“Sri Bhagavan, mind if I ask you something? I have an issue with my weapon.”, Shiva started. “Sure, Mahesh. What is it?”, Vishnu replied. “When I aim my trident at an enemy, they usually feel they are being targetted and start teleporting around Creation like crazy, trying to save themselves. I track them as quickly, but the problem is, there’s always that slight delay between identifying them well enough to lock on, and actually deploying the weapon, which would of course instantly kill anything at any distance, but by that time the enemy is already elsewhere. You are using a sudarshana chakra, which seems to track an enemy after the initial lock. Is that working better for you?”

“Yes, to a point. It tracks, but my enemies teleport wildly as well. The chakra maintains the lock on the soul itself, but needs to re-establish the location after each teleportation, the same way you’re doing it yourself, but my weapon has this functionality built into its design. We seem to be having the same problem, only my weapon launches and then tracks, while you track and launch only after you have the target pinned. Both essentially hit in same conditions, when the target runs out of ideas or has a sufficient delay in teleportation”, Vishnu mused. “I wish we could figure out some form of tracking that binds the target in some way that inhibits their ability to run, or something.”

“That’s unfortunate. Sure, we could always do it the way our girls do it – curse them and watch them wither and die, without lifting a finger, but that would be unmanly”, Shiva grinned, and Vishnu fist-bumped him. “Speaking about the girls, here they come; it seems they are finished with whatever girly business they had in mind. And speaking of which, wow”, Vishnu spoke with amazement. “Ladies, if one asked me before, I would have said that your beauty is legendary, supreme and impossible to improve, but you apparently did something that leaves me wordless”.

“Oh, we’ve been playing dress-up”, Lady Lakshmi answered, curtsying to the Lords and glowing at her husband. “We created dresses and ornaments for each other, using our own power to enhance the other one’s beauty, and it gave us a lot of pleasure”.

“Lakshmi made a tiara of supreme wealth, dignity and fortune for me, that is powered by my own soul but creates light through her blessings, and I created a dress for her that boosts her own spiritual attributes with the blessing of my power”, Shakti added, curtsying to Lord Vishnu and looking adoringly into her husband’s eyes. “We also talked about some stuff that we found interesting”.

“What kind of stuff?”, asked Shiva, bowing to Lakshmi and looking at his wife. “Oh, mathematics, as a matter of fact. I noticed how mathematics appears as an emergent property of Creation, but only when the principle of Order prevails, and in direct proportion to it. The more things are static, the more they can be modelled in ways of mathematics, which quantifies entities, phenomena and interactions. However, when Chaos is introduced, and things either lose their static and predictable nature, or free will of beings introduces new elements or alters existing ones, the deterministic and predictable quality of the Relative is lost.”, answered his Goddess.

“That is quite interesting”, Vishnu scratched his chin. “What do you think about the implications of this? Is Chaos disturbing the good quality of Order, thus breaking mathematical models and ruining something of value, or is it somehow for the good, if it is allowed to happen?” Shiva nodded in assent and looked questioningly at the women.

“We also wondered about this, and here is our preliminary analysis. It seems that neither Chaos nor Order manifest the will of the Absolute on their own and by themselves. Order would result in rigid laws that would negate all possibility of surprise, creativity or anything new, which is not the point. Also, Chaos on its own would break all good things, as well as the evil ones, indiscriminately. So, Chaos needs to disrupt just enough of Order to make things alive and fluid, while Order needs to guide Chaos in order to make it a force of creative disruption rather than pointless destruction. In both cases, mathematics breaks”, Shakti answered. “It is my hypothesis that this, in fact, is why we exist, and by ‘we’ I mean the four of us in particular. We are powerful enough to disrupt, and yet holy enough to do so in ways that actually make things better, rather than leaving a wasteland and injury. We are all different enough to have different approaches to things and different views on reality, and yet we are similar enough that neither of us would do something that would be seen by others as actually wrong. It’s always some kind of a good idea, even if it comes with initial drawbacks and issues, and we all trust each other’s judgment and cooperate. Any fight between us would be so incredibly destructive, that the entirety of Absolute’s manifestation and plan would instantly be destroyed, but that never happens, because it is not in our nature to oppose each other, but to assist”, Shakti finished.

