To follow up on the last article, let’s see what the tradition says is a problem and will cause failure in yogic practice, and what I found out.

If I had to sum up the traditionally described modes of failure, and if I don’t attempt to be too abstract or formal, it would go more-less like this:

Attachment. This is pretty straightforward; one is attached to the worldly things, doesn’t wish to let go, and thus either abandons spiritual practice or fails in it. My experience: yes, that’s a very common mode of failure. Basically, one gets interested in yoga, practices until their attachments are tested, and then invents this or that excuse to end the practice, or remains involved with the “movement” as a mere formality, but does absolutely nothing that would result in actual spiritual advancement because that would threaten their attachments.

Moral failure. This is also straightforward – if one becomes, or fails to stop being cruel, evil, a liar, fornicator, thief, murderer etc., they won’t make spiritual progress, and at worst will become practitioners of dark magic. My experience: unfortunately, this is also common. I could probably classify it under “attachment” as well, but since it’s attachment to very dark modes of behaviour, it deserves its special category.

Blasphemy. One invents imaginary failures of his guru, proclaims himself to be God or an enlightened master without proper qualifications, starts accepting students and invents his own theology that is centred around his own failures and hallucinations, proclaiming them special virtues. My experience: yes, this indeed happens, but I’m not sure if it’s a cause of a downfall or merely an ego-preservation strategy.

Lack of dedication. One lacks devotion to God, desire for liberation and spiritual improvement, loses focus and discontinues spiritual practice, or continues lackluster practice that fails to attain any results. My experience: yes.

Fanaticism. One practices too much and hurts himself, or goes around making foolish and exaggerated claims about virtues of his practice without actually attaining results himself. My experience: yup, that’s a thing, unfortunately.

Impurity. Eating meat, drinking alcohol, taking drugs, having sex, having lots of money, basically refraining from recommended ascetic practices. My experience: I actually never encountered a mode of failure of this type, which is funny because according to what people usually believe, one would think that this would be the main mode of failure, but it never is. If anything, people fail for other reasons, and then later degrade into abominable behaviour. Eating meat and having sex proved to be a non-issue, unless connected with other problems, such as having sex with a person that is trying to attach you to worldly things and won’t let go. Drugs are a bad idea in general but I never had an experience with someone who abandoned yoga because they wanted to take drugs or drink alcohol. It’s usually some of the aforementioned modes of failure as a cause, and debauchery as a consequence.

Hubris. Thinking you are so advanced you can perform immoral and sinful acts and count on the yogic technique, guru and God to save you. My experience: yes, this kind of a thing happened so often it looks like a pattern, and people tend to treat sin as an energetic impurity that can be easily remedied with yoga, while it is in fact a cause of strain within the soul and causes its fragmentation and inability to practice yoga properly in any way afterwards. Also, intentionally doing that is a sin against both guru and God and causes one to perceive them in a disrespectful manner, thus renouncing their authority and being unable to receive help.

So, other than this list, what would be my personal observations? Well, one of the most pernicious issues I faced is the propensity of students of yoga to create cult-like environments even when the guru has an obvious dislike for this behaviour and warns against it. Trying to establish and maintain “pecking orders”, or hierarchies of seniority and dominance, trying to assert their relevance to the junior students, abusing their assumed authority within the group to either play ego games with the new students, or get them to have sex with them and so on. This stuff kept repeating so much that I think it’s one of the most basic human patterns of behaviour, and it caused all kinds of trouble and mischief. It sometimes worked out fine as a form of social bonding or finding a compatible mate within the group, but regardless of the possible benefits it universally distracts everyone from actual spiritual practice, and the whole thing degrades into a cult. Apparently, spirituality isn’t a team sport. Specifically, the issue of an “idiot senpai”, more accurately a person who is a student for a longer time regardless of actual accomplishments, and who tries to impose himself as some kind of an intermediary, proxy guru, giving the less experienced people all kinds of advice, hints and alternative teachings, or even make sexual advances, is an endless cause of mischief. Apparently, being in some kind of a spiritual organisation or a movement makes people feel special and important without any good reason, and this becomes a cause of downfall for themselves, and is a nuisance to others.

I’ve been thinking about something recently.

I’m not sure I ever explained why exactly did I do certain things in a certain way in my early yogic practice – all people know was that I did something, then I changed it, and I never explained my actual thinking behind the decisions.

