Category Archives: religion

Illusion over substance

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I’ve been thinking about how I don’t care about the appearance or an illusion of a thing, and would rather have the thing itself, and how often people do the opposite – sacrifice a thing in order to have the appearance of it.

Perhaps that’s too abstract, but let’s take luxury goods as an example. Unlike what people tend to think, they are not something rich people buy because they can afford it. They are something middle class and actually poor people aspirationally buy in order to create an impression of wealth, thinking it will magically attract wealth into their lives if they appropriate its appearance, or something. And sure, there is a segment of rich people who also buy luxury goods in order to create the appearance that their lives are not empty and meaningless and that their wealth did actually help them achieve some worthwhile thing. However, most wealthy people invest in projects that are actually worthwhile, at least in their opinion. Traditionally, libraries, hospitals etc. bear names of their wealthy donors. They finance welfare projects for the poor, infrastructure, science and so on. Sure, they will buy a big mansion, yacht and jet plane, but the majority of their focus usually lies in making something lasting in the world they will be remembered for. Also, unlike the aspirational middle class, the people who think they will be perceived as belonging to the important class by wearing a Rolex and an expensive suit, the actually wealthy people are known by name. You get to be important by doing something that matters, not by puffing yourself up with status symbols that define your status – as that of a desperate wannabe social climber.

So, what do status symbols actually do? They convert actual money into appearance of wealth, and in the case of middle class people, they aggravate their actual financial situation by incurring debt and depleting their bank account instead of that money being invested into something that will actually help them – basically, if you want to improve your social standing, buying LVMH shares will do more for you than buying their products.

Cars are likely the worst, since they cost a significant portion of a real-estate purchase, they depreciate rapidly and need to be replaced with some regularity, and if you want to use a car as a status symbol, you’d have to refresh it every five years or less, and that will be such an impact to your finances, it might actually prevent you from achieving any worthy goals. The expensive cars are for people what Pleistocene tar pits were for wolves and sabretooth cats – an irresistibly attractive fatal thing where their bones get to be found at a later date.

In both cases – cars and luxury goods – you create an appearance of wealth at the cost of wealth itself. It is something that doesn’t matter if you’re so wealthy that this doesn’t actually cut into your wealth significantly, or at least no more than a good dinner cuts into the income of an average person. For instance, if the price of your car is your annual income, such a purchase is literally destroying your financial future. But if the price of your car is one or two months of your income, and you keep the car until the entirety of its useful life had been exhausted, this might be a reasonable and frugal purchase. But have this in mind: a very rich person will buy an expensive car for their pocket money. It will be a fraction of their monthly income. If you try to imitate them, you probably could, but you will have to financially destroy yourself in the attempt, and it will do absolutely nothing useful for you. It won’t make you rich, it will make you poorer. It won’t get you into the company of rich people where you’ll do business and become one of them. You’d still have to figure out how to do that regardless of the car. You’re buying an illusion of wealth at the cost of the actual thing.

There are things other than wealth where this applies as well – for instance, sacrificing happiness in order to obtain the illusion of it, but wealth is the easiest example. The most fatal one, however, is spiritual advancement, where one has to choose between the thing and appearance thereof very early on, and almost everybody chooses to appear spiritual. You can imagine what that looks like – read the right books so you know the lingo, be vegetarian, believe in karma and reincarnation, and so on. Add celibacy and poverty for the next level. Do that for twenty years, and you’re perceived as a genuine spiritual seeker. The problem is, not only did you achieve absolutely nothing of value in the spiritual sense; you achieved things that are making it impossible for you to even start. You made yourself into a circus act. And, most importantly, you have your “achievements” to defend as a matter of ego support structure, which means you won’t listen to good advice and change your stupid behaviour when someone like me tells you’re merely making a fool out of yourself. Essentially, you sacrificed the possibility of getting the real thing in order to obtain the appearance thereof.

Why do people do it?

Because it’s easy to copy the appearance of something; or, at least people think it is, if they believe they know what the real thing is supposed to look like, and in the case of spirituality, they absolutely don’t. They also have “magical thinking”, and they believe that if they become similar enough to something in appearance, this will make them more like that thing in substance. It’s a “cargo cult” mentality.

