People fail because they don’t actually want to succeed.

That sounds weirdly counter-intuitive, and they will forever protest against that statement, citing this or that reason or obstacle – either the spiritual technique isn’t working, or the guru isn’t “authentic” enough, or something else. Basically, they will change philosophies, religions, gurus and techniques ad nauseam, and the only things they will “improve” at are arrogance and cynicism.

When I say they don’t actually want to succeed, I mean that the professed goal of their practice is often different from the actual one. The professed goal is to “attain enlightenment” or “find God”. The actual goal might be to feel like you’re better than other people, so you’re creating a system of values that places you at or close to the top, with little effort. That’s why religious cults are famous for being a refuge for losers; outside, you’re nothing, but inside, you’re a bhakta of the Lord, or one of the “saved ones”, or whatever they think of themselves. It’s always easy: modify behaviour, change language, sometimes change outward appearance, eat vegetarian food, believe in the official doctrine, and you can pretend to be spiritual. It’s something that is easily done, provides great ego-boost, and the reason why people continue this charade often for decades is, basically, because they leave only when the price of continuing becomes greater than the price of letting go. Everything is measured in ego-stimulation or ego-trauma; what will people think or say, how will they perceive you, what will be your perceived social status. It’s probably wrong to say that those people don’t attain spiritual goals – it’s more accurate to say that they define spiritual goals in different terms than one would normally expect. If your goal is to feel great because your community thinks highly of you, and you mistake that feeling of ego-affirmation for spiritual bliss or something, and you genuinely have no goals other than to attain an even greater degree of this feeling, you won’t see this either as a spiritual wrong turn, or as a costly mistake. Someone like me might see it that way, but from your perspective, you’re doing great and I’m just jealous of your great success at spirituality. Only when the degree of ego-stimulation wanes will you actually start using your intellectual faculties to re-assess your situation, because if it feels good, you’ll just continue doing it. But when you’re on the bliss-high, the only “spiritual work” you’re doing has the function of increasing your stature within your community. The concept of actually deconstructing your desire-structure and other self-perpetuating patterns, of seeing how you use your energy to power ideas, to test moving your mental energy to different things, withdrawing it, increasing the strength just to test control, that’s not something you actually do. If spirituality is “a thing” in your social network, the social network is the primary interest, and “spirituality” could be cars, computers, guns, or breeding exotic animals, for all it matters. So, if you’re failing, you need to really honestly think about what you are actually trying to do. When people don’t make progress at something, it usually means they are quite content with their present situation, and they don’t see anything that’s so bad that it would require great sacrifice and effort to change. If they wanted to join a religious organization for the feeling of community, belonging to a group and having a common purpose, and they attained that, I’m not necessarily going to perceive their situation as “failure”. I would perceive it as failure only if their goal was to actually gain experience of the transcendental reality, to gain insight into their own spiritual momenta and attain power over themselves and spiritual states and energies in general. But if that’s not the goal, then not attaining it is not failure, it’s Tuesday.

There’s an expectation on the physical plane that individual beings have rights and privileges and legality of anything needs to be based on at least acknowledgment of that principle, through majority rule, if not outright consensus.

There is no such thing in “heaven”, or however you might call the higher planes of existence. The concept of everyone having equal rights is not only something that would be seen as strange, it would be seen as outright blasphemous. I will explain why.

You see, the physical plane creates a particular illusion, that existence is defined by the physical body. This creates an assumption that every-body has rights, and justice means equality of rights for all. However, if you remove the physical body, what remains can contradict this appearance greatly. Remove one body, and you have a whirl of energy, barely maintaining continuity of existence and consciousness.  Remove another body, you have a well defined “soul” with a complex history and deep consciousness. How do you even think about equality when the entire existence contradicts this concept?

Well, there actually is something similar. There is democracy in heaven. There can be a “vote”. It’s just that it’s not the “souls” that vote, because this is an arbitrary concept, since the “souls” can break apart or aggregate into more sophisticated structures. No, it’s the individual kalapas, the “particles of consciousness”, that “vote”. The more kalapas aggregate in a structure, the more value it has, because, for all intents and purposes, greater aggregation of kalapas into greater density-substances makes something “more of God” than something else. An astral bug is God to a very small degree. A Divine being that is crystallized light and consciousness is God to a much greater degree. That’s the closest I can get to describing it using human language, but it’s not very difficult to understand how for instance Jesus would be “more God” than a saint, a saint would be “more God” than a sinful soul, and a sinful soul would be “more God” than a soul so rudimentary it can barely maintain a continuity of individual consciousness.