You see, the way I started yogic practice was pretty interesting. I won’t go into great detail, but I had no guidance other than books, and my pretty advanced knowledge of autogenic training, so it was a given that I had to experiment in order to establish what actually works, in the sense of achieving presence of God, and transforming my consciousness and energy system in order to be able to bear God’s presence and eventually be God’s presence. The problem is, the books I had contained mostly the very general instructions, and not of the kind that actually had anything to do with yoga itself – it was mostly how one should behave, what kind of emotions to avoid and what kind to stimulate, be vegetarian, celibate, non-violent, kind, don’t do drugs, alcohol, don’t smoke and so on. It all sounded pretty much like standard religious moralizing, and I initially put it all in a “nice to know, but it’s not a cause-side but effect-side of any spiritual equation”. However, the texts that talked about yoga always talked about dangers of practice, and it was mostly “if your system is not pure enough, the increased energy level will either burn you up, or it will cause energy detours from the main nadis into the smaller ones, which will cause overloads and serious damage”. Since I initially had no experience with energy overloads of any kind, I filed this as “exaggerated”. That is, until I had an experience during meditation, where I didn’t actually “hear” the “OM sound”, it was more like feeling it with both body and mind, and it was something that felt so strong I really got scared that if it got stronger it might break me like a twig. At another instance, I had the experience of ananda, divine bliss, which was so strong that it felt like orgasm multiplied by a nuclear blast, and I’m not even exaggerating much here – it felt like something that could evaporate me if it got any stronger. You can imagine how I started taking the warnings very seriously after those two experiences. I also changed my approach to the things I couldn’t personally verify to “obey everything first” from “try to confirm everything first”. You see, the problem with the “try to confirm before obeying” is obvious – you might die, or at least experience some mode of failure. There were obviously all kinds of factors there that I didn’t understand, and since I worked from books alone without any personal guidance from anyone, after several very powerful experiences I decided it would be a very good idea to reduce my chances of sudden death or terrible failure by respectfully obeying all instructions given by authoritative persons, especially if the instructions overlap.

You see, yogis try to make yoga popular by saying it’s a spiritual science, but that’s not exactly true. It’s more of a proto-science, the way people experimented with herbs to figure out what’s poisonous, and what has medicinal properties. You experiment with something, you observe the results, but there’s a limit to what kind of experiments you can make and it never reaches the requirements for a proper science where you can isolate active compounds and test them in vitro and in vivo to figure out what does what exactly, and in what circumstances. The “gold standard” for yogic proto-science is “I did x and reached a spiritual experience, so if you try to reproduce x, you will also likely reach a spiritual experience”. The problem is, “x” is usually a complex thing. What did he actually do? He was a hermit who lived in some cave, ate whatever fruits and herbs he could find around, didn’t have sex, did some physical exercises, did some pranayama, did some prayers, chanted some mantra, visualized something from the scriptures, and some combination of the above worked and he experienced something transcendental. Not knowing what exactly worked and why, he passed it on to his students and told them to just do what he did, and it will work.