Let me tell you how you become rich. You do it by having more money and other assets. You don’t do it by having expensive shit on you. You become “spiritual” by having the soul structure and size of the angels and persons of God. It’s not done by trying to make yourself into a stereotypical cultist. I know that children learn by pretending to be, or at least they think they learn, and adults seemingly just keep this up but in the adult version, but it’s not working. It didn’t work for you when your were children, and it’s certainly not working for you as adults. Imitation is not a way of becoming – it’s a way of losing substance in order to obtain appearance. Just stop it.

Work work…

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I ended up modifying my smtp server so that gmail would no longer bounce messages; it was easier than I thought, some simple things on the linux side and mostly DNS work. SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Sounds obscure, but very easy to do if you have a good tutorial and know how to follow the instructions. Fortunately, I kept my Linux skills sharp enough for this kind of stuff.

So, I can now again use my own mail server instead of Google’s, until someone in America again decides to adopt, modify and extinguish some existing and perfectly good open protocol. To defend the world against all kinds of evils, of course, because they’re the good guys. That’s sarcasm, BTW.

I used to be annoyed about the part of the NDE experiences where people come before the Judge and he shows them the retrospective of their life. At that time, I was going through my memories with a metaphoric magnifying glass, finding everything messed up in order to fix it, and it seemed to me that my life is basically all about fixing traumatic shit – traumatic either because it was something I did wrong, or because I was in a desperate situation. In any case, it looked like there’s almost nothing good there, and yet it’s something that’s been put on my plate and now I have to deal with it. If, after all that, someone’s first idea is to make me look into all that again, after it’s all over, I thought I’d be so annoyed I’d chase that person around Heaven with a stick.

And yet, I recently had a situation where exactly that happened; someone showed me where to look, again, with a different perspective, and my whole understanding of my childhood had changed. Not because I missed something before; I was very thorough. I did, however, inspect only myself; my role, my condition, my actions, and apparently that was not enough, because other people’s roles and actions in all of that fundamentally change the whole picture.

It’s not that my approach was wrong. It was incomplete, but not wrong. It’s like handling a medical emergency without handling the war that caused it. Necessary, and good, but doesn’t actually deal with the wider picture.

I did try to understand what’s the point. It is now pretty obvious what happened – Satan seems to have deceived me and modified my life in order to harm me in a very specific way. Why is a different question.

It certainly had consequences, and if I assume that those consequences are what he aimed for, apparently he harmed me in ways that would distort my own perception of myself and make it impossible, or at least incredibly hard, to reclaim myself here, in this body. The goal seems to be to make it impossible for me to coalesce my physical experience and person with my true, original being, because he blew so much dust in my face, I was supposed to spend the rest of this life navel gazing somewhere – trying to repent for and correct my supposed sins, which turned out to be forced errors or even someone else’s faults entirely. Basically, someone else showered me with shit and then tried to convince me it’s obviously my problem – after all, I do stink. Wouldn’t be right to run away from facts, right? Fortunately, God knows better what the facts actually are. Convincing me of them, however, seems to be an ongoing effort, but I seem to be making progress now. I would expect it’s related to the karmic processing, because it’s making me stronger. Me, as a physical being with layers of spiritual energetics of a very high order, as opposed to me as a being that actually incarnates through this.

How does that even work? I mean, I get the general idea. You attain initiation here in the physical, and this creates an energetic layer that makes it possible for you to live a deeper form of spiritual reality, and in my case incarnate more of my true being. It’s a partial incarnation until you get those energy bodies high enough and solid enough that there’s basically no difference between that and the incarnating entity. But that’s not actually something that even happens, historically. Not in this order of magnitude. I feel there’s something of unique importance going on, and I can’t figure it out yet. It has the “on Earth, as in Heaven” quality to it. For the first time, ever.

Not there yet; not quite. But I’m working on it. Apparently, I need to transform all this karmic mass in order to get there. The quantities are enormous, and I wonder what it even is, because it’s not like there are many things this big anywhere.

False expectations

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I was just thinking how people have incredibly silly ideas about what it means to be God. Before Jesus, I would actually understand it – they would expect God’s appearance in this world to be something of supernatural majesty, authority and power, where God appears and everybody drops on their collective arse in fear and obedience. If God appears in human form, they would still expect him to be superhuman, and all the laws of the world to obey him.

