Author Archives: danijel

American dream

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Regarding the attractors placed within this world, America obviously has a prominent place, but let’s analyse the obvious elements first.

The American dream is that you can go there and “succeed”, you can “make it”, and it’s usually defined as “you can become rich and famous”, which means you can distinguish yourself from the grey irrelevant masses of bland unimportant lookalikes. There is a specific astral beacon associated with this promise of success, the beacon that points to the vaguely defined finish line of success, making you feel it’s all going to be worth it, in the end. There’s also a feeling that America is special, it’s where the meaning of life is, it’s where you want to be if you want to be a part of great things that await mankind in the future. This is what I mean by the term “attractor”, and it’s obviously created by associating some pretty powerful source of spiritual energy with physical entities, the way one would put a tasty worm on a hook to deceive the fish.

Let’s first analyse the promise of the American dream. First of all, it’s obvious that we’re going to deal with lots of survivorship bias here, because I’ve seen stories by the Croatian immigrants into the USA, who suffered terribly working on building the railroads sometime in the 19th century, and regretted the moment when they had the idea of going to America to find a better life, because what they got was hell, filled with incredibly hard work, suffering and eventually death. If you look only at those who actually did become rich and famous, and those do exist, you will get a skewed perspective, the way you would get a skewed perspective of the Russia’s post-Soviet 1990s if you only interview the oligarchs. It is a fact, however, that the post-WW2 America did in fact have a period of widespread wealth, and a very rich middle class, which was definitely not the case before, when you had widespread misery and very few extremely wealthy oligarchs, or “captains of industry” as they used to call them.

So, let’s ignore the pre-WW2 times and focus on the golden era of the American dream, when an ordinary person pumping gas could earn several times more money than the European engineers and other elites; life was easy and good in America even for the wide masses, but let’s see what “success” meant. Usually, it’s a house in the suburbs, with a pool, several nice cars, one for each family member, a promise of a wealthy retirement that included carefree travelling on a cruise ship somewhere abroad, you had a nice family and could send your kids to college.

Let’s now see what this material paradise actually means, spiritually. It means that the siren call of the attractor remains elusive, and you never actually have a feeling of “arriving” at the goal; every material thing you purchase comes with an initial “rush” of satisfaction and fulfilment, but it’s very quickly normalised, and so you try to acquire the next thing, trying to check every single item on the list – got a good job, check, got a house, check, got married, check, had children, check, got all the nice appliances for the house, check, got a nice car, check, got a nice car for the wife, check, got all the newest gadgets and status symbols to impress the neighbours and coworkers, check, got the kids to Harvard, check, got a million dollars in the bank, check. At some point, you can decide that you’re fine, and you don’t mind that everybody else around you is the same kind of fine, which means you’re not particularly distinguished in any way, but at least you’re not distinguished in a negative way, so that’s great, or you can get depressed because you invested all that energy and made so many sacrifices and compromises, and the best you can say is that you have a nice, ordinary middle-class life. At worst, you get divorced because you found out that your wife was cheating on you with a pool cleaner while you were busy working for all those material things; she got half of everything, and you are now in a hotel somewhere, thinking about putting a hole through your head. The emotional result is between mild satisfaction at best, and bitter depression at worst, and when you poll the wealthiest, most successful and famous people in America, they seem to be the worst mess of them all – divorced multiple times, undergone all kinds of plastic surgery, addicted to drugs and alcohol, with scandals, depression, suicide and depravity. You obviously don’t have people who are completely blissed-out because they attained the goal the spiritual attractor promised them, that feeling of euphoric bliss and greatness that was promised. There’s just work, sacrifice, spiritual compromises that have to be made along the way if you want to succeed, pieces of your soul that have to be sold or denied, cocks to be sucked and arses to be licked on your way up the ladder, and whisky you have to drink to try to forget and wash out the aftertaste of cock and arse. Then you bling yourself out with expensive trinkets and put on a fake smile entering that cocktail party, pretending you’re happy without a single worry in the world, because you’re living the dream, making a short pause every now and then to snort some cocaine.

