I can tell exactly when the New Age concept of religion started.

It was September 11, 1893, in Chicago. There, Swami Vivekananda held a speech at the “World’s Parliament of Religions”, essentially sucking up to everyone by saying they’re all good: all religions lead to God, like rivers that all lead to the same ocean. Which is kind of obvious, considering how many people from all kinds of religions have reached God.

Yes, that was sarcasm, and the applause from appealing to all that narcissism must have been something to see.

God can truly adopt whichever form is most effective for leading the worshipper. Sometimes, it means that if you pray to God through a certain religion, God will reveal Himself to you in that form. However, sometimes it means God will reveal Himself in the form that actually teaches you and leads you from a wrong path to the correct one. I’ve heard of Muslims having visions of Jesus and converting to Christianity, or having NDE visions where they saw that Islam is completely wrong and Christ is the Lord, again, converting to Christianity when they were revived. That doesn’t look very much like “all religions are equally good”, or “God will reveal Himself in whichever form you pray to”. No: God is the Truth, and He will lead you to Himself. Your starting point can be whatever – it’s obvious that most are terrible. However, God can meet you in your pit of spiritual doom and show you the way out. That doesn’t mean you will see Allah if you’re a Muslim. It means you will see the way to God from your bad place.

I’ve heard about Protestant Christians who had a vision of Mary, mother of Christ, because that was the aspect of God they deliberately neglected and looked down upon, and that was the vision God chose as their next step and a way out of their spiritual darkness. It’s something you need, and don’t have.

People think what Vivekananda, and later Sai Baba taught: that you can imagine God in whichever form and God will reveal Himself to you, means that you can do whatever – imagine God in form of a sexy girl, for instance, and visualise some “tantra”. In Hindu tradition, this would be known as “aparadha”, translated as either “offence” or “transgression”, and means something that either ends your spiritual path altogether, or gets you a vacation in some picturesque section of hell. There are rules for this, you know. A form in which you can visualise God can be very few things, and always something that is the strongest association with God in your soul. It can’t be a bottle of Coca Cola, or a centrefold from Playboy, or anything that’s not actually God. Also, it can’t be anything that God personally wouldn’t approve of, because, believe it or not, God does actually have a say in this. If God doesn’t approve of your conduct, your spiritual path will either be thorny or lead through Shit Creek. When I followed this instruction from Sai Baba, that God will answer in whichever form was closest to us, I thought about it, and meditated on Jesus. Why, because He was the default association with God in any kind of form, and I visualised Him in the sermon on the Mount, in His moment of power and glory. That was obviously a good choice, because I received initiation immediately thereafter.

So no, you can’t just “do whatever” and hope to have good outcomes, because God has a say. God needs to approve of your consciousness, conduct and choices. You need to impress God with your actions, for instance by manifesting sincerity, purity and choice for transcendence and away from the worldly. Sure, God can sometimes show Himself to people who are on a very wrong path in order to snap them out of it, but I would not count on that being some kind of a rule. It is much better to do things that are recommended, and meditating on an incarnation of God, rather than some form that you “like”, is a good start. If you want to reach God, meditating on a person of God is the way to go. Trying to avoid meditating on the known person of God and instead visualising some other form translates into trying to avoid God because you have some issues with Him. Better get those sorted out first, methinks.

As for religions, have in mind that not all rivers lead to the sea. Some lead to deserts where they evaporate. Some lead into desolate, isolated lakes that serve as radioactive waste dumps. Some religions, in fact, don’t lead to God, are not created by God, and don’t have anything to do with God. Some have a transcendental component, but also contain serious errors. You can’t rest assured that whichever religion you are born in or have chosen for yourself, your eventual fate will be in God. Most likely, you will have to change your religion at least once if not many times, and at some point you will actually need to have thoughts of your own because no religion will suffice.

