There’s a thing that keeps annoying me when someone brings it up, and that’s the attitude of looking for good in everything, as if that, somehow, is a praiseworthy feature, and you’re a good person if you do it. Also, the attitude of not condemning anyone because there’s bad in everyone and good in everyone, and so on.

Let me make a few illustrations.

Let’s take two big containers of ice cream, five litres or so. They are both freshly made and perfectly tasty. Now, we take a spoon of fecal matter – shit, if you like – and mix it into one of the ice cream containers. It’s fraction of a percentage, two millilitres of shit per five litres of ice cream. A few hundredths of a percent, if my math is right. Now we randomize the containers so you can’t tell which is which.

I would like to do that in front of one of those people who tell me they like to see good in everything, and would never discard a person because of a “small flaw”. Go, eat. It’s 99.9% ice cream; by your definition, almost completely pure goodness. Me, I’d throw both containers into the trash, because not only is the contaminated one pure shit, and not 99.9% ice cream, but the other is so suspicious by mere association that it’s shit as well and needs to be disposed of.

That’s what mortal sin is. Not only is it so bad that every single fraction of it in something makes the entire mass shit, but it’s even worse – the other positive virtues make the mass more dangerous and problematic, not less. The fact that 100% shit can look like 100% ice cream and can deceive an innocent person into eating it makes it worse. If you see dog shit on the road, you’re not going to eat it. If you see a bucket of ice cream that contains 0.04% of shit, you might eat it, and for all intents and purposes it’s not less bad than the shit that’s self-evident and thus avoided. Likewise, positive virtues on an evil person make them worse, not better.

What am I saying here? I’m saying that lack of discrimination gets you doomed. Discrimination is the ability to understand what something is, in its nature. Discrimination is the ability to understand what needs to be understood in what context. An insect in amber makes amber more valuable. An insect in coffee makes coffee less valuable. Shit in a garden is useful. Shit in ice cream makes ice cream useless at best and dangerous at worst.

So, we now have to understand that some people have all kinds of flaws, but they are great people. We also need to understand that some people can have only one flaw and lots of virtues, and they can be extremely dangerous and evil. Quantity isn’t even a thing. You can’t just make a quantitative analysis and say that a certain percentage of impurities is acceptable. No; sometimes a huge amount of impurities is not only acceptable, but improves the mixture. An example is penicillin mold in cheese. Sometimes, any amount of AIDS or hepatitis infected blood in the blood bank can make the entire batch useless and dangerous. Having a thin layer of ice on the road doesn’t make it mostly road, it makes it black ice.

In the end, the only criterion is what someone actually does. If a person is mostly virtuous but has a a slight penchant for genocide, you expect that person to be condemned, not 99% praised and 1% condemned. No, you want them 100% condemned, fuck their virtues. Nobody cares that Hitler had good ideas about preserving the environment, increasing employment, making great public roads and was a very good painter. The concentration camps kind of make his virtues moot. Also, you don’t care if some great person had flaws. For instance, Ernest Shackleton had all kinds of flaws, but if you got stranded with him in the middle of nowhere, he was the best person in the world to be stranded with, because he ended up getting everybody to safety, where others calculated with “acceptable losses”. He didn’t have acceptable losses, which is why people he got safely out ended up being his friends for life. Sure, he drank too much and died in debt. People whose lives he saved couldn’t care less.

Various spiritual people have different opinions on this. Jesus, for instance, said that the fruits are the only valid criterion of one’s true spiritual significance. Not what virtues they have, not what flaws they have, not what they look like or what they say – just what the results end up being. If someone is a great person but gets everybody killed, is he truly a great person? Likewise, if one is all kinds of flawed but ends up saving everybody, is he truly flawed?

