I heard two statements about Gods from two different sources, decades apart, and I kept thinking about both of them.

The first statement is that the difference between God and some kind of a super-Devil is holiness. A Devil can be so powerful that you can’t practically distinguish him from a God. He can also be so close to omniscient that you can’t practically tell a difference between him and God. However, he completely lacks holiness, unlike God, who is most holy.

The second statement is that a God can be good or evil, but is never powerless. A defining characteristic of a God is power.

The second statement obviously relates more to the Gods in fantasy literature and ancient polytheisms than anything I would normally bother with, but it’s still something I want to address, if only because it’s something people instinctively assume, because it seems to make sense. However, I will cite two examples to the opposite. The first is Jesus, who is one of the most spiritually powerful beings known to history, who also performed all sorts of miracles, but there was a period in time where he was completely powerless and abandoned to the mercy, or lack thereof, of a human mob and executioners. Judging at a certain point in time, he was powerless, and according to that second statement, not a God. A better conclusion would be that Gods can do lots of things, including self-sacrifice and renunciation of their own power and invulnerability, when they deem it necessary in order for some worthy goal to be accomplished. The second example to the opposite is the story of Indra, king of the Vedic pantheon, who was once incarnated as a pig due to a curse. In this condition, he was a completely ordinary pig without any divine qualities whatsoever, and even tried to protect his oinkful existence from other gods who came to rescue him. Rather than conclude that he stopped being a god, a better conclusion would be that physical incarnation can mask true nature of a soul even from the soul itself.

So, the second statement is something I wanted to address not because it’s something I have a problem with, but because it’s something people in general wrongly assume, and this misapprehension causes endless confusion and nonsense.

The first statement, however, is something I keep thinking about because I find it personally relevant. The problem, however, is in the definition of holiness. I don’t think people have any kind of a clear idea of what that would be; if anything, they would think it’s something boring, associated with churches and wooden statues of saints and similar nonsense. So, let me tell you how I perceive holiness.

In Mahabharata, there’s a story about the blind king Dhritarashtra, who was to be married to Gandhari. She didn’t know he was blind until their wedding day, because the wedding was arranged. When she found out, she took a scarf and covered her own eyes with it forever, out of respect for her husband.

That intent and action is holiness.

I have another story, this time a personal one. The experience was nothing like what I’m going to describe, because I need to use anthropomorphic visual and verbal metaphor in order to convey the impressions that were for the most part nothing of the kind, but here goes. When I recently had darshan of the Goddess, I was feeling seriously terrible, but that’s not unusual for me, spending vast amounts of karma and all. When she appeared, I got a brief glimpse of her true state, the flash of infinite power, knowledge, intelligence, insight, bliss, “infinite speed” that makes her at all places at all times because she is Eternity, but only for an instant, because she disarmed and disrobed herself at the doorstep, reducing herself to a normal human female form, wearing nothing but a light dress and the spark of holiness, simplicity and purity, which made the human form feel as if it were illuminated from within and sparkling with white light that is pure wonder, and she just moved towards me wordlessly, sat beside me and cuddled up with her head on my chest, with casual intimacy of a wife who knows her husband is having a hard time and just wants to show him that she’s his forever and she knows everything.

That, to me, is what the most holy God feels like.

That’s what a super-Devil can’t emulate, and that’s why God doesn’t need to be powerful to be God. In fact, God declining to be God in order to meet you in your suffering, God choosing to be vulnerable to you, is the God-defining holiness. That’s also why she’s my favourite person ever. You can’t win that by being impressive, shiny and powerful. That’s why Satan looked like a puffed-up peacock to me, because he tried to be a God. It’s about as impressive as a bald limp-dick driving a Porsche. God is the exact opposite – like the richest, most powerful and smartest person in the world who just unassumingly stops by to chat and have coffee and make you feel better, wearing jeans and sneakers and a Casio watch.

You know what the tragic part is? That some people are stupid and virtueless enough to react to such mercy with contempt and arrogance, because if God were truly God, why would he have coffee with them? Wouldn’t he have better things to do elsewhere? It sounds impossible, like it could never happen, and yet it does, every day. It’s unfortunate and pathetic, and yet it keeps happening, because as much as holiness is abundant in God, it’s even more difficult to find in humans.