“So, that’s what you were doing with the dress-up?”, Shiva smiled. “It looks like a very apt illustration of your argument, as you both managed something I would have deemed impossible – you made each other even more wonderful, and it’s not just appearance, because your blessings seem to have interacted synergically with each other’s souls, giving it tools and means of manifestation while in no way interfering with its nature, which was obviously the will of God. When I think of it, when Lord Vishnu interferes to save me from the consequences of some of my inopportune blessings, he is essentially manifesting a high-order dharma to cover for my error, but with implicit assumption that my undeserved gifts are something that disrupts staticity of lower-order dharma, and apparently you can’t disrupt it without occasionally getting it wrong, so my blessings are essentially brahman disrupting the order of justice with the chaotic introduction of mercy, and Sri Bhagavan’s intervention to save me is essentially brahman disrupting the undesired consequence of that with his own free will, that is a blessing of its own kind. And you ladies are definitely brahman introducing wisdom in order to teach us about our own nature, and in such a lovely and charming way”, he bowed deeply, as the girls blushed, not knowing where to look, because the Great Lord turned what started as an impersonal exercise in logical analysis into a very personal compliment, whose blessing made their very souls tingle with power of rightness, because Lord Shiva doesn’t use words idly.

Seeing their embarrassment, Vishnu wielded his power to create a distraction and introduce some levity, making a space for them to sit and have coffee, in the atmosphere of music and light. “So, what have you esteemed Lords been doing while we were gone?”, asked Lakshmi, sitting in Vishnu’s lap. “Oh, we talked about the weapons we use for fighting demonic enemies.”, he smiled. “We established that they both share the same drawbacks but manifest them in a different manner”. “So, why don’t you just use us instead of weapons? I can curse an evil soul and make it lose blessings that make existence possible. Shakti can curse them and make them lose all power. It would happen instantly and regardless of what the evil soul does”, she countered.

Vishnu and Shiva looked at each other. “That wouldn’t be fair to our poor enemies”, Shiva offered. “You Ladies are too powerful and formidable, and if you got involved, the poor demons would stand no chance, and we would have no fun hunting them down”, Vishnu nodded almost seriously, while Shakti poured them more coffee, spicing it up with some starlight.

There’s always been a question of what to do with souls that aren’t pure enough for heaven, and yet they are not corrupted and evil enough for hell. If you put them in heaven, they will probably corrupt heaven with their presence and it’s also likely that they would find it very difficult to exist there. If you destroy them or put them in hell, that would be unethical because they don’t actually deserve to be harshly punished. Let’s say that those are the souls that existed in bad circumstances, but essentially tried to do their best and never actually chose evil. They didn’t choose God either, though. So, what’s the deal?

The Christians invented the concept of purgatory; a place adjacent to hell, that’s for all intents and purposes hell-like, but with one significant difference: there’s hope of leaving and ending up in heaven. Basically, you need to suffer for a while, and then as your debts are paid, you can leave. Interestingly, that’s how Hindu and Buddhist hell works – you suffer greatly for your sins, but it all has a time limit. When that passes, you can leave.

The problem with this concept is how it defines the reason why souls aren’t qualified for heaven. They always imagine sins that need to be repaid through suffering, in essence something that is added upon a soul and makes it dirty. I’m not saying that such “sufferariums” don’t exist at all; I wouldn’t really know much about it in any case. I do, however, know that the problem of most souls isn’t the excess of sin; it’s the lack of substance.