If you actually read more of Vivekananda, you will see that his actual opinion on this is far from “any religion will do”. In fact, he thinks that various religions are good for people on that particular level of spiritual evolution. The idea that anything will lead you from the beginning to the end is naive. In the beginning, sophisticated ideas will be too much for you. Near the end, no idea will likely encompass your understanding properly, because it will simply be too vast. Also, of course, Vivekananda held a reductionist view of religion, where advaita vedanta is the real truth, and everything else is a lesser knowledge that might be necessary along the path, but will later be discarded for a more superior knowledge, culminating, of course, in what he personally believed. 🙂

In the end, always remember: God isn’t some impersonal energy you can focus and manipulate. God might not be a person the way you are a person, but only because He’s much, much more of a person than you are. Where your level of personality is like a mass-value of a rock, God’s level of personality is like a mass-value of a galactic supermassive black hole. God is much, much more of a person than you are, and not just one; and He has opinions, He has a say in things, and He will make a judgment on you. Doing “whatever” will end “wherever”. Doing your best to find God by focusing on the best possible idea you have of God, is likely to get God’s attention. But that’s not a magical recipe for invoking God, because, remember: God is a person, and He has opinions, feelings and judgments. He has the final say.

Something global recently unlocked for me to spend, and I understood that it’s all related to all kinds of non-transcendental religions and quasi-religious systems. You can already guess what I mean – all kinds of pantheism where “God” and “Universe” mean the same thing; astrology where things happen because “the stars align”. Systems of belief where there are no “good” and “evil”, only “positive” and “negative”. Such systems don’t have a place for the Devil, because they don’t have a place for God either.

That’s not what got me thinking. I understood all that already. I am very familiar with those systems. What got me thinking is the fact that the “taste” of it, when I’m spending it, feels identical to the content of that hell for the godless people I processed earlier.

Initially, I thought it can’t be right. Most of those people may be ignorant, but they have a yearning for the transcendental; it’s just that they have silly ideas about it, like everybody else in this world. And then the next thought was: “Oh really; then why did their godlessness annoy you so much when you talked to them, and complained that all they are interested in was some kind of astral manipulation and energy exchange with some self-serving material purpose?”

Oh.

Indeed, I used to have impersonalistic ideas about the transcendental, mostly because I was told that was the correct way to understand spiritual experience, and it wasn’t until quite recently that I was forced to revise it all. My understanding of it, however, was profoundly transcendental. I mapped transcendence onto a flawed understanding; I didn’t paint a rosy tree-hugging mask onto the physical world and pretended it’s spirituality. I never had a “holistic” view, where body, mind and spirit are a unit, and should be treated as one. No, I felt that the physical body is just something the soul is locked into, and forced into a limiting and humiliating experience of the physical plane, which is an illusion and a lie. I didn’t think this damn place is God. I mean, sure, in one sense it is, because ultimately everything happens in the mind of God, but that doesn’t mean that a video game is God in a very literal sense, the way those pantheists perceive the physical world. And I surely didn’t think that good and evil are merely “positive” and “negative” things, or that things happen “because the stars align that way”.

I believed that God wants us to be free and to inherit the eternity in Him, and I believed that Satan wants us to be enslaved and destroyed in this world of illusion and humiliation. I believed that wanting the things of the world enslaves us by means of projecting fulfilment into things that lead only to misery and suffering. I believed one should desire only God, because only God is eternal and true, and everything else is a dream and dust. To me, things and ownership are a necessary thing in this world, but not as means of fulfilment, but rather as means of avoiding terrible suffering that looms in this place, like a predatory beast in a dark cave.

This is why I never truly got along with the New Age people and their worldview of impersonal energies, world-worship and self-serving attitudes. I understood that they mixed the physical world and astral “energies”, called it “spirituality”, and as far as they are concerned, being one with God and being one with the world is one and the same. To me, God is a brilliant, super-personal consciousness compared to which this world is but dust, a video game designed to devour your life. Worshipping the world, to me, made as much sense as worshipping Satan – an obviously deluded and self-defeating idea. And then I thought – what if we’re dealing with an issue of semantics. Replace their word “God” with “Satan”, and suddenly all their ideas about the world, its creator, its energies and worship thereof suddenly make a whole different kind of sense, and it’s suddenly clear why I went along with them like oil with water.

They want to be one with Satan, and they worship the world he made. They just call it God, the way all kinds of false religions call all kinds of false or evil things “God”. There used to be a hell that was full of godless people, and most of them used to be religious. It wasn’t a hell for atheists in the narrow sense; it was a hell for people without transcendental desires or interests. A religion can be wholly non-transcendental. Just remember the cult of Dionysus, a Greek “god” of wine, debauchery and madness. There’s not a single transcendental thing about it, and yet it used to be a religious cult with many devout followers. All those fertility deities – they are as transcendental as a pile of rocks. Worshipping life, worshipping “Mother Earth” and so on – it’s all non-transcendental. The fact that it’s often all mixed up into a broader term of “religion” doesn’t mean it’s all the same. No, not all religions are rivers that lead to the same ocean. That’s bullshit. Most religions, apparently, are of this world and they don’t lead anywhere, other than perhaps into a desert of this world where their followers die of thirst.