I know how confusing it has to be for people to hear me write about God. It’s like hearing me talk about ten different people of different genders and dispositions, and then I switch to an impersonal aspect where God is some kind of a deep energy source, and then I hint that it’s actually what I am.

It’s one thing to understand the concept of many religions having multiple different perspectives on God, and quite another to see that in one person. I get it, it can sound confusing and intellectually challenging. That, however, doesn’t mean that it isn’t normal or expected.

There are multiple reasons for the complexity. The first, most obvious is that God is a higher reality than what we are used to. If you project a higher-dimensional object onto a lower-dimensional space, the result will necessarily be either a lower-dimensional projection or a cut, where multiple different lower-dimensional cuts can be produced from a single higher-dimensional object. Try, for instance, mentally imagining putting a sheet of paper through a cube. Whether you get a triangle, rectangle or a trapezoid is merely a function of angle and position. Now imagine the same thing with a more complex shape, and you get even more of a mess, where the section might look nothing like the original shape, and it’s actually quite possible to get a very large number of different sections and still be unable to assemble a mental picture of the original shape. Basically, you can get an infinite number of human-God intersections, darshans in other words, and still understand very little of the vastness and infinity of God. You can be God and still not understand God.

So, I don’t try to make those things artificially simple in order to be more easily digestible, but ultimately deceptive. I present them as close to the messiness of the original experience as I can manage. There are multiple persons of God, formed when something that is essentially a normal soul, like most reading this, made repeated choices of choosing God against alternatives. What you chose became an aspect of you, in a manner of speaking, and at some point, as you evolve, you become another name of God, another person of God. It’s not that God developed a multiple personality disorder; no, it’s like putting a cold glass in a humid space, and observing condensation of water on the glass, as if droplets of water spontaneously appear on the glass. The water molecules are suspended in the air everywhere, but only if the properties of an object allow it, in this case temperature, will they condense on the glass. If the properties of your personality allow it, the all-present micro-aspects of God, the kalapas, will condense on your soul and make you more of what you already chose to be by altering your “temperature”. If you’re “too hot”, stuff will evaporate off of you, until you yourself evaporate and turn into nothing, because your “heat” repulses micro-particles of divinity that make up a soul away from each other. If you’re “cold”, essentially if you tend to calm down the chaos of the environmental particles by absorbing their “heat” and removing it altogether, your soul will grow by the cumulative amount of divinity-particles you have gathered onto yourself. Sure, this is a quantitative explanation of a phenomenon that includes multiple qualitative leaps as well, but it’s as simple as I can get it for a visual metaphor. Essentially, souls can become God, and since there are so many different ways in which one can choose God, they are actually very different from each other. Becoming God doesn’t mean you dissolve into some amorphous sea of primordial goo, as some teachers of Vedanta and Buddhism make it sound, which just shows me they understand nothing. No, the point of this evolution isn’t to reach the starting point, but to create exactly the kind of diverse mess of God-persons that makes this thing so confusing to read.

Also, those God-persons are not aspects of my personality of reflections of my unconscious desires or anything of the sort. They are actual people, only they are of God, if that makes any sense. It’s like Jesus not being a manifestation of some Freudian psychology, or a myth; no, he was a person like you, only of God.