When you look at most people, they’re just idiots. They aren’t concerned with spiritual issues at all, and even if they are, they are complete savages, with incredibly trivial ideas about the whole thing, asking completely trivial questions that they think are unanswerable because they never talked to someone who knows anything, nor did they read books of any substance. Their problem is a huge lack of things that ought to be there, not the excess of things that aren’t supposed to be there. Imagine it as gold ore, where you have a few grams of gold per kilogram of ore. Most of it is rock and dirt, and yet if you remove that, you’re left with enough gold particles to make it worthwhile. But what do you do if there’s just rock? Or if the substance remaining is tin and copper in minuscule quantities, and not gold? Or if the amount of gold in the ore is so insubstantial, it’s not worth the diesel fuel used for powering the machinery in the extraction process? I think that’s a better approximation of what happens when the Judges have to decide what to do with you. They need to figure out if the juice is worth the squeeze. If you’re all rock, they throw you away to be crushed into something that’s useful for paving roads or making concrete. If you’re all gold, they bow to you, tell you they are honoured to be in your holy presence, and escort you to heaven. If you’re mostly gold but also contain rock, they personally help you go through the issues, explain things you got wrong, tell you how the world actually works, show you examples, interpret things for you so that you can understand them properly, and so on. When people hear the word “judge”, they instinctively think it’s someone judgmental, but that’s not actually true; mostly, you’re the judgmental one, and the judge will be the one explaining things and putting them into a correct perspective, telling you something you thought of as a problem isn’t a problem at all, showing you what the real problems are and where you dealt with them correctly, where you didn’t know what you were doing, and where you fucked up for some reason, and then they go through reasons and show you what’s what. Basically, they are creating proper understanding and dispelling your ignorance, and the “judgment” part should be translated as “telling it as it is”. They are beings who are used to discerning truth from illusions; basically, they are Divine psychotherapists. That, however, means that they have very low tolerance for actual evil people and bullshitters. With good people, they will go through all kinds of stuff with a fine-toothed comb, but with evil people, it’s “Hell!; next?”.

So, the first aspect of purgatory is the Judge you’re facing after death. That person will for the most part be wiser, holier and more experienced than you can imagine, and they’ll also know everything about you, so I recommend not trying to bullshit them if you value your continued existence. Also, I recommend that you actually pay attention to what they are trying to tell you.

The second aspect of purgatory is what I would call heaven for humans. Rather than being adjacent to hell, where you’re supposed to suffer for your sins before you’re allowed to enter heaven, this is a place of healing and learning, where you’re supposed to work through your human stuff, understand how things actually work, and learn the inner workings of the real world after being confined to this lunatic asylum also known as the material world. Basically, you need to be deprogrammed from all the bullshit and nonsense you were programmed with here, heal all the traumatic injuries to your soul that you sustained here, and you need to learn about reality. As you do, your soul will heal and increase in maturity, you will unlearn lots of wrong things and artificial confines placed upon your thinking and feeling, and then you can move on to the place for souls that are no longer damaged, ignorant and conditioned to be bonsai cats, and into a place where you would find “normal souls” that are not yet “enlightened”. There, they undergo processes that are meant to result in them attaining eternity. I already explained the concept of astral gas being transformed into crystalline vajra, so I won’t go into that again, but that’s what’s going on there.

This is all not true heaven yet, and technically it’s all some sort of a purgatory, or a maturation process. True heaven is a place/state of eternity.

So, what about hell? Is it real, who’s there, what’s the point of it? Well, I must admit that I know very little about that. I didn’t really visit a hell properly until recently, because it wasn’t any of my business, really. What I do know is that the place I visited, right before wiping it out, contained souls that were completely and utterly godless, to such a degree that they could be in a God’s presence and see only the physical outer form, the way you would watch something on a screen and feel nothing. Absolutely zero resonance and correspondence between themselves and God. You’ll ask how that can be possible, and I don’t know, but that’s what they were. I decided there’s no point of keeping them in that buffer zone any longer and basically flushed it, and so that place was returned under God’s rule and became a section of heaven, that looks and feels just like the material world, only made of astral stuff and without all the worst stuff of the physical world, and those godless souls went where fire goes when extinguished.

