I once mentioned that I’m not an egalitarian, but you would probably assume wrong if you tried to guess the rationale behind this. You see, I’ve seen more diversity in souls, human or otherwise, than you could possibly imagine. Especially, I’ve seen diversity in souls that inhabit a similar body type; for instance, in a “young European woman” body type I’ve seen everything from completely generic, unformed low-astral structures, in great variety of structures and shapes, high-astral (some would call them mental) very sophisticated structures sometimes bordering on outright vajra initiation, and outright Gods on the extreme end – structures that use vajras, not only blue but even higher, as “ornaments”, while the spiritual body itself is of much higher quality, which you can’t imagine before having actually seen it. Also, within the spectrum of very similar body types I’ve seen huge variety in intelligence, from “stupid as fuck”, to “genius”, and in character, from “Satan’s asshole” to “aspect of God”. You can’t be an egalitarian if you’ve seen all this. Also, I’ve seen huge differences in typical soul-types between India and Europe. Obviously, incarnation is not a random thing. You don’t just randomly incarnate somewhere. This doesn’t mean that soul-type strictly follows a racial or a cultural group, but I did notice strong patterns. For instance, after getting used to the soul-types prevalent in India, I was shocked at the much greater sophistication and complexity of the ordinary Italians in the airport in Rome.

You would expect that the ability to see this would be exciting or entertaining. I assure you, for the most part it’s the exact opposite, because the statistical distribution of soul-types seems to follow a Gaussian pattern, which means that most of what I see is a very simplistic, coarse type that doesn’t differ greatly from the soul-types I saw in animals. In very rare cases you see something that’s not actually animalistic, demonic or disgusting. As you can imagine, observing all this, all the time, gave me my wonderful optimism regarding human nature. 🙂 Seeing the same energy-structure in a man and in a dog makes it quite impossible for me to see humans in general as my equals; if anything, I define my equal in terms of a soul-type, not a body-type.

Since, obviously, in the spiritual worlds there are no material laws, we cannot measure the spiritual powers in material units. This, however, doesn’t mean that laws and limitations don’t apply.

One of the limitations is that a being cannot harm another being to the extent greater than the harm it was inflicted upon by that same being. In practice, this means that the very laws of the spiritual world take form of an invisible shield that protects beings from harm, and the only way to invalidate this shield is to sin against another being, in which case this being can retaliate, but only to the justified extent, after which retaliation no longer “goes through”. You will now ask how is it possible for an offence to take place at all if harm is forbidden by the very fabric of reality, but it’s possible. For instance, if someone attempts an obvious use of force against someone’s will, that won’t work. However, if one gives permission and his limits are exceeded, this is a form of harm. We can use sex as an example – you cannot rape someone, but you can exceed the limits of acceptable during consensual sex, and this form of harm can be retaliated against, but one cannot over-compensate.

From this, it is obvious that the main form of harmful attack is performed by trickery and illusion, by luring someone into accepting something that turns out to be harmful. This is nothing new – in Hindu scriptures, this was elaborated in great volume, and it was illustrated how even the Gods can be tricked into granting blessings that can be abused and become a source of great trouble, because once a God gives his word, he is bound by it and cannot rescind it. This allows for recursive complexity, for instance a God grants a blessing to another, lesser being, to grant or refuse access to some holy artefact. This being can be tricked more easily than God, but his grant has the power of God’s own word. Also, the artefact in question can have power greater than its guardian, and the consequences of granted access can go far beyond the scope of guardian’s normal powers and responsibilities. My highest-probability estimate is that this is how this world happened to be created. There’s a special artefact, which is basically a spiritual jewel which was crated as a remnant of God’s will in touch with the Creation, which was to grant the ability to the spiritual beings to manifest their creativity by spawning alternative realities, basically creating the modified laws under which new “universes” can be spawned. Since, obviously, one can’t be allowed to access this thing just like that, some worthy spiritual being was appointed to approve or deny requests for its use. This jewel, let’s say that it’s basically God’s power to create Universes, to control their local space and time, to adjust their laws, and this ability is bound by the desire for the beings to evolve and know God. This jewel was both created by God, and is an aspect of God, which is and isn’t separate from God. Basically, like all high spiritual realities, it contains its own paradoxes. If you will, you can call it the world engine – it’s something akin to an infinitely powerful computer which can render an infinite number of discrete Universes, inhabited by countless spiritual beings, and create realities which are both illusory and real – illusory because only God is real, and real because they can be objectively perceived and tested in all kinds of ways.