Analysis from a spiritual point of view shows that all those people keep investing spiritual energy into the system, trading it for material things, and are on a perpetually energy-deficitary downward path, where they end up completely depleted, but surrounded with lots of meaningless things, having traded the things that actually matter, such as their spiritual energy, dignity and integrity, the things that actually bring fulfilment and joy, for things that promise a lot but actually don’t mean anything. The American dream, in essence, states that physical things will bring you happiness, and this is initially convincing to people who are poor and thus believe that poverty is the cause of all their problems, but the truth is, wealth will only solve the problems that can be solved with money. If your problems are caused by the lack of food, medical care, housing or transportation, then wealth will easily cure those. However, if you actually miss God and that feeling of blissful fulfilment and joy of expanded consciousness that you had in heaven, before, but you don’t know what it is, and the attractors placed by Satan can convince you to seek them as mirages in this spiritual desert of a world, you will keep losing yourself until there’s nothing left.

That thing Jordan Peterson said, that I mentioned in the previous article, is very relevant here – namely, that there’s only so much joy one can experience in human existence, so there’s not much you can add even with infinite wealth and success. There is, however, a terrible and deep pool of suffering and misery of human existence, and if you can keep that away, that’s basically 99% of total possible success you can actually have here. Everything beyond that is trinkets and bullshit – you wear a Rolex instead of a Seiko, big deal. Nobody cares, or can tell anyway. It’s the same with cars; you can get a better car up to a point, but after that it’s exponentially more money for chasing mirages. This means that the promise of the American dream is not all false; there’s some truth in it. Physical wealth can indeed improve things for you if you’re poor, because poverty can cause all kinds of terrible things to intersect your existence. However, you exhaust the pool of possible improvements very quickly, and you exhaust the pool of really significant improvements even more quickly. Basically, it’s like hunger – it’s a real issue if you have nothing to eat, but once you eat something there’s only so much you can do about it. Once you had enough to eat, eating more will actually make you feel worse, and that’s the first lie of the American dream – that having more will always make you feel better. It won’t. In fact, once you managed to leave the pool of abject misery, trying to have more and better things will actually cause you to neglect the most important things – God, your soul, your mate and children, your friends, and so on. If trying to be more successful and famous causes you to make compromises that will break you, this means accepting real harm and real injury in the place that actually matters, in exchange for mirages and nonsense. This is a bad trade by all measures.

Avoiding failure

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I recently saw a video clip of Dr. Jordan Peterson saying something that struck me as very insightful: if you want to advertise something to humans, the obvious idea is to frame it as offering success and well-being, but this is wrong. The humans don’t in fact care much about success and well being. They care about not suffering terribly and failing miserably. This is because “success” and “well-being” don’t really have much to offer, because human capacity for joy is quite limited. The threat of terrible suffering, however, is the primary motivational force, because the pit of doom is endless and promises untold horrors, and people would do anything to avoid that.

This struck me instantly as true, and it explained something I struggled with previously, which is the issue of status symbols. You see, status symbols are an obvious trap, something the super-wealthy people produce (thus increasing their wealth) and the people who are barely out of poverty buy, wasting their money and crippling their chances of ever becoming well-off financially. Essentially, one would do much better buying shares of LVMH or some other luxury-item business on the stock market, than buying their products. Basically, those luxury goods are upper middle class aspirational purchases, where someone who is barely out of poverty takes whatever money it is that makes him not poor, and throws it into fire. So, if you never want to make financial progress in life, do buy luxury goods and status symbols, because that’s the way to go. The reason people do that in such overwhelming numbers despite obvious reasons against it must obviously be very powerful, but the exact formulation eluded me. I used to think it was an equivalent of a peacock’s tail – a boastful show of opulence that serves no purpose for survival, and is in fact a hindrance to survival, so if someone can still pull that off, it’s a sign he’s really well off. An example of such a status symbol is a lawn. Initially, to have a piece of land in front of your house under grass or some aesthetically pleasing but non-productive trees was a statement of wealth – “you see, I have so much land already, I don’t have to plant something useful by my house, I can just waste it”. This explains other status symbols as well – they are intentionally wasteful displays, a show of how much money you can piss into the wind, because of how rich you are. Of course, when the poor or middle class people try to imitate that, and waste critical resources trying to look rich by doing what rich people do, they are completely ruined, but none of this still explains why people do it at all. Rationally, a response to “how much money can you waste on stupid bullshit” should be “none at all”. Also, wastefulness might be a show of opulence when really wealthy people do it, but when poor people do it it smells of despair and fear, like a scared cat puffing itself up to look bigger, not a peacock’s tail. This is where Peterson’s explanation clicked – they don’t do it because they want to achieve something positive, like being successful and happy. They do it because they desperately want to distinguish themselves from the grey, hopeless masses of poor, disenfranchised, doomed people barely clinging to the bottom rungs of the society ladder. There’s an instinctive recognition of dangers of being invisible, never seen by anyone important, never recognized enough for anyone to pay attention to you in any way because you are not distinguishable from the bland, grey, unimportant masses of people who barely make a living, working for slave wages. People are afraid of being losers, of being dismissed and mocked as irrelevant and unsuccessful, and will do almost anything to avoid this humiliation, and this explains sacrificing critically valuable resources at the altar of the false gods of status symbols.