Are there other similar places, “sufferariums” for the condemned sinners? I don’t know. I don’t know what the purpose of that would be. Suffering is useful if someone is to learn from it, become better, be redeemed. If someone is completely godless and condemned, they are not put into a place of eternal suffering; they are extinguished and recycled. Some people will now say that such fate, a mere eternal death, is not sufficient punishment for some terrible sinners. I disagree. There’s nothing worse than knowing that eternal life exists, that you rejected it, and it’s no longer an option for you, and you’re thrown into a composting pit with other trash (which is what the biblical word for hell, “Gehenna”, literally was – it was a name of an actual garbage dump where the Jews disposed of carcasses of diseased animals and other refuse, and where sulphur was burned to disinfect it). As far as I know, the godless souls that came from Earth were kept in that section of the astral world that was outside of the rule of God because of some reason that has more to do with Satan and his evil scheming, than because somebody in heaven decided to keep them out of pity or sentimentality. Possibly, he planned to continue the hellish and godless aspects of this material world after the term for his experiment expired.

So, there are no two eternities – eternal bliss and eternal damnation. Damnation exists in time, as do the damned, while eternity is reserved for God and the Divine ones. Also, have in mind that any kind of eternity that is not the endless sparkling fulfilment that is God, would eventually turn into a hell of boredom and desolation, and also that eternity is not a matter of infinite time, but transcendence of time. It is a state that is completely beyond the mortal beings’ ability to understand, which is why I write about the Gods in terms that are still human. The actual reality is much better than that, but it’s not conceivable by mortal minds. I can tell you a bit about the Gods’ character, but that’s but a pale shadow of reality. Heaven is beyond words and thoughts.

When I said that Goddess can frown upon something and thus make it go away – diminish and fizzle out of existence – I knew people will ask why does any evil even exist then, if there’s a being that can basically go back in time and cancel it out of existence.

The answer, of course, is complicated, because it has to do with how humans perceive time itself.

You see, people think Eternity is, basically, an infinite quantity of time. That’s not so. Eternity is a state out of time, where each point of time is a potential “now”, everything is happening “today” and everything already happened and the whole thing about time is contained in a glass sphere of memory that you can revisit; and there might be an infinite number of such glass spheres in the mind of a God. In other words, the state of an Eternal, such as the Goddess, is literally unimaginable for a timely being.

When a God or a Goddess smiles upon you with approval, it means they saw you, and they saw that you are good, whereby you attained Eternity and stopped being something that has a beginning, duration and end in time. If a God or a Goddess frowns upon you, it means your existence does not make things better, and that might mean many things for you, none of which are good. For instance, someone might destroy you as an evil to be destroyed, and thus gain glory. Someone might transform and change you as an evil to be transformed and changed, and thus gain glory. Basically, you might be a problem that has to be solved, resulting in the greater glory of God. Alternatively, you might decide to repent and change yourself into something that is to the greater glory of God, thus gaining redemption and active participation in the glory of God.

But in any case, those who earn God’s disapproval get to have their existence in time, where it will also end. That is because Eternity belongs only to God, and if you’re not of God, you have no place there.

We could speak of things that were altered and cancelled out of existence altogether, but since they were cancelled out of existence, they didn’t happen, so there’s nothing to speak of, really. In any case, realities that transcend time and space are not well suited for the human brain, which needs time and space in order to make sense of things, which is why I translate eternal things into a language of space, time and humanity; don’t confuse that with absence of transcendence and abstraction. But one corollary remains: the fact that this world was not cancelled out of existence altogether means that its existence will ultimately serve to increase the Glory of God.

The soul-creation event described in the last article definitely looked real, which poses a question: is that how it always works, or is it an exception? Also, if it’s an exception, what other ways are there?