Since this jewel isn’t astral in its nature, only a control aperture (my term for this structure, BTW) is located in the astral world, and this control aperture is like a “pointer” to a memory location in programming terminology, or a ssh terminal with root access to the server. If the control aperture is closed, the astral world loses access to the jewel. However, it is the will of God for the jewel to be accessible to the spiritual beings with legitimate claims, which creates and maintains the control aperture, which is guarded by an elder.

How this person got to be appointed to the role, I don’t know. I do know, however, that there was no precedent of misuse, and that he was not inherently suspicious of requests. The problem with Sanat Kumar is that he seems to have been insane, in the sense that he didn’t differentiate between reality and his wishes, and one can’t really tell whether he’s lying. When Sanat Kumar tells you he has a wonderful plan which will create a new way for souls to evolve more quickly, under more compassionate laws, where the majority of those who would otherwise be lost would be redeemed and attain unity with each other and God, he really believes it. There seems to have been something suspicious about it, since he was granted access to the “world engine”, but in a limited way. Also, there were negotiations. He had to accept a time limit. However, he was granted non-disclosure on the exact amount of the limit; so, nobody but him and God can know the exact date of expiration. The existence of the time limit is not protected, however; one can be told that it exists. Anyone is allowed to enter his creation and experience it, by accepting his rules upon entry. I do know that I had a very good idea that it would end very badly, despite the fact that the specifics of the world’s ruleset were not known at the time. I also know that my objection was disregarded by the guardian. You can guess the rest. It all ended badly, and since the thing couldn’t be deactivated from the outside (God gave his word, remember?), some beings attempted to at least help the trapped ones from the inside, in turn becoming trapped, and attracting others who tried to help them.

So, basically, God didn’t directly grant permission for this shithole to be created. In fact, its creation and nature are so immensely against God’s will, that the guardian of the aperture apparently died – the last thing I can feel from him is great remorse, sorrow and regret for allowing this horror of horrors to take place. However, since it was his right to basically sign off on requests with God’s authority, the permission still holds.

You can see the problem. Apparently, in the astral world you can lie if you’re crazy enough to believe you’re telling the truth. Also, if you really believe that something will prove to be better than God’s design, you are believed to be acting in good intention. And God didn’t interfere much, because free will and creativity would be impossible if he immediately blocked everything he didn’t like. The analogy with sex is valid – you accept to bring someone to your bedroom, and if that person turns out to be a psychopath who starts doing crazy and disgusting shit during sex, you can regret it, but you’re fucked anyway. You can’t become un-fucked by wishing it.

I heard an argument why this world couldn’t have been created by Satan, and that’s argument by beauty: essentially, the world contains beautiful things, which Satan couldn’t have created. This argument assumes that Satan couldn’t simply copy and modify a previous structure, inheriting most of the design. Also, I myself made the argument that any being who would be qualified for the role of a devil couldn’t possibly exceed the astral level of initiation, and creation of this world required at least causal level of ability, which is a requirement for modifying the astral mahat-tattva. This argument is much better, and I discovered the basic mechanism that made this possible only recently, and only after years of unmasking layer after layer of deceptions and information-blocks. This world is a paradox – it was created by God, and it truly exists only within God’s spirit, because that’s basically what the jewel is. It’s the intent within God’s spirit to make certain forms of creativity and will-expression possible for the spiritual beings who are below God-level of initiation. Also, the ruleset which was used to create this world started from the astral template, which Sanat Kumar modified, by ordering the jewel to produce a certain kind of results. He was constrained by the necessity of staying true to the wording of the request that he made, and which was granted, so he couldn’t deviate too much into outright evil. Instead, he used ambiguity, things that will be defensible as if having been made in good intent, but which would certainly or almost certainly produce evil. The keyword was “temptation”, because you supposedly cannot show how good you are unless you are presented with a viable temptation for you to refuse or accept. The wording of his commands was such, that he managed to evade punishment for quite a while, and was only caught when he let his guard down for a fraction of a second, when he was completely sure that utmost victory was achieved.