Sure, people tend to make God fit structures in their minds, and usually visualise God as a parental figure of sorts, which, after having told you about my parents, you will easily understand me not having any affinity for. God was never something that fit a role, or met some psychological need. God just was, and for the most part I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It wasn’t anything I could even describe or figure out, but it was there. That’s one of the reasons why I think atheists are idiots – they think religious people imagine God as “sky daddy” or some equally silly image that would be easy to dismiss as a psychological projection. To me, God had nothing to do with sky, and he absolutely certainly isn’t my “daddy”. The persons of God are even more complicated and messy. Some of them felt completely indifferent, no emotions towards me whatsoever, but their presence itself communicated something or brought me into some spiritual state like nirvikalpa samadhi. I respect them, I know they are wonderful people, but I can’t say I have a very personal relationship with them other than being grateful for the help they provided when I needed it. Some feel like friends I was separated from by incarnation. One feels like true, actual family. None of them feel like heavenly “mommy” or “daddy”; Goddess was actually quite exasperated with me in the early years of my sadhana because I was resistant to accepting that she’s my wife and that’s the relationship she actually wanted to have with me, while I thought that was incredibly disrespectful of me to even comprehend, and tried to cycle through other forms of relationship, and if she had hair she’d have pulled at it in frustration. It’s quite funny to remember now, but then I couldn’t understand it because I had so many self-diminishing ideas that I couldn’t imagine myself in anything resembling an equal relationship with God; it was always God the great and me the grovelling worm thankful for the crumbs of attention.

Also, when I say Goddess, I don’t mean some stupid Pagan deity of nature or other stupid bullshit. No, she’s the omnipotent transcendental God, the Absolute, the all-virtuous, all-conscious, all-blissful supreme being, only she’s my girl forever.

The Gods aren’t something you can imagine, or something you can visualise. They feel like actual people, just, well, orders of magnitude dimensionally richer than the people you encounter in your material life. They are smart, they have a great sense of humour, they surprise you with their insight and quick thinking, and they just have things around them that you never would have thought of. Whatever you can imagine, they are not it. Their presence is like living a black and white movie and then it suddenly bursts into colour, then into 3d, and it’s the real life you woke up in, only to fade back to the b&w movie later, with memories that are first in colour, but as you remember them more, they gradually desaturate back into the b&w.

Of course it’s hard to comprehend when you read about it; it’s just messy and complicated and real.

A certain type of people seems to be an unavoidable constant, like plagues, disasters and taxes. I’m talking about the snarky, cynical nihilists, of the kind that keeps saying that nothing matters, and people who think something matters are but fools to be ridiculed. To take anything seriously in their world is to declare yourself a boring idiot, because serious equals boring, and to take anything seriously means you don’t understand anything. Since there’s no point to anything and nothing really matters, they just “want to have fun”, which translates as get drunk and try to fuck something, where the person they want to fuck is an unimportant consumable, like the condom they will use and throw away afterwards, because to take another person seriously would be so stupid and boring. They are all atheists, of the most vulgar materialistic kind, and their reaction to every mention of God and Religion is such, that it manifests all symptoms of demonic possession. I think it is indicative of something – they don’t think God doesn’t exist, because they also think Star Trek doesn’t exist and yet they usually have it all memorised and practically worship it. They think unicorns don’t exist and they couldn’t care less about them. But the very idea of God fills them with absolute rage, because they know God exists, but they hate him to the point where they want to kill him, and punish everybody for believing in and loving the object of their hatred.

My feelings for them are essentially a reflection of their feelings for God, but there’s more to that. My contempt for them is especially strong, because I completely understand them. I know the inner workings of their minds. I know how their consciousness is basically a festering wound that became a worldview. I know it because I was there, I was one of them.

Almost nobody knows me as such, though, because that person died somewhere in 1993, but before that I was an absolutely terrible whoreson. That was so, because by that time I was what Satan wanted me to become. I was a product of my family’s upbringing. That’s one of those things that I sometimes hint at, but never talk about in detail, not because there’s some unresolved trauma there, but because I don’t think it’s useful to traumatise people with the horror stories of my youth. But I think this story needs to be told, because it explains how one can become one of those people – a nihilistic, godless creature of Satan.

