give off a feeling that makes me think they were once human; some feel female, some feel male. Some, however, feel like nothing you can possibly imagine, like having a sentient black hole simply be essential consciousness.

So, there’s my definition of salvation and enlightenment: if you end up as a God or a Goddess, you succeeded. I don’t care for definitions that see enlightenment as basically a lasting samadhi-state, or salvation as God not being pissed at you anymore. I’m more pragmatic, I know it when I see it. If I feel you and I think you “taste” like God having taken form, you’re enlightened. I also understand quantity and gradation. Even if you’re a God, there are often greater Gods. Even if you’re Buddha, you can find yourself in a position where someone greater needs to clean up after you. I don’t see it as some simplified single-point destination; it’s much more complex than that. I don’t see evolution as a path and God as a goal; I see God as material from which you evolve, if you evolve at all. I see it as finding new ways in which to be God.

Foundation, not addition

In the previous article I wrote about the concept that was introduced by Jesus, the narrow vs. the wide road:

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” Mt 7,13-14

Here’s what it’s about. The huge majority of people will say that they desire salvation. However, they aren’t willing to go much out of their way to attain it. They want to keep their old life, and add salvation to all the great things that they perceive there. That’s the wide road.

The narrow road is to perceive that there is nothing of value in your old life. All is already lost, and trying to preserve anything is insane, like someone being born a pig and trying to preserve his piglets and pigpen.

People who think they already have something of value are disinclined to invest effort into salvation, and will perceive it as a sacrifice. They will see their shackles as jewelry. The people who understand their problem will not see investment of effort into spiritual practice as time and effort taken away from their worldly life, they will see it as the singularly important thing, and everything else as time and effort lost.

Jesus actually talked about that, too:

When one of those who were reclining at the table with Him heard this, he said to Him, “Blessed is everyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!”
Parable of the Dinner
But He said to him, “A man was giving a big dinner, and he invited many; and at the dinner hour he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come; for everything is ready now.’ But they all alike began to make excuses. The first one said to him, ‘I have bought a piece of land and I need to go out and look at it; please consider me excused.’ Another one said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out; please consider me excused.’ Another one said, ‘I have married a wife, and for that reason I cannot come.’ And the slave came back and reported this to his master. Then the head of the household became angry and said to his slave, ‘Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in here the poor and crippled and blind and lame.’ And the slave said, ‘Master, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’ And the master said to the slave, ‘Go out into the highways and along the hedges, and compel them to come in, so that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste of my dinner.’” Lk 14,15-24

That is the meaning of the other frequently quoted section:

He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it. Mt 10, 37-39

Also, that is the meaning of “Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Mt 19, 24

The Zen version of that would be that in order to put something in a cup, it’s better to start with one that is empty. If one thinks he already has something of value, he will seek everything else only as an addition. Such people then obviously make half-assed attempts at spirituality, and they of course fail. You can’t organize your life so that you fuck yourself up for 16 hours and then sleep, and expect to attain high spirituality. No more can you expect to replace one of those 16 hours with some spiritual practice, as a compromise, and attain high spirituality. No, you must find a way to make the largest possible part of those 16 hours into a spiritual effort. You don’t need to quit your job and live in a cave for that to work. However, you need to have your priorities straight. Washing dishes is one of the most important tools for learning how to meditate during daily activities, and I was surprised to find out that all my students failed at that. It’s not about washing dishes, it’s about being able to occupy the body with a repetitive task that takes time and you’re not bothered by others, during which time you can meditate as deeply as you could if sitting in some asana in a cave. Part of the lesson is what the great Ram Gopal told Yogananda: if you have a room in which you can lock yourself in and be alone, there’s your Himalayan cave, there you will find the kingdom of God. Another part is that meditation can become the norm of your consciousness, rather than the exception. It’s the foundation of karma yoga: the form of yoga where you act as an expression of meditation, act by following the inner spiritual guidance. This is the highest, most demanding form of yoga, but it is also the form of yoga that is most likely to result in high spiritual achievement, because it is inherently immune to bullshit. In every other form of spirituality you can deceive both yourself and others, but in karma yoga, that doesn’t work, because reality of daily action gives a harsh feedback and if you’re doing something wrong, you will either be unable to meditate or you will be unable to work. If your actions are wrong they will snap you out of meditation, they will switch you out of inner alignment. If your meditation is crap, it will interfere with the things you have to do and you’ll do shoddy work.

However, in a realistic situation, it might be the only way for most people. It certainly was the only way for me, to the point where you can live with me 24/7 and not see me meditate, not because I don’t, but because it’s so expertly hidden in everything I do, it’s never obvious. It started with things where I had to do something repetitive and could be left alone – washing dishes, vacuum-cleaning the place, washing the car. Then I added things where I was surrounded by others, but without interaction; taking a ride in a bus, walking through the city, sitting somewhere in a crowd. Then I added intellectually demanding tasks (Object Pascal coding). Eventually, I added interaction, and it didn’t take all that long – it took me less than a year, perhaps, to make meditation the foundation of everything else that I do, instead of an addition that tries to squeeze itself into some miraculously vacant time slot, which never works. That’s the thing about the narrow path, that’s less travelled: instead of finding excuses for failing, you find ways to succeed. There are no important, static elements that can’t be rearranged or removed if necessary. It’s all a matter of priorities.