Why am I telling you all this? I’m doing it to illustrate the dangers of the spiritual world. The danger is in consent. Your free will is supreme. Nobody can hurt you or force you against your will. However, with your consent, absolutely anything is possible. You can be deceived, trapped, hurt and destroyed to the last kalapa. In the world based on willpower, idea, consciousness and form, the creative power of a command, or a permission, is not to be underestimated. So, basically, you need to be very careful in the wording of your “spells”, because they are binding contracts. Accepting surprises is potentially deadly. Giving others permission to show you “something” is potentially deadly. Always give yourself the ability to cancel your permission or acceptance of anything at any point if it turns out to be unacceptable. Never allow anything that will modify or inhibit your memory, so that you can’t recall what you accepted or the terms according to which acceptance can be revoked. Why is it relevant? Because you were attracted by something that felt wonderful, for instance a display of the best moments of your potential life, showing you moments of sexual delight or great achievement and satisfaction, and you said “I want that”, you were asked to sign off on a contract which says that you accept all responsibility, that you will hold everyone blameless for any possible adverse consequences of your experience, that you accept the rules of the game, and that you acknowledge that you were informed that what you were shown was an incomplete experience, where only the positive achievements were displayed, but everything you were shown was true. And the next thing you know is that you opened your eyes in an ob-gyn ward, not knowing who you are and how you got here, but wanting to go back to the good place which you could no longer remember.

To be honest, a good number of you reading this are nowhere near that stupid, and you are here because you knew exactly what you’re getting yourselves into, and why. Most of you know who you are.

With spiritual bodies, there are two main considerations: quality and quantity, or, in other words, how sophisticated the substance and structure are, and how big it is. A computer equivalent of this is estimating a CPU’s power by knowing what technological generation it belongs to, and how fast it’s clocked. The more sophisticated technology gives the greatest advantage, and within that, the greater clock speed the better. Comparing “size” alone, in this case clock speed, doesn’t tell you anything valuable. In spiritual terms, comparing spiritual beings by size gives you an important information only if you first look at the quality of structure, which primarily means the energy level and density of the substance it’s made of. One vajra-jewel might “unzip” into entire universes of astral substance, and yet it might look small, the same way a black hole or a neutron star might look small, yet its structure reveals the truth. It’s like comparing mainframe computers from the 1980s with the smartphones of today; an old mainframe is physically imposing but the smartphone is actually more powerful, because it’s all about structure. However, if you build a mainframe system out of modern building blocks, it will have the same power per litre of volume compared to the smartphone, and greater volume will produce linearly more power. This is what I mean by comparing quality first, and quantity second.

So, let’s imagine that physical volume units can be assigned to astral entities, which is not the case but I don’t know how else to formulate this so that it would make sense. A gaseous-form being with a volume of one litre is lesser than a gaseous-form being with a volume of ten litres, all else being same. However, one millilitre of crystal-form being might be greater than an arbitrarily large gaseous-form – and here I mean planetary sizes, because the quality is different and it’s like comparing ordinary matter which is mostly empty space, and comparing neutronium, which is nucleon-density, zero empty space. My observation, when undergoing initiation into vajra 20 years ago, was that the relation between ordinary astral substance and vajra is even more extreme than the relation between rarified gas and a black hole. So, the thing to have in mind is that when I speak of spiritual jewels, or vajra-stuff, it relates to astral matter like black holes relate to cooky jars. It’s literally mind-boggling density. I had the misfortune to have to deal with some corrupted spiritual jewels (yes, that can happen), and that’s the most wicked and malignant shit you can imagine. I’m not sure what’s the physics behind the corruption, but I do know that the creators of the jewels pledged them to Sanat Kumar, and something happened to them which corrupted their entire mass. Not only is that shit bad, it also caused accidents, when my girls cast a glance with their astral vision to see what the hell was it that wrecked my system so badly, and a few kalapas of that substance transferred into their astral bodies, and I had the opportunity to watch what happens when a trained yogi with years of experience dealing with all sorts of bad shit gets struck by that. It’s like watching microscopic black holes tearing through matter. Nothing they could do with astral spell-casting and shielding had any effect, because the “mass” of that shit was too great, although it looked like only a few particles. I had to intervene and transform those particles myself. Basically, if you can imagine black dust that’s as sharp as diamond dust, and as massive as singularity, and simply shreds through everything due to its mass, you get the idea. One kalapa of this substance expands into entire nightmare-worlds of ordinary astral stuff. The expansion rate is huge. I didn’t measure it, because I don’t have any quantifiable metrics at my disposal, but it’s like that zip-bomb file, which is a few kilobytes large but when you unzip it, it expands into terabytes of data, that was used in the BBS era to break a BBS when it tried to unpack the transmission. In order to deal with this kind of stuff you need to have the capacity to move the particles of this matter, in its compressed form, to “order” them around, to orderly decompose them into constituents of lower magnitude, and absorb and transform them in that state.