However, there’s more to it than that. This is only the lowest “octave” that everybody recognizes, the physical one. It also extends into the spiritual realm, and I think that’s where the real issue lies. People don’t want to be mocked by Satan for being losers and failing his “tests”, and will keep investing their spiritual energy into attempts to achieve enlightenment in this world, to Satan’s great joy of course, because that’s how he can keep milking them dry. The spiritual equivalent of a Rolex or a Porsche are the spiritual achievements such as samadhi, or various demonstrable siddhis. Those things won’t necessarily get you any closer to any worthy goal, but they are a spiritual Rolex you can casually wear to some equivalent of a spiritual cocktail party, at least in your mind, and you think it will make you acknowledged, seen as worthy and accepted. In reality, the spiritual abilities that are of greatest use are usually the least “flashy” and “showy” ones, and collecting “experiences” like butterflies for your collection only shows your insecurities and fears of being unsuccessful and unimportant. It’s not necessarily even the experiences and abilities – sometimes it’s the spiritual titles, belonging to an established lineage and similar nonsense that gets people involved in cults and submissive to all kinds of weirdos who carry flashy titles, but that, obviously, seems like a path to being a weirdo in an orange robe who is generally recognized by others as spiritually successful. It’s the same circus as the Rolex and Ferrari crowd, only a different wagon, because if you know you’re not successful, you will go to great lengths trying to persuade others that you are. If you actually are successful, you won’t give a fuck. But of course, there are fakes who understand that and thus pretend to be the successful ones who don’t give a fuck. 🙂

Obviously, trying to fake achievement is something people devote an inordinate amount of time and effort to, in every sphere of interest and activity, and one could say that the same amount of effort, if invested in productive venues, could produce actual results. However, it seems that people actually give up on believing that they can actually do that – that they could achieve something real, be actually successful at something real and worthy, and trying to fake it is a sign of that. It’s a sign of someone who believes he has no chance of real achievement, but is desperately afraid of the depths of the pit of doom that awaits the losers.

The irony is, acknowledging that you’re a loser is the way to win.

When Satan mocked the souls that they would be nothing without constantly being in God’s presence, the “losers” acknowledged that, stating that God is everything of value and without Him they are nothing. Those “losers” are still with God in heaven, while those who wanted to be cool, emancipated and successful “winners” got lost here in Satan’s maze of reflections, illusions and quagmires, without God and all hope, still desperately trying to “achieve” and “succeed” in order to avoid Satan mocking them as losers.

Even in purely material things, avoiding the pitfall of posturing, acknowledging that you’re poor, saving and investing all your money, acquiring skills and living a modest life, are something that will eventually result in quite a portfolio.

So, what’s the lesson here? Trying to avoid failing miserably is probably the strongest motivational force in human life, and it can convince people to do the most desperate and counterproductive things. Also, people don’t “fake it until they make it”, they fake it because they gave up.

Recession

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Take this as an observation based on my personal experience with several recessions and growth cycles over the decades.

The way you can tell we’re at the peak of the growth cycle is the generally positive social attitude towards overt displays of wealth – people driving expensive cars, wearing expensive watches and other trinkets, and so on. The social attitude is, basically, aspirational – “good for him; we’re all doing well, some are doing better than most, but we all aspire to be there”. There’s abundance of money in the system, and there’s an abundance of people having lots of money, as well. The attitude is that if you don’t have money at that point, it’s your fault.