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: the Gods already existed at that point, and there was a whole history behind them, which means this is not the first generation of souls.

Is creation of souls a thing that happens only when a localised presence of dharma weakens the veil between the Relative and the Absolute to the point where new souls precipitate from the space itself; I don’t know. Honestly, before I saw this myself, or relived the memory of seeing it myself, I didn’t know it’s a thing, and if you asked me, I would have said that it’s possible but I don’t know how likely it is. Obviously, the major Gods like the four described are the very peak of Creation and they have reality-bending, or -breaking, properties. If they manifest the Creation itself, you can imagine that all kinds of extreme phenomena are possible when they are together and they do things that invoke and concentrate their essence and powers. If they disapprove of something, it tends to disappear from existence. If they strongly approve of something, it tends to get magnified and brought into prominence. I described their interaction in human terms and translated them to human language, but those beings are not human. I don’t think I have words that properly convey the order of magnitude. Also, they can feel very human if they want to, more human than any human being has a right to be, but they are arbiters of reality; faces, persons and names of the Nameless, Unmanifested Absolute. The Christians will envision God in form of Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, one God with three persons, and I will envision Him as the unmanifested, impersonal, all-encompassing Absolute on one side of the veil, and those two married couples on the Relative side, four persons that are One True God. I don’t think there’s even a question of which one of them is greater – they are all The Supreme God, who doesn’t seem to be an atheist, and seems to find purpose and fulfilment in worship of other persons of God, because worship is how you speak truth about the pinnacle of Reality. To speak of Them in terms other than worship is to slander them, and that is a sin. Sin kills souls.

I know some feminist-minded people are asking why didn’t the women say anything. Well, first of all, unlike the feminists, who are all weak, evil and mentally ill, the Goddesses are omnipotent and immensely “together” in a mental sense. When God is praising your husband, you don’t interrupt, you don’t interfere, and you don’t add to perfection. When your husband is praising God, you don’t interrupt, you don’t interfere, and you don’t add to perfection. If you have nothing to say, you don’t speak out of insecurity just to hear your own voice and let others know that you exist, because you fear that otherwise they would forget. One can’t forget the huge concentration of God-stuff that wields reality out of nothing, creates time and space, or alters reality in order to focus, magnify or diminish realities, beings and destinies. The Goddesses feel like women, but they also feel like powers of such magnitude that reality breaks in their presence and normal beings can’t even think in terms of what they truly are. When brahman (a term for the highest of truths) is spoken, a Goddess smiles and nods, thus affirming it and making it grow. When untruth, malediction or slander is spoken, a Goddess frowns, thus opposing and rejecting it, and reality changes to destroy the evil and cancel it out of existence. That’s the thing with omnipotence: if you like something, it becomes and grows. If you don’t like something, it goes away. Only the weak and insecure need to make lots of noise, that ends up amounting to nothing. Finally, the Goddesses are wives. The more a human woman approaches dharma in her life, the more she can identify with how a Goddess feels about her husband, what her priorities are, and how she perceives herself and her role. The more a human woman goes insane and evil, the more she would have a problem with it. Basically, to even think in a way that approaches feminism is to insult a Goddess, and that doesn’t end well for you, to put it mildly, since a Goddess makes such things go away. If you’re a Goddess, the only thing that matters in the whole world is your Lord. You are his; his power, his glory, his magnificence. To be submissive to him is to have meaning and purpose. The only way to be truly yourself is to be his. So, when he is praised by God, you are so happy you couldn’t speak even if there were anything to say. When your husband is praised, your feeling of self is magnified and your true being is pure happiness. That’s what being a Goddess means. You are the Power and Glory of God. When a God is praised by God, his Power and Glory are magnified. When a God is praised by a lesser being, however, that lesser being’s reality, self-ness, truth, power and glory are magnified; the God remains unchanged. That answers the question of godless people who ask what does an omnipotent God get out of having humans worship him? The answer is: absolutely nothing; the humans, however, stand to gain absolutely everything. They can become real, eternal, meaningful and glorious, finding their true self and purpose. The only thing that actually affects a God is truth spoken about him or her by another God.