Why am I talking about this? Because I sometimes mention the spiritual jewels, and I know beyond doubt that almost everybody routinely misunderstands that, thinking that it’s some “normal” but “prettier” form of astral matter, like diamonds are a prettier form of coal. No, it’s not like that. Those “jewels” are not astral matter, they are supercompressed to the point of being another form of matter entirely. The world “causal” is usually thrown around in this context, because that’s how Vedanta classifies things – matter, astral, causal – but I’m not convinced that it makes much sense. Aurobindo’s term, “supramental”, is definitely more accurate, because this is substance that is superior to the mental plane (or, high astral, as I would more accurately name it). The way a black hole is physical matter compressed to such an extent that it goes beyond what matter is normally supposed to do, compressing a whole star into a mathematical point, while retaining its mass. How that works, nobody really knows. Also, in theory vajra is not supposed to be corruptible, although there are marginal scenarios which make it theoretically possible. For instance, if you have a being whose spiritual body is still astral, but contains spiritual jewels, this being as a whole can incarnate in the physical world, be deceived into thinking that this world was created by God, and pledge its spiritual powers and merits to the world’s creator and his intents with this world. I don’t know the actual process of commitment that ought to have been followed in order for such a claim to hold, but I know the aftermath – such beings appear to have been consumed into powering evil, and the jewels were so corrupted, probably due to the fact that they powered immensely sinful deeds such as deceiving other souls by providing a source of false attraction within this world, they had to be deconstructed and transformed at the kalapa level. Essentially, other than Sanat Kumar himself, those jewels were the nastiest, most dangerous things I have ever seen, and I wish to never have such “opportunity” again.

So, we have now established that spiritual matter can exist in many qualitatively and quantitatively different forms. The next thing to understand is evolution of the soul.

The first thing to understand about this is that majority of the Eastern religions assume there’s only one path, only one goal, and that evolution is basically the process of rubber-stamping, of having a soul conform to a pre-existing template of perfection, which is then called enlightenment. It’s either nirvana, or kaivalya, or moksha, but essentially, there’s an assumption that the sinful and bound souls are all different, but that the enlightened souls are all similar, or that they simply merge into a supra-reality where they lose any kind of personal identity. But really, what would be the point of that? To have the end-point reproduce the origin? Really? I don’t think so. Instead, what seems to be happening is that the souls go through vastly different paths and formative experiences, and as a result they are all vastly different. I don’t say “vastly different” like “they are different because they haven’t evolved yet to the point of perfection”, but exactly the opposite, that they have evolved into their own version of perfection. That’s why I have a problem with religions, because they have a template of sainthood. God doesn’t have one. Spiritual development is possible through imagining complex abstract ideas and acquiring knowledge; it could be sophisticated form of love felt for some other super-being; it could be strength, courage and loyalty shown to the ideals under grave pressures and hardships. It could be observation, empathy, identification, basically samyama on other beings and structures, where one extends his consciousness in order to encompass new things and possibilities. It could be challenging the preexisting notions and limits of the known, by testing new ideas, new practices, doing new things and learning from the results. Basically, you can grow on the path of the flower, the path of the warrior, the path of an angel, the path of a saintly iconoclast, the path of a concubine, the path of a scientist, the path of a sorcerer. You can achieve perfection by growing to be God’s love, or to be God’s sword. As I said, the end-results can be as vastly different as a female beauty-love-kindness-insight, or male strength-truth-justice-brilliance. The end-result can be a saintly scholar, a lover who touched God through sexual worship, or a musician who crystallized God into sound-emotion-insights. Obviously, there is great diversity in the good; it’s the evil ones who are so similar one can’t really tell them apart, because the spiritual structure of evil is usually quite simple and rudimentary. As complexity and sophistication grow, so do the differences between the beings. It’s sad that people usually imagine God as some predictable, simple but “good” being, when God is something utterly and incredibly other. Metaphorically speaking, God is the endless vault of treasures – of beauties, of knowledges, of powers, of unimaginable things that cannot be borne by human mind and emotions, and of which human tongue cannot speak. God is not a sea in which you drown in order to become the sea, nor are you supposed to be a drop of seawater which understands that it’s the sea. No. The better analogy is that there’s an endless landscape of wonders that is God, and you can be either a macro lens to explore and record this beauty by magnification, or a wideangle lens that captures the entirety of the landscape, or a video camera that captures beauty in motion, or a sound recording device that captures the sound in its perfection, or a library that manifests tomes of precious knowledge, or a soldier who protects the precious things with his life and sword when they are endangered, or Shakti listening to Shiva explain the intricacies of Yoga. Poetically speaking, spiritual stuff condenses into crystalline vajra-form once it touches God’s perfection, and becomes a perfect “lens” that holds some of God’s perfection, in shape of an individual point of view.