This puts things into perspective, and the quantitative model of spiritual advancement looks completely inadequate; you know what I mean, the idea that one is increasingly more pure as they approach God. In fact, that doesn’t seem to be how it works at all. Someone can be all kinds of flawed, but if they get the important things right, they can be judged as perfect in the eyes of God. For instance, one of the criminals crucified alongside Jesus, the one who repented and prayed to Jesus to remember him when he gets to his kingdom. That’s the first saint recognised by Christianity. On the other hand, one could look all kinds of pure, but if they hated Jesus during his life, it wasn’t seen as one tiny speck of impurity on an otherwise good person. No, it was seen as a crucial giveaway, a sign that this person truly hates God and is destined for hell. All his other virtues and merits don’t amount to anything at all – they are like an expensive rope on a dead and rotting ass: just worthless trash.

So, if you say you try to see good in everything, what you probably wanted to signal is being a good person that rejects evil and aspires towards the good. What I heard is something altogether different. So, have some of that 99.9% ice cream while trying to condemn God for creating hell that is full of people you would be compassionate enough to save, unlike God who condemned them. You are obviously a better person than God. Either that, or you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Compassion without discrimination results in evil. Love without discrimination results in evil. Wisdom without discrimination is folly. Without discrimination, you will condemn God and vindicate Satan. Without discrimination, you will end up eating shit ice cream all the way to hell.

Some people might ask why I haven’t revised or outright removed my old books, since I know they contain errors.

The thing is, yoga isn’t about a “correct teaching”. Yoga is a process of transformation, and therein lies the rub. When I was still intensely practicing it, I understood how my perspective changed since a year ago, and how I would now find it very hard to understand my former position and give proper advice; I’m becoming too far removed. Different problems, different methods, different understanding, different structure of higher and lower bodies. I made a decision to write it all down as soon as possible, so that I wouldn’t forget, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to pass the knowledge on, and it would again be lost, and everybody would have to start from scratch, like myself. The danger of too high a teaching is that the first step is in the clouds, beyond reach.

The fact that it contains some wrong beliefs is not really a problem. I contained even more wrong beliefs before I wrote it, and yet here I am now, not because I had the right beliefs, but because I followed the right process and had the right understanding – that it isn’t about espousing all the right beliefs, or by doing all the right things all at once. It’s about focusing at the right goal, about being able to transform, to abandon beliefs and form new ones as needed, because you change. In the beginning, and in fact in most of the process, you can’t have a correct understanding of God, because of what you are and what your nature is. You understand that God is awesome, but you can’t really formulate a proper understanding of what that means. What you can do is focus on God regardless, and practice purifying energetic techniques to make non-God stuff on you break up, purify on a particle level, and become closer to God stuff. God is not merely something far that you occasionally see; God is someone you become by following a process.

Yes, my first books contain flawed teachings, but they all contain correct understanding that resulted in much better teachings later on, as the process was given time to transform the slow physical matter of my brain. Yes, those old teachings were flawed, but do have in mind that they are the teachings of Vedanta for the most part, but already upgraded by the practical understanding created by the purification of the elements, initiation into Vajra and a glimpse into the higher substances that I couldn’t yet wield, but which I knew existed. They are flawed by my current standards, but they are better than anything else, and all the techniques and methodology were already perfectly formulated; what I lacked was the exact theoretical understanding of what’s going on. I just knew what you had to do to get results. Also, it’s all written by a version of me that still remembers what problems I had, how I had to solve them, and it’s all more “human” than anything I would write now. I wouldn’t dare to touch the old materials and “improve” them, because the very part that could help an ordinary human become a yogi could be lost, because I could accidentally “upgrade” something to a point beyond ordinary human understanding.

On the other hand, the books I write now are possibly more understandable, because you can explain better when you have a more complete understanding. Where I used to fumble around issues, trying to explain something, I now have a clear, straightforward and simple theory. So, it’s not as simple as it might seem – start with the old books first, and gradually work your way to the current ones. In fact, the opposite might be the best – start with the newest books with the best theoretical understanding behind them, and then work your way back through the older ones, to see how I got there, what I initially got wrong, how I revised it and why, and get to the point where you can do something, yourself. Because, what does it even matter which teaching is more correct and which book is better, if you yourself are not there? You can sit on the fence and watch me struggle with things, and wait until the end to see what comes of it all, but it’s a bad idea since you get to be firmly entrenched on square one decades later. It’s much better to try and fail ten thousand times, than to be safe doing nothing.