So, as it appears, Gods seem to “reproduce” by praising each other’s greatness to the point where the veil between the Absolute and Relative realities starts to falter. Are those new souls children of the Gods? In a way, probably, but not in a human way. They are also their brothers and sisters, born out of the Absolute. Human analogies don’t hold here.

However, souls seem to be created also in other, less glorious ways, and in this world the physical incarnation itself seems to aggregate karmic substance in ways that seem to persist and you get “smoky” astral stuff that looks like some kind of a soul, but I’m not actually sure it qualifies, unless it passes an initiation where it becomes of eternity. Those things are complicated and it’s very hard to say that they work in a certain way, because there’s so much diversity in how it all takes place. So, I’ll just shrug and state the obvious: Satan came to exist somehow, and honestly, he didn’t look like one of those sparks created in the mutual respect and worship of the Great Lords and Ladies of Creation. He looked like a maggot that would try to bite their foot in spite. He looked like someone who would frown at the concept of them praising each other, finding it disgusting and degrading, because he wouldn’t bow before anyone or praise anyone: that would be so cringy and degrading. He would want to verbally degrade others and see them humiliated and cowering before him, feeling terrible while he feels empowered by being able to make them feel terrible.

You see how easily you sympathise with him, and how much like him you are? That’s not an accident; that’s your spiritual emptiness manifesting its symptoms, the way it did for him. Spiritual fulness speaks in language of devotion, belonging and worship. Emptiness speaks in terms of power dynamics.

Last night I had one of those yoga nidra situations where I’m supposed to be sleeping but instead I’m having darshan-like visions, so here goes.

“I am honoured to stand in your presence, Lord Shiva”, said Vishnu. “Your nature is so holy, and your courage is so incredible, that when the rest of us feel terrified by something, you calmly absorb that darkness and evil into yourself and through your own suffering transform it into the holy light we can all feel in your presence. Everybody else desires power, but you are so controlled and absorbed in your transcendence, that Power herself is your wife, and wants nothing but to belong to you and draw inspiration for Creation from observing your holy presence, which is the closest there is to the unmanifested Absolute itself.”

“Lord Vishnu, the honour is mine”, responded Shiva. “It is indeed like you to grace me with your kind words, and yet it is you who are such fullness of reality-consciousness-bliss that you give meaning to all of Creation, because the reason and the point of Manifestation is to embody the qualities of the Absolute into a relative being, and you, in your infinitely blissful and enlightened nature, show all of us what the goal is and what we are striving for. Where others would be endlessly tempted by the Kaustubha jewel, which emanates great bliss and fulfilment, you, as the ultimate being of bliss and fulfilment, can wear it as if it were a mere trinket, because your own bliss and fulfilment are of a far greater order. All beings desire fortune, and yet Fortune (Lakshmi) herself sits contently by your side as your wife and desires nought but you, who are such a magnificent embodiment and manifestation of the formless brahman, the sat-cit-ananda, that you are the source of greatest fortune even for the Fortune herself.”

Hearing him say this, and seeing the truth of it herself, his Lady smiled, because previously she felt incredulity when Shiva would highly praise Lord Vishnu, because she couldn’t believe that any being could match her husband’s greatness, but now she just smiled in pure happiness, and so did Lady Lakshmi, blushing with excitement and pleasure seeing her husband so aptly and gloriously praised by one so holy and virtuous.

As they all stood there in deep meditation, as the presence and manifestation of the Absolute grew manifold due to the holiness of the moment, the whole atmosphere between them became changed, and an endless number of small spark-like entities precipitated, like snowflakes, and they saw that each was a new soul that was being born out of the mutual worship of the Gods.

Born out of holiness and God-worship, each of those souls can only find fulfilment and meaning of its life if it attains this state again through its own evolution.