(continuation from the previous article)

There are several important issues that need to be addressed regarding soul-growth and spiritual evolution.

The first is why some soul-types cannot be saved. There’s one interesting thing about astral substance, and that is its non-linear behavior in the low-energy spectrum. In high energy spectrum, when you expose an astral entity to “light”, basically to aspects of God, it absorbs them and “glows”, it is enhanced. When you expose a low-energy astral entity to the same kind of “light”, it disintegrates and “dies”. One would expect the astral particles, or kalapas, to use the proper term, to respond linearly to the influx of energy, in some predictable thermodynamic pattern, and on the level of individual kalapas, I think this is actually true, but apparently the larger structure seems to be destroyed when its constituents are exposed to the light of God that they need, and the larger structure rejects and avoids. Apparently, the individual astral kalapas refuse to put up with that shit anymore and go their own way, refusing to be bound into the darkness that is the choice of the dark entity to which they belong. As a result, when a dark spiritual entity is exposed to God’s light that is stronger than its own dark will that holds it together, the tangential momentum of the individual kalapas exceeds the already weak cohesive force of the structure, and it goes poof. Essentially, this shows that the existence of spiritual darkness is so against the basic laws of nature, that it is opposed on the kalapa level.

This law apparently holds even on the higher levels of reality, because if the level of God’s light a soul is exposed to significantly exceeds the power of its internal energy bonds, essentially if the level of love, truth and consciousness one is exposed to from the outside exceeds the level of love, truth and consciousness that bind his individual ego-structure together, he is at the risk of breaking up at the seams, metaphorically speaking, where “seams” are the weakest energy-points of his spiritual body, similar to the inclusions of weak material in a stronger rock. Those “seams” therefore limit the amount of spiritual energy one is able to take, and in order for that limit to be raised, the inclusions need to be transformed into higher-energy substance, and the disjointed fragments of the spiritual body need to be integrated. So, how does one do that?

If you’ve read the reports of the spiritual experiences of the saints, as well as the NDE experiences, which I hope you did, you will remember that the experience is usually a combination of joy and pain. Joy is because of God, and pain is because of one’s sins and flaws that light up in the consciousness as the overall energy level rises, and the soul instinctively tries to handle those weaknesses by either remorse or understanding. Both approaches work, depending on the specifics. Healing of the inner spiritual fractures and inclusions is usually done by a combination of remorse, acceptance of forgiveness, release of resent and blame, and understanding of truth. The low-energy substance is not released, it is absorbed into the rest of the spiritual body, which temporarily lowers the energy of the entire structure in the same way absorbing ice would cool down your physical body. This means your entire soul will feel pain of some kind during the process of absorption of the inclusions. The process is similar to the absorption of traumatic content encapsulated within a “larva”, where low-energy substance one was unwilling or unable to deal with was encapsulated within a membrane that isolates it from the rest of the spiritual body. Those membranes are inherently impermanent, and when they burst, the content is released into the spiritual body, creating trauma. If this trauma is absorbed and suffered through, the structure recovers and reintegrates on a higher level of functionality, because now there is no fragmentation and isolation of parts of one’s being into inaccessible regions. However, if trauma is unbearable, and one tries to shield oneself from it, another larva is formed in order to block the undesirable things from one’s consciousness. So, essentially, by accepting spiritual pain, living through it, with a combination of acceptance, remorse and understanding, one regains parts of oneself and is released from the necessity of existing in the energy spectrum that is lower than one’s maximum, because of the fact that higher energy would stress the larvas and inclusions to one’s breaking point. When those breaking points at the lower energy levels are removed, the entire structure can experience and absorb much higher levels of God’s light than was previously possible. Essentially, this reintegration and removal of low-energy inclusions, and raising the energy level of the entire spiritual body to the level of the highest-energy structures within the body, is what takes place in the process of evolution of the higher parts of the astral world, inhabited by the beings who already possess significant sophistication, complexity and purity. When the entire astral body attains uniformity at the highest energy level of the astral substance, apparently the entire structure crystallizes, it compresses into crystalline vajra form as it transcends the limitations of the astral world and goes beyond. This is basically the point I tried to lead my students towards, because once they get there, they are essentially out of the woods. Sure, there is spiritual growth even beyond that, but after that point one’s position is no longer precarious.