That’s not really science, but that’s what I had to work with. As I learned more, I could tweak things and isolate the active component of the practice, but the real question is, what would I recommend to a beginner from my current perspective? I was talking about vegetarianism with my wife, and explained why I was a vegetarian initially, and told her that I’m not sure I would be willing to gamble with someone’s life even now, by recommending any detours from the process I personally followed in the beginning, because there’s a serious difference between introducing things later on, as you have a volume of personal experience and power, and doing it in the beginning, when any deviation can cause either absence of experience altogether, or an experience so extreme it can either damage you, or cause such trauma that you will subconsciously try to avoid experiencing anything similar in the future. So, yes, I eat meat now, but would I recommend a beginner yogi to eat meat, as I do now, but not as I did when I was a beginner myself? You see my point? Yoga is not something where you can do whatever because none of it works anyway. The “problem” is that it very much works, but the exact parameters and circumstances vary so much between individuals that it’s safest to try to equalize most of it first, in order to reduce the number of variables. Also, the humility required for one to obey the guru and the tradition is also a factor that contributes to a good outcome of the practice, because it means that your energetic system is properly aligned. Arrogance is a symptom of dangerous misalignment, and contributes to bad outcomes. By arrogance I mean the attitude that you are in a position to second-guess the guru, and cherry-pick the stuff you’re going to obey or ignore. In the beginning, only absolute humility, respect and blind faith works, because you’re too ignorant to be able to make any judgment about anything. Only after you’re experienced, powerful and holy enough to have full mastery of something, to the point where you understand how things work, is when you can gradually change things, see what’s irrelevant, what can be done better, and what is actually harming your progress. An advanced yogi has such “density” and purity of his soul that he can rip through “reality” the way a supermassive black hole bends space around it. Stuff that could completely perturb a beginner is of no consequence to a master. That is not to say that a master has no problems at his own order of magnitude, but that is a different matter entirely; it’s comparable to Jesus having a problem bearing the sins of the world, and an ordinary person having a problem controlling their attention and avoiding distractions. To a master, a certain level of disturbance and impurity absorbed by the physical body is something he can perceive, wait until it passes, possibly repair the damage and proceed with whatever he was doing before. To a beginner, the same level of disturbance and impurity can distract him to the point where he completely loses his inner spiritual bearings, “forget” the spiritual content of a mantra and be unable to find his way again. Where a nuclear submarine might not care about the waves, a small sailing boat must pay utmost attention to the conditions of the sea. “Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi” sounds very unpleasant to the egalitarian minds of today’s men, who might think it encourages moral relativism, but it is in fact a great truth. A great master of yoga can absorb and neutralize immense kinds of energetic damage, where a normal person’s soul will disintegrate on a mere contact with a problem orders of magnitudes weaker. A normal person would strive for years to attain darshan of spiritual states and substances that a master wields. At some points in my advanced practice, I actually practiced exposing myself to outside noise and interference to harden the inner core of my meditative state against it, with the result that I could do spiritual initiations in a crowded bar. A beginner must absolutely avoid this kind of interference and noise in order to establish the spiritual connection first, then slowly strengthen it, and then gradually introduce all kinds of noise to check his resistance, and even when you’re able to resist almost anything, it doesn’t mean that you should bathe in filth all day. Resisting harmful interference requires an expenditure of energy and effort that might be better used for something more constructive. However, trying to copy a master’s behavior rather than obey his instructions diligently is a very foolish thing for a student, because I can tell you with absolute certainty that a student is simply unable to understand the complexities behind the instructions, and trying to think about it is a wasted effort. For instance, Romana once came home completely disturbed, I took a look at her and told her to take a shower and wash her hair immediately. She resisted because it made no sense to her, at which I raised my voice and told her to obey me immediately. She did, and she felt much better, which is when I explained that she was under an astral attack by a malevolent person, and since she had all kinds of contaminants on her pranic body, the astral connection held on quite firmly, and the easiest way to break it was with water, because water for some reason binds well with prana and can break the impure structures away, allowing your spirit to create a fresh and pure layer, which is why ritual baths for spiritual purposes are so fundamental in Hinduism. I didn’t have the time to explain all this while she was under a foreign influence and taking damage, because her mind wasn’t working properly and talking to her would have been a wasted effort. However, when she obeyed my order, her condition improved and she came to her senses, which is when I could provide an explanation. This is why obedience is obligatory, and understanding is optional for a student of yoga. For a master, however, understanding appears as a result of practice, and becomes a foundation of his philosophy and teaching, but instinct informed by the inner spiritual connection with God is always the foundational mechanism of his decision-making.

When I was writing my last article, re-reading my first book made me think about all the things that changed since then, because my thought processes then were obviously different.

The thinking behind the “Approach” is, essentially, that God is the ultimate reality and the ultimate goal; the humans are generally unaware of this and are trapped in all kinds of illusions, and they should revise their ideas about life and its goals and meaning, because the goal is to not only be in the presence of God, but be a presence of God. Also, there is the implicit assumption that there isn’t much time, that this is an important and urgent matter, and there will be consequences for failure.

So, what changed?

In 1999, I felt the urgency to impart this message on as many people as possible, in order to move them in the right direction while the window of opportunity is still there. I would argue with them, try to convince them, explain things, show things by example. But now, I feel none of that urge anymore. It’s not that those who are already on the right path should despair because the window of opportunity has closed, but for quite a while now if you asked me what is it that I want to tell people, I would shrug and leave, because there’s literally nothing I have to say. That’s the thing about time and the horizon of choice. The time runs out, and the only thing that remains when you fall below the horizon of choice is to experience the consequences of the choices you made.

There’s something that crossed my mind last night that I want to put into words.

It’s about fault-finding.

The immediate context was spirituality; people seem to pre-condition being able to learn from someone by absolute perfection and absence of all kinds of flaws and errors, supposedly because they want to guard themselves against failure or wrong paths or whatever, and the logic is that if you find one flaw or error, you proved that this person is not perfect and you don’t have to learn from them.

What that actually means is that a person that really doesn’t want to learn can make sure they stay exactly where they are by trying very hard to find fault with every person that could possibly help them, and this interpretation is actually a very good approximation of my experience with such people, especially since their thinking vastly differs from what I, myself, was doing when I wanted to learn.

