In the previous article I wrote about the differences between male and female approaches to spirituality and there are some things I’d like to add.

The most important thing is that the female approach to spirituality is what is commonly known as spirituality. That’s what everybody implicitly assumes to be spirituality – fight ego, be nice and smily and kind, meditate, please God, try to be acceptable to God, that kind of stuff. If the male approach is even mentioned, it’s mentioned as “bad guy stuff”, as something you are warned against, the dark side of the Force. Essentially, if you turn into a slavegirl you’re on the light side of the force, and if you develop balls you’re on the dark side. Apparently, God favours femininity.

Except not. You see, when I have to take account of the most impressive historical spiritual people of all times, what do we get? Buddha, male approach. Jesus, male approach. Marpa and Milarepa, male approach. Lahiri Mahasaya and Yuktesvar, male approach. Shankaracharya, male approach. Devpuriji, male approach. Ram Gopal, male approach. Most Zen masters, male approach. Vivekananda, male approach. Me, male approach. As for female approach, we have Theresa of Avilla, st. Francis, John of the Cross, Ramakrishna, and, most notably, Caitanya.

It’s not that female approach is without representation among the saints. It obviously produces results. However, considering how incredibly represented the male approach seems to be among those who are the most worthy of emulation, I think some things require reassessment.

First of all, the difference between male and female approach is not necessarily a radical one; sometimes it’s merely a matter of fine accent. For instance, female approach is to worship and admire your husband (or God), and find fulfillment in contemplation of his person alone, without self. This is then misinterpreted as ego-less state, while it’s in fact merely the female approach to samyama. The male approach is to train with a master as an apprentice, to acquire skills and to become a worthy artisan and eventually a master. You learn by accepting an admirable worthy authority over yourself and diligently practice and absorb skills which you immediately employ in practice, so that they can be honed and further refined. With progress, you develop pride in your achievement, which motivates you further.

The end-result of the female approach is to be inseparable from the object of your affection and a worthy wife, and the end-result of the male approach is to become a master of your trade.

If you ask a spiritually successful woman about her secret, she’ll tell you about all the things to do in order to be acceptable to and inseparable from God. If you ask a spiritually successful man, he’ll tell you about all the skills you need to master, all the self-control you need to have and sacrifices you need to make in order to obtain qualities that matter. A woman will describe enlightenment as sacred spiritual marriage. A man will describe it as spiritual mastery.

Ask Caitanya, he’ll tell you how to love Krishna and be inseparable from him even in separation. Ask Shankaracharya, and he’ll tell you how to attain realisation of brahman and cast aside all illusions and ignorance, understanding that you are that reality.

Ask a male-approach saint and he’ll tell you about all the things that need to be overcome and conquered, all the enemies to be defeated, all the pitfalls to be avoided, all the allies one needs to have, all the sacrifices one needs to make, and all the qualities one needs to hone. Ask a female-approach saint and she’ll tell you how you need to renounce ego in order to be acceptable in the presence of God, how to renounce everything that gets in the way of the love for God, how to persevere when not in the presence of God and remain faithful, and how you need to surrender to God who will remove all impurities from your soul and remake you into his image.

Both approaches work. It’s not that one is an inferior version of the other, or a set of spiritual flaws that need to be polished away on that other path. You just need to be aware of what they are. It’s not that the male approach is ego-driven and female approach is ego-less. That’s all bullshit, because males and females have a different ego-structure, different animal biology with different instincts and reactions. The term “ego” is woefully ill-applicable and is firmly entrenched in the 19^th century understanding of those things. To a female, being judged as attractive and acceptable is as much of an ego-boost as power and control are to a male. That female ego is passive and male is active makes no difference. It’s just that we are used to accepting a female who just got a major ego-boost as ego-less.

Satisfied female ego looks like an ego-less state, and satisfied male ego looks like an egoistic state. For instance, when a woman lies in bed with her husband after sex, she is satisfied, calm, without thoughts, without desires, at peace with herself. It looks like no ego, but it’s satisfied ego, ego that has what it wants. A satisfied male ego is also a state of accomplishment, pride of achievement, of job well done, in peace and no thoughts and desires.

Most talk about overcoming ego comes from female-approach teachers lecturing men on how to become good women, or even worse, how to make men non-threatening to women. It’s all crap, it’s worthless and only damages men spiritually and hinders their progress. I’ve seen the results of such schools; they produce happy and empowered female students and wrecked, feminized, insecure and tightly restrained male students. Also, the male-approach teachers can produce strong and empowered male students, and insecure, fractured, shriveled-up female students. That, too, is a shitty outcome, but since the teachers seldom understand how things actually work and how you need to adapt your approach to work with students’ strengths in order to overcome their weaknesses, and they rarely even know what actually worked for them, it’s not unexpected.