Another important issue is the motivator and mechanism of evolution in the astral plane. Incarnated human souls usually assume that without motivators present in the physical world, the souls would stagnate indefinitely in the astral world, and so the physical is useful as means for accelerating spiritual evolution. That, however, is not only false, but is in fact the direct opposite to the truth.

The logic goes like this: one feels comfort and is disinclined to change anything. At some point, discomforts and dangers of the physical world make him think and do things to avoid dangers and to assure his survival. The problem is, the most effective way to assure your survival in the physical world is to be the worst kind of a Darwinistic satanic animal, which by the way is also an excellent way of assuring your spiritual degradation and destruction. So, the only way to spiritually evolve in this world is to do all the wrong things, judged by the worldly criteria, because if you do all the “right” things, you’ll end up a spiritual abomination. In the astral world, however, the motivation isn’t negative. Theoretically, an astral “vegetable” can sit in the light all day and feel good, and this could theoretically go on for millennia without interruption. However, this astral “plant”, a simple aggregation of kalapas without much structure, which is able to experience only the basic, primal emotions, can also experience the existence of more sophisticated beings, who are able to interact, communicate, merge, share ideas, and eventually experiences discomfort due to its inability to do the same. This discomfort with one’s limitations is the main motivator of spiritual growth. It begins with perception, proceeds into empathy, and then into emulation, and with practice one acquires new abilities. Also, although God’s light is perceived by the simple spiritual beings as primal emotions – joy, pleasure, gratitude, fulfillment etc., it’s never just that. This light is also reason and intelligence and promise of greatness if you know more of it, and it is inherently motivating, it sort of pulls your toward and into itself, so basically the more you have it the more you desire it, and by “more” I don’t mean more of the same, but primarily the expansion of quality. There is pain, but its origin is in the awareness of one’s limitations in knowing more of God. So yes, this pain is also a motivation, because a spiritual being feels a special kind of pain when it sees that others can take from God something he’s yet unable to grasp, but it isn’t jealousy (defined as a desire for someone not to have more than you do) but its opposite (defined as a desire to be as good as those who are now better than yourself). You don’t want to allow others to be better than you, but not by limiting them, but by growing to match their high standards, and possibly even more, to be the shining example of God’s beauty and wonder for others to aspire to. So yes, there is a competition of a sort, between the spiritual beings – who will know more, who will do better, who will say the greater truth, do a greater deed, feel the purer emotion, and when one excels, others rejoice and applaud, and strive to do one better.

There’s a thing in the last article that I think was not understood by most: “You become good, actually good, by appropriating aspects of God’s spirit, and thus participating in eternity”. What do I mean by that?

Let’s first clarify what is usually believed about the soul, and then I will specify points of contention.

People either believe there’s a soul, or not. If they believe in it, they usually believe that all humans, and in some cases all beings, have an immortal soul, whose destiny after physical death is influenced by its choices and actions during life. This destiny can be either temporary or permanent; essentially, those who advocate impermanence of soul’s destiny believe in some form of reincarnation, where conditions of the soul constantly change depending on its spiritual qualities and choices. Those who advocate a permanent destiny essentially believe in a heaven/hell dichotomy, where good souls go to a good destination, and evil souls go to a bad destination, where both destinations are permanent and eternal.