And then, eventually, the remains of their souls end up being the trash I’m currently spending, because something needs to be done with it all.

That last thing got me thinking: how can a person know whether what I’m saying is actually genuine stuff or I’m full of shit; assuming they are unable to personally verify crucial parts, and assuming that dying, ending in front of a Judge of Karma and being told the exact truth isn’t a currently available option.

Tl;dr: you can’t. Sorry. It’s theoretically impossible to verify things if your actual ability to verify them is defined as insufficient, as a premise. You can believe this or that, for all the good it will do you.

Long version:

You can work with probabilities. For instance, if someone is fake, they are generally fake everywhere, not in just one thing. So, if you can’t verify a certain part of someone’s claims, you can verify everything around it. It’s not foolproof, but it’s better than nothing, I guess. For instance, if someone does reliably rational and good stuff at every point you can check, it’s reasonable to assume that the trend continues in places where you can’t check. Unfortunately, that’s also something an expert deceiver would think of, so you can only rule out the possibility of one being an incompetent, mentally ill person. A deliberate rational fake will do his homework, lay out all kinds of evidence in spheres you can verify, and use that to sell you something really dangerous in spheres you can’t verify. What’s important to know is that this absolutely rules out a crazy person. A crazy person will be too crazy to do any of this. In order for someone to plant deceptions decades in advance and do this kind of complex trickery, the only two options you have is genuine and expert deceiver. Crazy is not an option. You can eliminate crazy quite easily by testing in this manner. You can’t eliminate malicious or evil.

There’s a possibility that one is not crazy, but merely deluded, and then works hard on sharing their delusion. That’s true, and I’ve seen it, but it’s kind of always obvious, for the following reasons. If we’re talking about spiritual things, one way of checking for authenticity is checking for overlap with existing spiritual revelations. We are here assuming that a certain percentage of those are authentic. Something that’s authentic will need to have overlap with other authentic stuff, unless we’re dealing with a situation that everything else is 100% wrong and just this one thing is 100% right. This is very unlikely, for all kinds of reasons that I think don’t require a detailed explanation. For instance, it would mean that the level of difficulty is so great, that probability of success for everybody else would be 0, and then it suddenly jumps to 1 in only one instance. Albeit not theoretically impossible, that’s usually not how things work in practice. In practice, someone gets something right, and others make improvements upon this based on things that work in practice, and at some point you get a working theory, which makes predictions and so on. Even in things like alchemy, you had things that worked, such as distillation, precise measurements and so on. Based on this, actual chemistry was made. It didn’t just happen out of thin air, after alchemy being 100% wrong. You can have theory that’s wrong, but you have reliable ways of funnelling gases and weighing compounds, purifying compounds, making non-reactive dishes and so on. Astronomy existed in form of very precise measurements before it had a solid theory, and those measurements were in fact incredibly precise, precise enough for Newton to have used them in making his theoretical system of mechanics. He didn’t just work with thin air, he worked with precise measurements of planetary positions by Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Tycho Brahe didn’t know how planets moved, but he measured their positions with extreme accuracy. So, it was all based on some kind of reality, regardless of the fact that the theory they came up with was usually flawed. Everything is always flawed in this world. It wasn’t all pulled from someone’s arse, and that’s what matters. They thought Sun revolved around Earth, but they knew the position of Venus on every day of the year with such precision you wouldn’t believe. So, when someone came up with a better theory, they could re-use the measurements with complete confidence, because it was spot on.