How do I know all this? It’s because I use both approaches when appropriate. I can start with female approach and then switch to the male approach; for instance, I use female approach when I’m insecure about something and I want to absorb all that I can, and I switch to male approach when I know what I’m doing. Similarly, if a woman uses mostly the female approach, it’s great, but she needs to be able to use the male approach when necessary, because not all problems can be solved with one way alone. Sometimes you need tools that help you endure and change, and sometimes you need to own the power. Sometimes you need to pray for the Force to be with you, and sometimes you need to factually state that it is with you, at the present moment. That isn’t a fall to the “dark side”, it’s a necessary prerequisite of success, because it’s ok to be uncertain and doubtful when you’re trying, but once you’ve succeeded, you need to claim it or you are effectively rejecting it.

Considering what I wrote about human genetic predispositions in the previous article, one might conclude that I think male approach to spirituality is inherently better than female and that women are therefore disadvantaged.

What I actually have a problem with is women teaching men their female kind of spirituality, with the end result of men not achieving anything. This female approach to spirituality became so widespread that men are seriously disadvantaged unless they see it for what it is and understand that a masculine approach s not a set of flaws that need to be corrected in order to turn them into a proper version of a human, which just accidentally happens to have ovaries. There’s no inherent problem with either female or male approach to spirituality as long as you have a correct understanding what they are, how they work, what is their realistic purpose, and what’s the realistic chance of success if you apply them with the intended goal of attaining liberation.

The male approach to spirituality is to correctly diagnose the situation, to figure out how it would best be approached, and then to improvise methods in order to achieve the goal.

The female approach to spirituality is to be likable in order to gain favor from the entity in charge, assuming the entity in charge reacts positive to cute and lovable females.

Let’s model the problem first, in two possible ways. First model is impersonal, according to Vedanta. This place is what it is, there’s no-one in charge, there’s no lock on the door, but ignorance, desires and past karma bind souls to this place and the only way out is to gain proper understanding and realization, to shed desires and cultivate detachment, and to patiently work through past karma.

The second model is the common denominator of Christianity and Buddhism. You did something that got you attached to this place. This place is the domain of its King, whom Jesus calls Satan the prince of this world, and Buddha calls him Mara, the lord of illusion and binding. The King is completely immune to empathy, he doesn’t react to any form of manipulation, and he couldn’t care less about females, cute or otherwise. What he cares about is keeping everyone bound to this place in order to achieve his goals, whatever they may be.

Let’s now see how a competent, intelligent male would approach the problem according to both possibilities.

In both cases, he would read all the literature and consult all the experts. According to the available options, he would attempt to source all possible help. He would then assess what has the greatest probability of working, and would try that first, and if it fails, he would reassess and work down the list through other options. There’s essentially no difference in his approach regardless of whether there’s a “boss” at the gates or not. If the problem is impersonal, he will attempt to attain all the spiritual qualities that will liberate him from this mess. If the problem is personal, he will also attempt to attain all the spiritual qualities that will liberate him from this mess, and he will also study possible approaches that will help against the King. If that means accepting Jesus as his savior, he’ll do that. If that means emulating Buddha’s dialogue with Mara, he’ll do that. In any case, his approach will be coherent, practical and appropriate for the circumstances. It might still fail, but you can see how it’s rational and straightforward.

Let’s now see how a woman would approach the problem.

A woman would instinctively assume that she needs to influence the person in charge and that this person would have a known emotional response to her actions. She will first try to make herself look good and acceptable. Then she’ll try to see if she did something wrong and try to fix it so that the person in charge will see that she’s trying to be a good person and she deserves credit for trying. She will either cry and act remorseful, in order to gain sympathy, or she will attempt to be loving and radiant, non-judgmental and sweet. She will read all the spiritual books, with the purpose of making an effect on the person in charge, so that he sees that she’s trying and that her heart is in the right place. She will try to adopt all the recommended modes of action and fit in the group that seems to be spiritual.

If the problem is impersonal, meaning that there’s no gatekeeper and the only thing keeping us in bondage are our personal beliefs and investments of energy, the female approach won’t achieve anything. In case there is a gatekeeper, he is completely impervious to this form of influence and manipulation and will use the energy of all those attempts to keep the person in bondage and illusion. She will be submissive to him and he will accept submission and use it to increase bondage. She will be remorseful and he will use that as admission of guilt which strengthens bondage. She will try to make herself fit into a stereotype or a group, and he will use that to increase bondage.