My mother was an only child of loving, devoutly Catholic, middle class parents. She was their whole world, their golden child, someone who ended up studying French and Italian language and literature, along with all kinds of atheist and feminist ideology by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir among others. She lived and breathed entitlement, the feeling that she’s so much better than all those other, uneducated working class people who didn’t have golden Omega watches, fancy fur coats and jewellery and didn’t read obscure books in French. She acted as if there was a force field around her that communicated all the things the world owed her because she was special, and she knew it owed her. She adopted some of that attitude from her father, because he too thought he was better than all kinds of people, those not from Zagreb, for instance, those who are not Croats, and so on. But he was a hard working, self-made person who started as an orphan on the streets when his parents died young, and he probably had to have something to boost himself up emotionally because the rest of the world sure wouldn’t. But with my mother, it was something else. It was pure, pro analysi hubris and entitlement. My grandfather sounded bigoted because the world wanted to crush him, and he said “I’m better than you, so you can all get fucked”. My mother was a princess in her own mind, better simply because she existed, and deserved everything because, well, she existed. It was not a coping mechanism against tragedy. She was just a spoiled piece of shit, whose mantra was “I’m nobody’s servant”.

She also felt that kindness was weakness, and she lusted for power over others, when she was not busy reading feminist magazines in her bed all day, crying because she wasn’t getting all the power and wonders the world owed her, and it was her husband’s and her children’s fault, especially mine because I was her first, and if she didn’t have me her life would be nothing but glory, power and fame, because she was born to be a star and she was a princess or a queen in her own mind. When she wasn’t crying about not getting what she was owed by life, she was complaining how hard her life is and how much she’s working at home and nobody appreciates it, despite the fact that she wasn’t actually doing anything; she’d make a half-assed attempt at lunch, usually heated up leftovers from the day before or something equally trivial that she could get over with quickly, and I learned not to complain because I would get beat up. At first she would beat me up herself, but her hand would hurt so she changed strategy. When father would come home form work, she’d be her normal dark cloud of gloom, and then she’d tell him how that’s because children (and that usually meant me, because I was older which means everything was automatically my fault) were “naughty” and were driving her crazy by all things that basically meant existing, and he would not question her veracity and would just take his belt off and beat the shit out of me, and that was my day, basically from the age of 6 to the point where my brother and I attempted suicide when I was 18 and he was 14, and that, too, was presented as my fault, because I was older and my brother already had a learned strategy of avoiding their violence by basically getting out of the way while they were beating the shit out of me with gleeful joy.

It was not just the part where I got beat up every day or at least five times a week with any available excuse or just because someone was in a bad mood; it was actually much worse. You see, the way those people interacted with me was to just hit me in passing – slap, elbow, something – just for the sin of being there, the same way a normal person would hug a kid in passing or ruffle their hair or kiss them. I absolutely despised my mother. She was cruel, psychotic, stupid, incompetent, a liar, and had an incredible love of violence; she just sucked at it, so she outsourced it to her husband. My opinion of him was different. He was intelligent, hard working and competent, very disciplined and organised, but cold, cruel and dangerous, because the only emotion he allowed himself was anger, and when he was angry he got violent, and the only outlet for violence he allowed himself was children, and that usually meant me, because my brother learned how to walk the path of silent cowardice and apparent victimhood and let me get my ass kicked. Father never hit his wife, regardless of how abusive and cruel she was with him, because with her he was a “good Christian”. He always took her side and believed all her lies, and as a result, my life was a never-ending nightmare, and his was no better, because, well, she was his wife, and his attitude meant she just got worse, and worse, pushing the limits until she openly conspired to get him locked up on some contrived charge of violence she tried to provoke, thinking she’d get all his money and who knows what else was rotting in her diseased, evil mind. Eventually, her behaviour was so much of a direct threat to him that he moved out and divorced her, but by that time I was long gone.

So, what kind of a person did that make me? Well, garbage in, garbage out, I guess. I treated other beings the way my parents treated me – cruelly, insensitively, as things you blow out steam on. They beat me up, so I’d beat up my brother and kick the cats “when they deserved it”, and I would torture insects and so on. My worldview was a nihilistic godless nightmare, and I would read science fiction and get into computers, because computers were something I could control and it didn’t derive pleasure out of hurting me viciously with a barely contrived reason or without one. Since I was emotionally bleeding and damaged, kids at school would instinctively bully me, so my nightmare never ended – it just alternated between school and home. I learned to harden myself, not be weak, feel only hatred, anger, spite and tenacity, because everything else hurt more.