The main point of contention that I see is in generalization. For instance, I don’t believe in a soul as a Boolean (either exists or not, and if exists, it’s eternal), I believe in a soul as a range of possibilities, because I have a very empirical position based on personal observation of souls of various qualities in various conditions, which happens to match the Buddhist understanding of the subject matter very closely. You have spiritual substance which can be aggregated into structures of varying complexity, size and something you can call the difference in energy, similar to the difference between photons of infrared light and gamma radiation, or the difference between a rock and a black hole, where both are matter, formally speaking, but the differences in structure, density and behaviour are enormous. Well, in the spiritual sphere the differences between spiritual entities or beings, you can call them souls if you want, are comparable to the differences between material entities, such as for instance between a cloud of water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere, a cloud of plasma on the Sun, a cloud of dust on Mars, and a cloud of methane on Titan. Then you have the next order of magnitude of difference, between clouds, liquids, solids, and even denser things like protons pressured into fusion, neutronium and singularity. Finally, there is a difference in complexity, such as the difference between a super-simple things like clouds of hydrogen, or a lattice of carbon atoms, and super-complex things like human brain, or the newest microprocessor.

So, what I understood, decades ago, is that souls don’t actually appear to be some point-like abstract eternal entities, and that they don’t appear to be all of the same kind, and I mean that in a sense more radical than you can probably imagine. There’s spiritual substance which exists in a spectrum of, well, energy, if you can call it that, but this “energy” is also self-awareness, mentality, joy, beauty, and other things. Low energy of spiritual “particles” makes them feel “evil”, for the lack of another word. Evil, hatred, anger, spite, arrogance, cynicism, roughness, malice, stupidity, ugliness, that’s what I sense from observing the spiritual substance of low energy. Another thing about it is that low-energy particles don’t bond well with each other, because apparently an aspect of low energy is that there’s not enough power in them to form bonds that would allow creation of large and complex structures. So, when you have a being that’s made primarily of low-energy spiritual matter, it’s very unlikely to hold together for long, like ephemeral phenomena such as the dust devils in the desert. The low energy entities can attempt to prolong their existence by trying to steal energy from somewhere, but it’s always a losing game, and eventually they all disperse into basic constituents. In fact, it appears that spiritual matter behaves the opposite of physical matter: when energy of the physical atoms is sufficiently raised, the connections between them become looser and eventually impossible. With spiritual matter, the particles behave that way when they lose energy.

The higher-energy spiritual particles behave differently; they have more color, brightness, cohesiveness and ability to form complex structures, but we are still dealing with something that looks like a gas; a collection of particles that are held together in a larger structure due to some mutually attracting force, and they don’t tend to dissociate on their own, but their density and solidity is still low. This range, between low-energy gas, and high-energy gas, is mostly how I perceive the lower part of the astral spectrum. It’s all low density, and simple structure, comparable to clouds of various kinds. On the higher astral spectrum, things get very interesting, because the higher, more complex beings display much greater complexity and diversity of structure, comparable to the difference between, let’s say, some colloidal suspension or aerosol on one hand, and a computer, or a living being on the other hand. Lower astral entities are capable of simple energetic emotions, where the lower spectrum of entities are capable only of the low-energy states such as hate, fear, anger, spite etc., and the higher-energy entities are capable of higher-energy states such as joy, admiration, love, pleasure, fun and acceptance, but they are still in both cases only very simple emotions, and compared to the higher astral spectrum, they look like the difference between happiness of a mouse who is happy when he has enough food and there aren’t predators around, and happiness of a man who listens to subtle and beautiful music and thinks about some wonderful character in a book that he had read recently, and wonders what it would be like to fly without physical limitations and absorb sunlight as food. Essentially, it’s like a difference between a pocket calculator and an iPhone, where both can be the same size and general shape, but they are vastly different phenomena. Because of this vast difference in complexity and structure, you can somewhat understand my take on good and evil, where I perceive lack of development, sophistication and structure as the greatest evil, where spiritually speaking it’s much better to be the worst man than it is to be the best cloud of generalized emotion. Spiritual evolution, therefore, means greater structure, complexity, cohesion, density and each spiritual particle carries within itself some form of self-awareness, mentality and other forms of “spiritual energy”. Greater and more sophisticated structures have more permanence, and they have greater capability of capturing the qualities of the Absolute, of God. It’s like transistors, where each on its own is little more than a switch, but several of them together form logical circuits, like AND, OR, NOT etc.; put thousands or millions of them together and you get a CPU. Increase complexity and sophistication of the structure, and you increase their capability to process instructions in increasingly smaller slices of time. You can say that each transistor has some small inherent capacity to do something with information, which increases when they are intelligently aggregated in greater structures, and when the structure grows large and sophisticated enough, you get a kind of magic, with entire synthetic worlds simulated within the machine.