So in both cases, the female approach to solving the problem, which works for manipulating powerful men into sharing their status, resources and sperm with you, will completely and utterly fail. The male approach, which works for dealing with problems in the real world, which works with actual forces, actual enemies and isn’t a social networking strategy, has a much better chance of working.

However, there’s a way in which the female approach to things might work excellently, and most women who managed to attain a high spiritual status used exactly that method. What a woman has to do is to find a concrete, actual person who is either a God or a yogi, and marry that person. How do you marry a God, well it’s simple, the nuns do it all the time. You just dedicate your entire life and your entire focus to that person that embodies God to you, you contemplate, meditate, feel the sublime spiritual states and qualities of that person and completely absorb them into yourself and model your entire personality around satisfying that person. That’s the natural female instinct, and if they target it right and follow this approach with unyielding tenacity that females genetically possess and use when they want to get something of supreme value, their approach has an incredibly high chance of producing high states of consciousness in which they can receive actual Divine guidance and instructions, which they can follow and attain liberation. Of course, they are highly vulnerable to all sorts of deceptions from Satan, so it’s a a weapon that cuts both ways. However, this form of bhakti-yoga and puja is actually designed to utilize all the female instincts and genetic makeup and that’s the primary technique of yoga a woman should use. For men, such techniques are not nearly as appropriate, and things that emulate a crisis, combat and admiration of a great, noble personality full of virtues, that would work better. For men, ishta devata is someone you emulate. For women, ishta devata is someone you surrender to and who becomes your spiritual husband. It’s a gender thing – men want to do great things, and women want to fuck men who are doing great things, and to obey them diligently.

So that’s all there is to it. Both male and female approach work if you know what they are, who you are, what you want to achieve and what will be the easiest way of doing it, for you personally. But there’s no one single method that always works, just as there is no one superior gender. However, the sure way to mess things up for yourself is to try to do things in a way that is appropriate for the opposite genetic and spiritual makeup.

But let me make this clear: all of this makes sense and works only in the initial phase of spiritual work, before you attain actual spiritual guidance and before you have to actually do things. When you receive guidance and make progress on your path, the way you need to approach things is not gender-specific, it is completely and utterly identical to the male approach, because you’re dealing with real world problems and not social networking problems. If you need to practice vipassana or the inner space technique, it doesn’t mean anything whether you’re male or female, everything you need to do is identical. If you need to have a verbal duel with Sanat Kumara, it doesn’t mean absolutely anything whether you’re male or female. Both Romana and Biljana had such duels with him, and they did it in the most male way possible; Romana gave him a retort worthy of Buddha (“All sins belong to you”), and Biljana immediately remembered one of my personal idiosyncratic weapons and struck him with it, to great effect.

So yes, female stuff is all nice and cute and cuddly, but if you’re a woman and you need to kill some shit, you need a male weapon, like a sniper rifle or an RPG. You don’t want a female weapon, like high heels or a mini skirt. 🙂

Let me tell you why I lost my patience with Vedanta some decades ago.

To Vedanta, the state of realization of essential unity of atman and brahman, the first-person realization of the true nature of Self as one with brahman, is the fundamental metric of emancipation and spiritual success.

This state is acknowledged as identical to the state described in Patanjali’s Yoga as samadhi, union of the observed, observer and the process of observation. Samadhi exists as savikalpa and nirvikalpa, which are usually described as partial and full attainment of Self-realization. When nothing remains outside the “I Am” realization, samadhi is nirvikalpa, without remainder.

The problem is how to differentiate between a hippy who entered samadhi on LSD and was drastically changed by the experience, and a yogi who entered a samadhi as a result of a process of spiritual transformation. If the end result is the same, it’s the same, right? Also, the problem is that the experience of samadhi doesn’t necessarily produce an enlightened personality. I’ve seen genuinely insane people who had an experience of samadhi. The experience itself was authentic. According to Shankaracharya, this is not supposed to happen. Such an experience is knowledge that erases ignorance. All seeds of past karma are roasted in the heat of knowledge. The clouds have been blown away and the sun shines in all its glory. This is the ultimate end-result of all spirituality, all there is, non plus ultra.

Except that it isn’t.