Essentially, the kalapas “vote” by “choosing” to aggregate or to disperse, if you want to put it that way, and if something contains more kalapas it has more “rights”. It’s more complicated than that, because privileges can exist separately from the defining core of one’s being, but basically, if you meet a Divine being, saying “who gave you the right to judge me” might not be the smartest thing.

The concept of aggregation of kalapas forming souls is foreign to Christianity, but it’s commonly understood in Buddhism and if you think about it, it explains things much better than “God made souls to be different”. Well, yeah, you can put it that way, but aggregation of kalapas is how that happened, and you’re not an innocent victim of God’s whims, because your structure is a result of your own personal choices. For all intents and purposes, you created yourself by relating to everything else and defining yourself against God.

This means that the structure of authority in Heaven has nothing to do with democracy or “human rights”. It has more to do with “dignitas”, as the Romans would frame it. You have dignity that emanates from your being and is proportional to your spiritual magnitude. If you reduced your dignity by making evil choices, you might not be worth much and in fact your being might not last. On the other hand, if you made virtuous choices, if you always chose God before all other things and your actions reflected those choices, your dignity might be great, and will automatically grant you respect, privileges and, in fact, something akin to “rank”. Other beings might consult with you, your opinion will be sought and respected, and your will might have weight in all kinds of decision-making. It’s basically aristocracy, the rule of the virtuous, only for real. If you find yourself in a position where you lack personal dignity, and you act arrogantly as you were taught to act on Earth, calling upon your “rights” and questioning the “right” of others to pass judgement upon you, meat grinder might go brrrrrrrr.

And yes, as a postscriptum, lots of “dignitas” equals “imperium”, to keep it within the Roman analogy. Although, “imperium” is not something automatic that emanates from the soul-structure, it is a special thing that is granted, let’s say Divine Authority, literally the power of God or power sanctified by God, although I’m not happy with the formulation because it’s too mundane and sounds arbitrary, while it is everything but. It’s total and absolute.

I was thinking about one of those bad words, that have so many different meanings to so many different people, that they end up serving the purpose of miscommunication. The word is “spirituality”. I have two definitions for the word that I use interchangeably. The first is “worthless deluded bullshit that’s practiced by idiotic people who appropriate a set of superficialities in order to pretend to be supramaterially aligned in front of other such idiots, because apparently they aren’t able to fool the general audience”. The second definition is “the ability to feel and manifest properties of spirit in a profound and sophisticated manner”.

Let’s talk about the second definition and how I understand it.

There is a world-type, or mahat-tattva, where the laws are different from those in the material world-type, to the point where differences are greater than the similarities. When the physicists speak about the “multiverse”, which is a magic trick they pulled out of their arse when it turned out that some of the fundamental properties of this world are so sensitive that the slightest variance would skew the properties of the Universe to the point where we couldn’t exist in it. Instead of concluding what any reasonable person would conclude, which is that this Universe was obviously created by an intelligent being, and very likely with the purpose of producing us, among other possible goals, they decided it’s more parsimonic to assume existence of an infinite number of Universes with all kinds of random variations in the fundamental laws, where anthropic principle determines that the one we are perceiving necessarily has the properties where we could exist. Basically, instead of one intelligent creator that they can’t prove, they invented an infinity of other Universes that they can’t prove. They call it science. I call it a materialistic religion. But let’s return to the main point. If you vary fundamental laws of a material world, for instance the gravitational constant or the strong nuclear force, or the thing they call “dark energy”, which is basically the curvature of the empty-space manifold, you get a different Universe, but still a material one, even if you don’t get protons and neutrons in it. The mahat-tattva you are modifying is material.