Most humans have souls that are no more than astral clouds, of some complexity to be sure, but of little permanence. You can call them souls, but it’s really an insult to the concept. Impermanent, ephemeral, contradictory, inconclusive, they amount to nothing and usually decay into basic constituents, which rearrange chaotically like atoms of gas. Unfortunately, when I say “most humans”, I mean a rather large majority. This majority was created when the world was populated by the extreme number of humans, far greater than the number of complex and sophisticated souls that could merge with the bodies and experience physical matter. Essentially, they are either the lesser souls that would normally be unworthy of a human incarnation, or merely whirlpools of astral substance created by the astral interface in the human brain, creating “something” in the place where a soul is supposed to be, trying to form connections and communicate information. Those clouds or whirlpools don’t persist long after the physical death. The minority are what I would call the normal human souls – complex high-astral beings with a differentiated, solid structure, with abstract ideas, sophisticated longings, deeper awareness and desires for great, beautiful things, attempting to form connections of love and companionship with other souls, and attempting to know more about reality in its various aspects. They admire things that are good, hate things that are bad, and they try to learn and grow. Essentially, they are self-aware, intelligent beings of complex emotions, frequently conflicted within themselves due to their various, often incompatible choices and ideas, and their structure has both strong points and weak inclusions, of substance of lesser energy and quality, and they either manage to gain understanding that turns weaknesses into solidity, or they, in some cases, break apart into lesser entities. I would assume that in some cases several souls can merge in order to form a larger, exponentially more sophisticated and powerful entity, but from my experience, the best path towards growth is that which both includes more spiritual substance, and compresses it into increasingly smaller space, at the same time purifying the structure, raising its “energy”, in an analogy to the processes that take place in the stars. This compression and exponential growth in sophistication can be partial or complete. An example of partial transformation are the astral beings whose parts have been transformed into spiritual “crystals”, or “jewels”, which are essentially parts of one’s personality that became much more pure, powerful and participating in God’s various perfections than the rest of their beings. In the beginning you have a sophisticated higher-astral soul that looks like an angelic being decorated by one small jewel which is even more beautiful than the rest of the soul. The next degree of progression is when more parts of the soul transform and it looks like it’s decorated with many spiritual jewels, who each tell a story about God, perfection and eternity. The final degree is when the entire soul is transformed into jewel-stuff, “vajra”, and since this vajra carries within itself the aspects of God’s greatness, it is impervious, permanent, pure and a state of salvation. There are of course higher levels of participation in God’s nature, states of Godhood where spiritual jewels are merely ornaments, weapons and “clothes” of Gods, whose nature is more-less indescribable, except by very weak analogy.

So, you can imagine why I cannot limit my understanding of the subject matter to the simplistic concepts of heaven and hell, or reincarnation. Sure, reincarnation exists, but it’s not an eternal process, and is often very messy. Beings can appear to evolve for a while, but then they break apart and dissolve. In other cases, they fail to form any kind of structure and dissipate quickly. In rare cases, they grow in complexity, but only up to a point, where they reach equilibrium, and then stagnate. In exceedingly rare cases they grow in sophistication to such an extent, that the results appear to be magical, and followers of most religions would consider it blasphemous to even consider the possibility of such fate for themselves, for such things are supposedly reserved for Gods. I, however, see it as some kind of physics, not unlike the thermodynamic laws of matter. It’s just that spiritual matter has spiritual characteristics that influence its behaviour; the particles interact based on how they “feel” and, lacking other terms, “react to the truth of God”.

So, that’s the very literal meaning of my original sentence. If you fail to know God, you fail to attain permanence and eternity. If you fail to know God, there’s no eternal hell for you, because hell isn’t the state of eternal suffering, it’s the absence of eternity, or, as Jesus aptly put it, the eternal death, death without resurrection. Entropy, decay into chaos, disorganization of a spiritual entity due to lack of internal cohesion, because only the longing for God, for eternity itself, creates cohesion and structure and solidity and, eventually, eternity of the soul. When I say there is no possibility of salvation outside of God, I mean it so fucking literally you couldn’t believe. It’s the actual, literal truth of the matter. Only God is eternal, and you’re either of God, or you are not at all. Eventually, only those two outcomes are stable, and everything else is just a temporary phase that precedes collapse into either of those permanent outcomes.