That’s what I mean by overlap with existing stuff. The interpretation might differ wildly, but there’s some serious common ground in most authentic cases. The way Hindus put this, there must be alignment of Shastra, Guru and Sadhu. They go too far with this, because they assume their scripture to be far more than it actually is, but the idea is that scripture, your guru and the genuine spiritual people will be in alignment and will all teach you the same stuff, which is how you can tell it’s true. If your guru is telling you stuff no other spiritual person is talking about, and there’s nothing about it in the scriptures, the possibilities are that the guru is either fake, or he’s a point of revelation of higher reality than anything else up to that point. Since the latter is something that would literally be a unique point in history, the former is more likely to be true. There are, however, such points of revelation, and they do happen every few thousand years, so it’s not impossible. It’s just that they don’t happen every Tuesday, and if you’re dealing with such a person it would be accompanied by serious indications which would increase the probability of it being true. For instance, miracles, visions and spiritual experiences by others etc. would be likely to lend credibility to such a person, but if you’re unable to personally verify any of it, it becomes a recursive issue of faith – basically, you would need to believe that a person b had a valid spiritual experience regarding person a, in order to accept validity of person a. If you’re unable to verify, you can only default to faith, choosing one way or another depending on your personal character and attitude.

So, if your ability to verify is zero, you need to default to faith, and in that case you are also going to be unlikely to resort to faith either, so you are likely to reject the whole thing. However, if your ability to verify is non-zero, but incomplete, you will still have to ultimately resort to faith, but this faith will be based on something not wholly insubstantial. If that is of any comfort, even I resort to faith when I’m not in a state where I’m directly experiencing something. After a few days or weeks at most, a spiritual experience becomes a mere thing in memory, and you need to believe that what you experienced was this and not that, because you’re no longer there and no longer able to verify it directly. Essentially, if you’ve been to the Moon, a day after you landed back on Earth it’s a mere memory. Twenty years later it’s an old, faded memory, and even for you it’s a matter of faith to believe that the memory is accurate and represents what it seems to represent. So, you can never really avoid resorting to faith in this world. It’s a matter of faith for you to believe that you can drive a car once you’re not actually driving it, let alone anything else. But if you have something you can verify, your faith will be more established and stronger. For instance, if you had visions of angels or Gods telling you things about me, you can still be sensitive to doubt regarding your experience, but you’ll be in a better position than someone who didn’t have any such experience and can only believe this or that based on emotions and thoughts. This is a very weak basis for faith and I wouldn’t actually recommend it. The way I would personally verify things is try the stuff they teach and see if it’s useful. If it produces a genuine spiritual experience, it’s still not perfect evidence, but it’s good enough to assume there’s some serious shit going on there. However, evidence of supernatural is not evidence of the Divine, and one needs to be extra careful with that difference. Eventually, the only solid way to know whether one is a genuine spiritual person or not is to be one yourself. The closer you are to that, the easier it is for you to verify. The more distant you are, the harder everything is. That’s why I personally don’t actually care much about convincing people of anything regarding myself. I mostly tell them how yoga works and how to practice it. If they manage to become genuine spiritual persons, my job there is done, and I still wouldn’t care much whether they know who I am or not, because that’s actually so demanding that even I don’t actually remember who I am most of the time, and when I do it’s not the most pleasant thing, since I need to be separated from it for the duration of this life. So, the entire thing about people wanting to know who I actually am and how authentic I am is a pastime for idiots, beginners and people otherwise completely unqualified for verifying anything in spiritual spheres. You can know that I’m smart, and you can reliably establish that I’m not crazy, but whether I’m some kind of a super-Devil who is here to deceive you, or a yogi who attained some spiritual experience he’s probably exaggerating, a yogi who attained spiritual experience he’s genuinely reporting, or a God who manifested a tulku here in order to do some things unique in history, you can’t actually know for sure, and relying much on faith in these matters isn’t actually productive. Faith is good when you experienced or did something and you remember it a month later, and you believe it’s all true. In such a case, it’s hard faith, because it’s based on your own experience and facts. Having that kind of faith is essential. However, having faith that’s based on weak foundations, on mere belief without actual experience and facts, it’s not actually something I would recommend having, and it’s better to work on establishing better foundations for your beliefs, than to rely too much on feeble nonsense.

So, that’s that. If you’re not sure who I am, and want to be, I would recommend against mere belief, one way or another. I would recommend learning more, having more actual experience, developing a stronger spiritual core, attaining spiritual transformations and initiations, attaining darshan of God, not once but many times, and learning about reality from that. As a corollary of great knowledge, you will understand more about me without actually bothering to know more about me, which is as it should be.

But without that, if the difference between what I am and what you are is too great, you wont be able to know or verify anything, and that’s not even your actual problem. Your actual problem is that if you knew anything about God, you wouldn’t have that problem.