But Jesus showed something different. God needed to be born in a barn among the farm animals because there was no room for his parents at the inn. There were persistent questions about his godhood, to the point where the religious authorities decided to have him crucified for blasphemy.

Just think about it. Having someone executed for blasphemy means that for some people it was “obvious” that it’s a matter of an ordinary human “pretending to be a God”. This means that all the miracles attributed to Jesus were either generally unknown, or questionable, or apocryphal. It wasn’t obvious, in a sense that Jesus looked the way he’s historically been painted, with light and authority of God radiating from him, making it obvious he’s a person of God.

If you read the gospels carefully, you’ll understand that he was often starving, and living in abject poverty. He was constantly put into question. He was persecuted. Multiple attempts against his life were made. Does that sound like someone who was “obviously” God? To me, it seems that only the most spiritually intuitive people figured out enough to guess right, but it was far from obvious. Only his resurrection answered this question finally and decisively.

Apparently, people haven’t learned from this, and they still have the assumption that if God were to be born as a human, he’s be a perfect human with superpowers, everything he’s do would succeed, all the resources, energies and laws of the world would serve him and it would be an obvious thing.

No, it would not. Those expectations got Jesus crucified. Those exact expectations are why that Lama poisoned Milarepa – if he’s truly enlightened, I won’t be able to harm him, and if he’s not, I will discredit a fraud. The crucial wrong expectation is that God rules this world, and being one with God basically makes you omnipotent here. But think about it – if Satan rules here, being God merely makes you a target of great hatred from the one who rules this place, and decides who gets the resources, and who gets crucified.

Busy

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I was kind of preoccupied last week or so, and it wasn’t just one thing. I did, however, get some nice pictures this evening.

A7CR with the Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN kicks serious ass for such walks; mostly because the combination is very small and light.

I was thinking about many things.

For instance, how people routinely misunderstand everything I say about spending karma, because it’s such an uncommon thing that almost nobody has any experience with it, and they misinterpret it as some kind of rationalization for depression and so on. It’s absolutely nothing of the kind. People have no experience with it because they are mostly busy creating sinful actions and rationalising them; if they actually ever feel remorse for their actions, it’s usually a rare, almost once in a lifetime event. Spending other people’s karma… that’s exceedingly rare, and most people don’t even understand the mechanism, or the possibility of such a thing. People are afraid of this kind of a spiritual pain to the point that they wrap its potential causes under all kinds of insulation, and when that fails, they tend to completely break down. That one would willingly endure that, and to no fault of one’s own, is beyond their comprehension. So, they invent interpretations, which are of course as wrong as they are silly.

The same goes for darshan. No, it’s not something I can pull out of my arse when I’m feeling bad. I wish. It’s not something you can remember, invoke, reconstruct or imagine. When it’s not there, it’s not there and there’s nothing you can do about it. When it’s there, it’s like the light being suddenly turned on in the dark – and human experience in general is a very dark thing, compared to that. This is the true light, something you can’t even imagine until it’s there, and it’s so much not under my control that I had literal decades without such experiences, and I couldn’t do anything about it either. You can’t remember it, because a memory is merely a shadow, something of a lower dimension of existence, like a faded photograph compared to the actual person. You can’t cause it when it’s absent, the way you can’t cause someone dead to appear merely because you miss them. When people think it’s something I imagined in order to comfort myself, I find it incredibly silly, because if that were so, I wouldn’t have to endure decades without it then. No, it’s an absolutely genuine phenomenon: a person of God stopping by to say “hi”. If you haven’t experienced it, you certainly can’t imagine what it’s like.

There’s a good reason why those two things – spending of karma, and darshan of God – are such opposite experiences. Sin by definition binds you to darkness that is the opposite of the light of God. When Christians talk about sin being something that removes you from God, they do actually know what they are talking about, because that’s exactly how it works. So, when you’re processing sin, it’s the least desirable experience possible for someone who loves God. It’s a combination of pain and spiritual darkness, low energy and all kinds of energetic, physical and emotional damage. It is, however, an extremely effective way of growing your soul and increasing your spiritual powers. It doesn’t feel like it when It’s ongoing; in fact, it feels like being immersed in a spiritual equivalent of raw sewage. But in pauses, when you can feel your purity, power and all sorts of new good stuff that wasn’t there before, it feels very much worth it. But when it starts again, you think: if I ever say anything is worth this, beat me with a spiked club please. 🙂

It’s a vastly unpleasant cure for a terrible thing, but its ultimate fruits are incredible.