The way you can tell we’re entering recession is that the attitude towards boastful displays of wealth grows increasingly negative – an increasing number of people either lost their jobs, or had their salary cut, or the prices grew; the pension funds went bust, some people couldn’t pay their mortgage and so lost their homes, and so on, and the attitude is that we’re all basically fucked and trying to make ends meet, and the goal is no longer to make the most money, but to survive to the other side of this. The attitude towards wealth is no longer aspirational, because it’s seen as a dream we had to abandon and will most likely never reach, so displays of opulence are seen as someone poking at our wounds, intentionally reminding us of our misery and loss, and the rich people who don’t understand that the times had changed might find themselves at the wrong end of the stick.

I’ve been noticing this souring of attitude towards fake and real displays of wealth for a while now, which, to me, signals recession, and not only recession, but widespread pain of recession, that is not being acknowledged by the media, which makes it worse because it makes people assume it’s probably just them and not everybody else, and they feel as if they should keep up a facade of opulence in order not to stick out and be seen as losers, and keeping up the facade is increasing the financial pain. So, whenever they see someone who is buying a fancy new toy to show how well they are doing, they feel this as pressure to keep the expensive pretence and hasten their financial ruin.

Usually, when it’s publicly acknowledged that we’re in a recession, there’s a collective sigh of relief because then people feel they are allowed to show signs of adversity, because it’s seen as something that happens to everybody – they can keep wearing old clothes, sell the expensive car and get an old beater, not buy wasteful trinkets as holiday presents, and so on. Even the rich people usually have enough sense to tone it down, because they don’t want to be seen as the only ones not suffering; when everybody is doing well, doing better is good, but when everybody is doing poorly, doing better might single you out for retribution.

We are in an unacknowledged recession.

Avoid hacks

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I recently saw something that made me think about typical mistakes people make in everything they do. Basically, I saw one person trying to learn how to play Oldfield on guitar, and another wanting to learn how to play heavy metal.

I don’t know shit about guitar, but I would expect that what they are doing is going to fail, because in order to learn how to play something specific, you first need to learn how to play anything in general. You learn how to pick out notes, then you practice scales, then you elaborate from the scales and develop melodies and so on, and you need to practice this boring stuff ad nauseam, so it’s your second nature. This is the point where I understood that I saw this pattern before, with “spiritual” people. They all want to become enlightened. They all want to attain some very specific thing at the very peak level of achievement; basically, they want to play Oldfield. Invariably, they all fail, and I’ll tell you why.

They fail because of their contempt for methodical, gradual, systematic approach. They fail because they want to reach the top of the pyramid, but they don’t want to start at the bottom, because that’s boring and unpleasant. They just want a hack that will get them to the top. If only they reached the top for one second, they think, this would tick the “achievement unlocked” box.

Let me put it this way. My personal way of learning things was far from anything orthodox. I didn’t have a teacher and I didn’t belong to a spiritual school of any kind. I did, however, have experience with science, and I did have experience with writing code. I also had experience with failing many times in many spectacular ways, and I was smart enough to see a pattern in failures.

The pattern is that when you don’t invest enough time and effort into the ground work, into the “boring” basics, as you progress further this quickly results in chaos and disorder that inhibits your ability to go any further. Basically, it’s like climbing a ladder. It’s quicker and easier than building a solid structure that will allow you to ascend, but a ladder is flimsy and after a few meters you’re done. You either stop and fail, or you fall down and die. In coding, the equivalent of this is writing quick&dirty functions you don’t test thoroughly, and you write complicated stuff that can’t be tested independently and it all needs to work at once. As a result, when you get unpredicted or unwanted behaviour, it’s exponentially harder to fix as you build further, until you eventually end up with immensely complex, unfixable code that almost works. The pattern is, if you want to succeed, stop trying to succeed. Succeeding is a stupid idea. Instead, try not to fail. If you work very methodically on every single step not failing, you won’t have to work on succeeding, it will take care of itself.