Fast forward to my first year of college, and I was exactly the kind of a nihilistic bastard that reads my blog today and ridicules me for being an idiot for believing in God and virtue because it’s all obviously bullshit, and the only real things are having money, having fun, and not treating anything seriously because that’s so stupid and boring.

Actually, it’s not stupid and boring, it just hurts too much to face. One thing I had to face was listening to other students talking between classes, and realising they had normal parents, not psychotic and cruel ones who are a constant danger of violence, and who mock and belittle you with every word. I heard a girl talking to her friends about something and I realised that they are normal and I’m damaged. I couldn’t function in their world where you can be vulnerable and talk about your feelings; I was too damaged to be able to allow myself vulnerability, so I was just snarky, cynical and abrasive, and the only thing I could do is reproduce the vicious cycle of dysfunction and violence that was my whole life.

I saw that I was broken, but I had no way out. I was not completely godless and nihilistic, but my worldview was basically some kind of materialism expanded to explain the telepathic phenomena that were too strong around me to sweep under the carpet. I knew something existed, because I felt it, but I would sooner have though it were aliens than God, because aliens were more likely to exist in my world. I perceived things that couldn’t be explained with materialistic science, but I thought the answer was to extend science, that there must be some deeper layer that explains it, the way things were expanded with Einstein’s general relativity. This was more than just intellectual for me, but it still didn’t touch any of my core issues; basically, whether God existed or not, I’m still fucked in every conceivable way. I didn’t expect any real solutions, but I still tried to figure things out. I started to understand how broken I am, but I had no hope of things ever being better.

This is where I was wrong, because I expected things getting better to be a function of something somebody else did, but they actually started getting better as I understood the mechanics of evil I was doing as a consequence of the trauma-induced programming, courtesy of my parents and later bullies at school. I started understanding that if I want something good to happen in my life, I have to actually do it myself, because nobody else is going to. I started caring about what other people thought, how they felt. Crucially, I thought about that “non-God, because God is what idiots believe in” presence in my consciousness and just thanked it for being there for me, instead of just barking orders and desires like a demon. That’s where things started changing quickly, and the crucial point was my first darshan, or first initiation as I later called it. I told God he was awesome, and some veil was removed and I was flooded with what I understood to be the ananda aspect of God – the blissful joy that felt as powerful as an atomic blast that evaporates you to the bones, and so wonderful that absolutely noting can compare.

This was merely the beginning, and if I were at that point looking for proof of God’s existence it would have been absolute and undeniable proof; I wasn’t. I was looking for proof not that God exists, but that God feels that I matter enough to actually do something. What actually happened is that I got a glimpse of what God is about, what God is like, that the actual reality is not a cold abstraction and indifference, but something so awesome I didn’t know enough to imagine it, let alone want it.

I took the experience as a confirmation, and continued changing myself accordingly. You would never know what I was before, if you got to know me after 1993. I came to embody my own spiritual choices, and no longer the violence and madness of my parents. However, I understood that multiplying them with -1 doesn’t produce virtue, it produces another kind of fault. I couldn’t just completely renounce and remove violence, because it was sometimes necessary and good, so I had to learn balance, utility, necessity, and train myself to act in ways that reflect God, not just evil inputs from evil humans, or their geometric inversion. That was all hard work, and it took years of trial and error, and this work will continue until I die because it’s never really over. It’s a homeostasis between too much and not enough, between inaction and overreaction, between the wrong emotions, and the lack of right emotions. The path of right action is something to be carved between Scylla and Charybdis of failure in every thought, word and action, because everything matters. Everything is important, because we live in the mind of God, and we have to choose for or against this fundamental reality by choosing to see it, recognise it, talk to it in all things, negotiate between reality and illusion and choose yourself by choosing how you react, what you choose to become by doing, and what you choose to reject and turn away from, and both are equally important.

Everything matters.

So, to the nihilistic, materialistic bastards who read this. I know what you are. I was what you are. I hated it, I chose against it, and now I’m everything opposite to that. Because I hated myself when I was you, I also hate everything that you are. I hope you either die, or turn into your opposite; I don’t care, as long as you no longer exist as the disgusting pieces of shit that you are. Get fucked, or get enlightened, as long as you stop existing.