You see, I approached things not with a loupe trying to see specks of dirt, but with a magnet. I went through lots of stuff and just picked up things that are useful from all kinds of sources, in order to clarify my own thinking and get better ideas. I even read many books by authors I vehemently disagree with, because by thinking about all the ways in which they are wrong I clarified my arguments as to why I actually think or feel what I do, and I would usually end up with a very concise argument that disproves the author’s position. Also, when I found an idea that clicked with me, I didn’t require the author to have literally everything about his other ideas or life in general perfect as a prerequisite for my acceptance of his idea. The idea sounded great, it clicked because it concisely expressed something I couldn’t properly verbalise before; now I replaced a vague concept with a clear one, thank you very much. I am also known for taking a vague and diluted concept from somewhere and condensing and purifying the line of thought into something much more coherent and concise, but you won’t see me going on about how the original author is an idiot. No, he’s good, maybe even great, and he came up with something great; I just focused it and enhanced the mantra.

This approach of using a magnet in order to collect needles from all sorts of haystacks is not really that different from the approach from the Upanishads, where one is advised to emulate a swan that can use his beak to separate milk from water, or the concept of a pure lotus flower that grows in a swamp. Basically, you are expected to do granular filtration and identify even a single good thought in a book that is otherwise rubbish, not throw out an otherwise great book because it contains one typo which proves that the author is not God.

Hello, fuckers: even the greatest of angels is “not God”, but you will not see God discarding him for that reason. No, you will see God loving and admiring him greatly because he is almost God. I see all kinds of idiots finding faults with obvious saints, ignoring the fact that God didn’t mind. Yes, Theresa of Avila was all kinds of flawed. Pray that you are that kind of flawed; that way, maybe God will show Himself in visions to you as well, so that you might see and achieve true perfection. Finding fault means one thing, really: it means that you are trying really hard to find an excuse for rejecting God and for keeping your sinful life intact. That’s what it really is. If you’re so perfect in your intellectual ivory tower that you can see all kinds of faults with saints and gurus, and God is absent from your vision, maybe your fault is much worse than those you are noticing with others. Maybe they have a problem here and there, but you are a problem, in the sense that your fundamental life choices are all sinful and wrong, and your intellect is merely a tool that rationalizes your sin.

It’s quite easy to make sarcastic quips about all the flaws and mistakes made by someone who was desperately trying to find their way around a difficult problem, and reach a solution they couldn’t properly grasp yet. Trying to solve a problem is hard. Being firmly entrenched in the problem and throwing rocks at others is much easier. It almost makes you forget how worthless you really are.

Unlike what you might imagine without diving deeply into the subject matter, the litRPG series I’ve been reading, “Salvos”, is in fact one of the most profound works I’ve read. Sure, some of it is just funny and silly, but there is really deep philosophy and emotion there, too. For instance, probably the best elaboration upon the concept of “love your enemies” is the chapter 81: “Lord of lies” of the book 9, where Salvos the protagonist talks about her personal philosophy and motives with a terrible bug-demon, a lord of illusions and curses, who is smart, calculating and cruel, responsible for the deaths of millions; essentially, someone that makes Hitler look like a little bitch. She talks to him while they fight, and it’s not the kind of talk you would expect, where someone tries to make the enemy doubt himself in order to weaken him, trying to instil fear and doubt. No; she talks to him with her heart open, explaining why she does everything for selfish reasons, but her selfishness encompasses other beings, those she loves and cares for, within her own identity, while in his selfishness there is place for none but himself.

She strikes him down with a mortal wound to his chest, and kneels by his side, gently talking to him about all the things she loves, that make her act to protect them, and in his final moments he has a change of heart, remembers one truly precious and unselfish moment from his childhood, and dies.

There is no obvious afterlife for the characters, yet the impression you get is that she saved him, in his last moments, and she just keeps kneeling beside his corpse later, and you try to guess her thoughts – probably something along the lines of “we could have been friends or even companions, had you only figured this out in time”.

She is portrayed as a character that is primarily driven by pride and selfishness, and yet she expands her sense of self to embrace so many different beings of different races, that her selfishness feels like divine protective love and inexplicable kindness, that heals even the soul of a mortal enemy, in death. Her enemy tried to argue that they are both the same: they act for selfish reasons, to which she answers, as a rebuttal: “And yet, I am Salvos, while you are Belzu.”, meaning that their selfishness is not the same because their sense of self is not the same.

This sentiment, where she is forced to kill her enemy in order to protect the world and the people she loves, but she doesn’t do it out of hatred or anger, and doesn’t even separate herself spiritually from her enemy even when she is forced to kill him, somehow does a better job at explaining the concept of loving your enemies than most Christian theologians. “Salvos” does an excellent job of portraying love as something with real dimension to it; something alive and powerful and fierce and fun; kindness and compassion that wields the power of a thermonuclear warhead.