The stuff I practiced most was perceiving what desires, emotions and thoughts do – energy goes in, emotion flares up, the thoughts whirl to give it reason and promote it, and then you grind through more thoughts to feed emotion, regardless of whether emotion is love or depression. The worst pitfall I perceived is a self-destructive pattern where you, basically, act like a baby that cries and makes itself miserable in order for mother to come and make everything better. I understood that this is a severely dysfunctional pattern that is based in physical body’s genetic design, and it’s a deadly thing, because there is no “mother”. Nobody is going to keep rescuing you as you make yourself miserable in order to get attention. All responsibility is on you. You need to stop digging holes for yourself to fall into and cry for help, because this leads to a perpetual fall into the pit of nothingness, and you fall apart in your misery long before you reach the bottom. You need to make sure that you don’t fail. Also, you need to control your impulses that result in fail-patterns. As you observe those things, your skill and accuracy improve. You perceive energies directly, and you learn that your entire mental and emotional structure is made up of various energetic loops and nodes that cause failure, and you work on gradually dismantling those, and absorbing the emotional energy of suffering that is released from them. As you suffer, you learn to release it vertically and learn Kundalini up-stream kriya. As you develop skill with perceiving the minefields of bound energies, you learn the inner-space technique; you basically learn to dig up mines by ringing various emotional “bells” that make them resonate, and then focus as you get a signal, poke where it hurts and have it show itself so you can deal with it. Basically, you learn to wallow in shit and poke at wounds. None of it is fun, none of it is “spiritual”, none of it is a quick hack that will give you a status symbol of having some achievement unlocked so that everybody will know how spiritual and enlightened you are. It’s just emotionally painful, hard and tedious work, and it goes on for months and years. However, as things progress you understand that you are spiritually much more powerful, and occasionally things just start happening, things like initiation into vajra, or being able to perceive higher realities, or being able to transfer karma from other beings, and “flash” a path towards God through their consciousness, or be able to purify energetic impurities from external objects, or be able to create objects of power, create and discreate souls, bring dissipated souls back into existence on kalapa-level, or work directly with structures created by Satan, depleting their energy sources, and then “spending” their control substance.

The thing is, the stuff I’m doing now is “playing Oldfield”, and most of that stuff I never practiced, it came to me easily and trivially as a consequence of other work. The stuff I actually practiced was, essentially, shovelling shit, draining pus from infected wounds, and suffering with calm detachment – basically, I did stuff nobody ever wants to do, and as a result I got to do stuff nobody ever was skilled enough to do.

How to leave

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I regularly get questions of this kind:

“If this world is a malicious trap, why not just cut your losses via suicide?”

My response to this is layered. The first argument is that suicide looks like such an obvious, simple and tempting option, if I were Satan, I would have built in strong safeguards against it – basically, those opting for it would have a much worse situation to deal with afterwards. Who knows what kind of a contract we had to accept by incarnating here, and what’s in the fine print. I don’t know, and I prefer to err on the side of caution. Let’s just assume that suicide might imply acceptance of all kinds of additional karmic attachments and retributive elements that we might very much wish to avoid.

The second argument is that self and body are joined in the incarnate state, and choosing to act against one might mean acting against the other, as well, with all the karmic consequences of such an action. Also not good.

The third argument is that we ended here despite this being a trap, which means it wasn’t obvious to us, for some reason. This implies that whatever reasons, that didn’t prevent our entrapment in the first place, might still exist, and unless we develop understanding that gives us resistance against it, we might end up being returned, and possibly in a worse situation than the one we have now. Take this very seriously, because now you know about me and you are reading this, and almost nobody on Earth knows about me, or cares. The odds are, you would be more lost, more confused, and who knows what else. In addition, Satan has an endless array of torments here for those who annoy him, and let’s assume that suicides make themselves karmically vulnerable to this. I think this is something we would want to avoid.

Hating this world and wanting to get out is, karmically speaking, not a decision against this world; only a consistent choice for God is a choice against this world, and I am pretty much certain that this is the only thing that would be interpreted as a liberating karmic choice. Basically, focus on God, and I don’t mean an idea about God. I mean God. This withdraws our spiritual energy from the world. Without us circulating power through the “electromagnet” of attraction, desire and attachment that holds us to the world, the world is released and we are emancipated from it.