The various schools of yoga came up with an inflation of terms that are supposed to deal with the obvious perceived difference in spiritual attainment between people who have had a first-person experience of brahman. First it was savikalpa and nirvikalpa. Then it was nitya nirvikalpa, the authentic nirvikalpa samadhi, no fucking around there. Then it was kevala nirvikalpa samadhi. Then it was sahaja samadhi. No, really, this is the real thing, the stuff before was not really it, but this is, we’re not shitting you.

One interesting thing I figured out when I entered samadhi in 1994 was that staying in that state would not suffice to make my spiritual position closer to that of Babaji or some similar spiritual superpower. Something else needed to happen, some kind of transformation that doesn’t exist in the metric of Vedanta, and which I therefore couldn’t put into words. Not knowing what that was, I put my faith into higher guidance which led me thus far.

I had a significant breakthrough when I was reading Bhagavata-purana, the part where the Kumaras are visiting Vaikuntha loka in order to see Krishna. The Kumaras are constantly in the state of samadhi, they are basically the end-result of all aspirations of yoga and advaita-Vedanta. However, when they actually see Krishna, they are so overwhelmed by the immense spiritual differential that they start crying and understand that there is more than samadhi, more than atma-brahma-advaita, more than the “I Am That”. Similarly, you have Shiva, the all-powerful Lord of all yoga, embodiment of supreme transcendence, possessor of ultimate power over all Creation, the sole being who could swallow the poison of Maya without being harmed, as he walks with his wife Sati and encounters Vishnu, and tells her, “this is my Guru, he is way greater than me”.

How is that possible? On what metric, by what criteria?

It took me a while to chew on this. The result, however, is unexpected. The result is that Vedanta simply doesn’t provide a valid metric for spiritual progress or evolution, that it lacks proper understanding of human makeup, it lacks proper understanding of the world and it provides almost no guidance. The single most obvious claim to veracity that Vedanta possesses stems from the fact that various beings, yogis et al., enter the state of self-realization of brahman. If not for that, it would have absolutely no merit, because every other claim that it makes can be quite simply falsified by evidence. Karma doesn’t follow predictions of Vedanta. The gunas don’t exist in any way other than as useful high-level behavioral approximations; they are obviously an impromptu invention that was supposed to supplant the Buddhist theory of elements (which BTW is confirmed by observational evidence in the advanced practice of yoga). The structure of soul doesn’t follow Vedanta‘s predictions, because the difference between the less and more evolved beings is not that the less evolved beings have more bad karma; they have barely any karma, which is why they are unevolved. The more karma a soul has, the more evolved it is; exactly opposite to the claims of Vedanta, but exactly following the Buddhist theory of kalapas and elements. Essentially, Vedanta is wrong on so many essential counts, it is useless for all practical purposes.

And here goes my radical statement: what if Vedanta is also wrong about samadhi? What if it’s not what Vedanta claims? What if Vedanta only provided a close-enough explanation of the phenomenon that everyone parrots the same cliches, and the reality is in fact something entirely different?

Let me provide an alternative explanation for samadhi. In samadhi, the limiting effect of the physical brain stops being the primary filter of reality onto consciousness, and that role is taken by the astral substance, which is inherently self-aware, it is of the nature of asmita, self-ness. In the astral mahat-tattva, God-presence and God-awareness are inherent in every kalapa, and you have to really work in order to mess with that, it’s that obvious. Beyond the astral, there exist the increasingly higher substances, whose kalapas carry a more essential quality of God, not just joy, awareness, clarity, consciousness and bliss, but deep, hard reality that’s different from the astral plane in ways similar to those in which a black hole is different from water vapor. If you concentrate an enormous number of astral kalapas, condense their essence, the way you would condense hydrogen in order to produce a star, and then collapse the star into a point in order to produce singularity, well, that point of singularity is of the quality of vajra, and its spiritual gravity is immense, it’s the difference between soul-stuff and God-stuff. There are also kalapas of increasingly higher order, and they make the spiritual essence of the Gods. So yeah, there’s your explanation of the difference between a hippy on LSD and Vivekananda, and difference between Vivekananda and Ramakrishna, difference between a disciple who had an experience of samadhi and a guru who could grant those experiences to others. There’s the difference between the Kumaras and Krishna. It’s not about how deep an experience of samadhi one had, or how long did it last, or how much without remainder it was; those concepts are merely attempts to fix a rotten boat by applying increasingly bigger layers of duct tape to the increasingly larger holes. The problem isn’t fixed by inventing increasingly “better” kinds of samadhi; the problem is fixed by abandoning Vedanta and adopting a better explanation of spiritual realities.