The example of what the non-material world-type looks like is provided by the NDE testimonies in which they describe what Theosophy would call the “astral” world. Basically, it’s what you get when you have spiritual supremacy over the basic substance of the world. The material world is the exact opposite: designed to keep the spiritual forces at the weakest possible level of influence relative to the basic substance of the world, where it’s still possible for spirit to witness the world and bind to it in some manner. To be spiritual in the material world, as a soul bound to a material body and perceiving mostly through the material senses, is to retain awareness of oneself as essentially spiritual, to retain ability to influence spiritual realities beyond the confines of matter, to communicate in a direct spiritual way with other beings that have that ability, and to generally function in a way that would change only quantitatively were you to shed your material body. To me, being “spiritual” doesn’t mean anything even remotely translated as “good”, which seems to be implied for most people. No, to me an incarnated demon that retains “astral” powers and abilities is spiritual. He can wield spiritual powers, perceive and affect spiritual realities and his way of functioning wouldn’t change significantly were he suddenly freed of his material confines. It’s just that while incarnated you perceive him, or her, as a dark mage or a witch, and while discarnated you perceive him or her as a dark malevolent spiritual force. Being spiritual doesn’t make you good.

I don’t perceive myself as “good”, either. “Good” is what people call a combination of weak and soft in the head, or, conversely, a combination of useful and harmless. God is not “good”. I like it how God is described in the Bhagavad-gita, as so awesome that his best friend basically shits himself in fear. That’s not what “spiritual people” are meditating on, not by a stretch of imagination, because you don’t get to meditate on such awesomeness, power and greatness, and get to be a weak, pathetic, broken person that “spiritual people” invariably are. You are spiritual if here, in the confines of physical matter, you can wield spiritual power in ways qualitatively if not quantitatively identical to the way gods, demons and other spiritual beings wield them in the spiritual worlds. Sure, when a demon wields spiritual powers, the results lack the awesomeness and brilliance that is obvious when the gods wield them, but a demon is at least capable of doing something. If you’re not even capable of doing that much, what does it make you? An incarnated god can open the doors of spiritual initiation, he can infuse words with mantric substance and give them power, he can infuse physical matter with spirit. An incarnated demon can wield darkness, cast spells and curses, recognize powerful beings and try to bind them or interfere with them. An ordinary human is basically a NPC; doesn’t perceive anything spiritual, even if he does perceive something, he doesn’t understand it or act on it, is driven by logical self-serving understanding of his material situation as provided by his material senses, tries to improve his social situation and everything he or she sees as meaningful and relevant is, basically, material. If an incarnated demon has better understanding of reality than you, and if he has more spiritual freedom to perceive and act, in the material world, it means a demon is your spiritual superior, which makes you a sack of meat.

And we finally come to the reason why I perceive “spiritual people” as worthy only of contempt and ridicule: they for the most part lack any ability to perceive the actual spiritual realities. They lack any ability to affect spiritual realities, to basically wield spiritual power. Their spiritual magnitude is negligible, and yet they talk and act as if they have a monopoly on spirituality, as if it’s a domain where they have the authority to pass judgment. They are spiritually weak, broken, usually mentally ill, socially incompetent, and their “spirituality” is basically an illusion created to escape their material problems, but no actual spiritual forces or breakthroughs are present. Basically, they are something a dog pisses on, in passing.

“Religious music” is usually quite terrible and cringe-worthy; usually a generic tune and text that’s a recital of someone’s cultist brainwashing. However, there are examples of tunes that were good enough to become famous hits, with the religious undertone that’s either so subtle that it flew under the radar, or so over the top that it was perceived as a joke. I’ll make a list, just to preoccupy myself with something less depressing than the news. I already giggle like a schoolgirl thinking how surprising some of the titles may be. 🙂

Desireless – Voyage Voyage

Mr. Mister – Kyrie

Mr. Mister – Broken Wings

Bobby McFerrin – Don’t worry be Happy

Boy George – Hare Krishna

The Beloved – Sweet Harmony

Ofra Haza – Im Nin’alu

These are, of course, the ones I like (ok, I don’t really like “Sweet Harmony”, it’s self-righteous propagandistic bullshit). There are at least two I profoundly hate on philosophical and theological grounds, because they reject transcendence in favor of this world; basically, they are a “fuck you” to God.

Lilly Wood and the Prick and Robin Schulz – Prayer in C

Queen – Who Wants To Live Forever