Can anyone do it? Well, start with your own, I guess. Everybody has abundance of sin to purify with remorse, and if they don’t think they do, it just means they are so totally immersed in darkness, they lack even the concept of God’s light. There’s a reason why saints talk about their sins, and sinners talk about how much they love and accept themselves. The reason is, when God’s light turns on, you see yourself in true perspective, and you can finally admit what you truly are, in an absolute sense. When you are in complete darkness, you feel the need to comfort yourself, convince yourself you’re fine. None of that exists in the presence of God. If there are impurities, they hurt. You feel a strong need to do something about them. The true perspective is so great that it makes it possible for you to admit things you had to hide from earlier. It’s a strange thing – in a sense, both sinners and saints lie. The sinners lie that they are good, and the saints lie that they are bad.

As I said, I’m thinking about many things.

Darshan

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What does it feel like? I know people think about it when I describe darshan, especially if they haven’t experienced it themselves.

It depends, you know. Depends on who it is – which person of God; depends on whether you know each other already and have an established relationship from before. Depends on what they are there for – to warn, to ask, to teach, to comfort.

But if I had to generalize, I’d say it feels like being restored to your true self. I usually have all sorts of anxieties and stress around me when I’m spending karmic matter. It feels like taking other people’s sin, but in atomic form, so it’s not a coherent thing. When I spend it, I feel pain, and I mentally repeat “I’m sorry”, without knowing exactly what I’m sorry for, because it’s too fragmented and garbled to carry any kind of information, but I’m sincere regardless. But after being immersed in that for some time, it feels terrible. I’m no longer sure of anything, because everything in my consciousness was sin, suffering and remorse for days, weeks, months… sometimes years. If it’s years, I no longer know whether it’s karmic transformation or have I been lost, fallen and rejected by God, and I can always think of reasons and rationalisations, and this anxiety makes me focus, makes me try to do everything right, cross every t and dot every i. I can’t tell what God thinks about what I’m doing, but I can at least try to do everything properly, trusting in what I remember of the truth that I saw, when I saw it, long ago, and trusting it’s still the same, that nothing changed; but I don’t know. I’m never sure, and this uncertainty is amplified by the pain and remorse and suffering of karmic transformation.

And when I am in the presence of God, it’s always sudden, without any fanfare or introduction, or announcement. One moment there’s only myself and the misery of what I’m processing, and the next moment there is a presence, and the quality of that presence is like having a long, sharp thorn removed from my body – all the anxiety, the uncertainty, not knowing what God would say, what he would think about things I had to do in the mean time, about the terrible condition I’m in because of all that stuff I’m processing – it all vanishes instantly, because I know. Sometimes I feel information being passed, and sometimes not, but the presence itself is a truth of a higher order, and it makes me know things without words or thoughts.

What can you know without words or thoughts? Well, I can know that I worried for no reason. If my old friend still sees me the same way, it means this shit didn’t really stick to me, it didn’t corrupt me, change me into something He would not want to be associated with. There’s that sense of being with someone who was there with you before the world, before the stars, before all those things people assume were forever here, but we remember them being born or made. It’s the sense of just being there and knowing that if one of us needs to go to hell to deal with some business, the other will watch his back, in such a serious and dedicated way that he’ll have absolutely nothing better to do until I’m safely out. That’s what Lord Vishnu feels like, to me. There are limits to what He can do here. However, the feeling of His presence alone tells enough – to Him, it doesn’t matter that I’m dying under a terrible burden, that I’m all shades of fucked up, deprived of power, memories and my true being, trying to feel through darkness and remember who I am. He knows who I am, and He treats me as if I’m my old self, in my full power, with all the stuff I can’t even remember properly now. He doesn’t treat me any differently – He’s the same as when we had coffee up there, before the world. In a sense, He’s the complete opposite to how humans treat me; they see my limitations and barely anything beyond them, and think I can’t amount to much. He sees much more of me than I can even guess in this state, and shrugs the limitations off as incidental and irrelevant. No words exchanged, but all of it is felt, and the effect is profoundly restorative and healing. Just that feeling that He remembers me in my complete form, and this here – He understands it, and understands what will be when it passes, and looks forward to us having that coffee.

That’s what it feels like.