Vedanta is one of the most dangerous mind-traps in the world. The entire New Age corpus consists mostly of its derivatives, and if there’s anything any idiot cultist “knows for sure”, it’s that “we are all one”, that enlightened people should not give a fuck about differences between things and people, that karma is some kind of spiritual trash that needs to be cleansed in order to become enlightened, and that one should attain “inner peace”. Together with the “red pill” of Matrix and accepting Jesus as your personal savior, it completes the collection of most overused and annoying quasi-spiritual platitudes.

So let’s clear things up a bit, in a way that will probably annoy some “vedanta experts” who think they figured it out.

First of all, the fact that brahman is the level 0 of reality, and that self-realization of brahman is always a first-person experience that is often accompanied with exclamations like “I am that brahman” and, leaving samadhi, “only He is”, and that the classical vedanta abounds with statements like “brahma sathyam jagan mithya” (brahman is the truth and the world is an illusion), that doesn’t mean that “we are all one”, because where there are “we” there is no “one”. Also, Shankaracharya was wrong thinking that switching into brahman-consciousness washes away personal karma, because it all goes away in the light of true knowledge. It does not. In fact, this belief is caused by an illusion, because in brahman, there are no limitations and ignorance and therefore no karma, but that didn’t just happen when you had this realization. That is always so and always has been so. Experience of brahman is transcendental to your karma and as such has no influence on it, except in a trivial way, that it’s a new experience that can change your attitude and behavior. Realization of brahman is not liberation, because brahman is forever free and unbound, and your realization of brahman, as impressive as it might feel, is merely a temporary window into this reality. So, since experience of brahman doesn’t significantly influence your personal karmic outcomes, and can actually introduce detrimental effects of bloating your ego because you’re so enlightened and you understand everything, I was always averse to guide people towards this experience. Sure, it’s impressive, but it can actually entrench you on square one of spiritual growth. Thinking you possess certain salvation is one of the main obstacles in spiritual life. Failure is always an option.

Second, vedanta is not some kind of a super-egalitarian hippie philosophy. The fact of brahman doesn’t erase the differences between relative worldly entities. You can say “everything is brahman” as much as you like, but before you though that “everything is matter” and it didn’t cause you to believe that a star is the same as a planet or that a fly is the same as an elephant because they are both matter. “Everything is x” statements aren’t worth shit, because they change absolutely nothing in the reality of things. In fact, rather than encouraging such nonsense, vedanta emphasizes the concept of viveka, or discrimination. It’s the ability to discern between the real and the illusory, between useful and harmful, pleasurable and useful, between that which liberates and that which ensnares. If “all is brahman” had any practical meaning, there would be no reason to encourage discrimination, would there? The moment you ask “where, in this vast ocean of things, should I look for brahman?”, you need viveka, and “everything is brahman” is the most useless thing you could possibly hear. What you do need to hear is Bhagavata-purana or the gospels, which were written with the exact purpose of showing people what God looks like in the world, in which direction they should look for Him and how can they know if they made any progress or not. Shankaracharya’s texts are excellent if you already had the experience of samadhi and you want to feel good about yourself, but they’re useless for anything else. If you don’t see the difference between a rock and a gold nugget, or between a tramp and a saint, you’re not enlightened. You’re too stupid to ever start doing anything spiritually useful. Figuring out the difference between a tramp and a saint is the most important ability you can have, because if you can’t tell the difference, how will you ever aspire to be more like the saint? Cultivating respect for the local manifestations of virtue and greatness in the world is one of the most effective ways of advancing spiritually. The ability to recognize the Ariadne’s thread in the maze is the most important thing to have. If you don’t have it, you’re someone’s food.

Third, vedanta speaks of karma in an inaccurate way that is actively harmful. It portrays it as layers of impurities that create illusions and obscure the reality of Brahman. As a result, most followers of vedanta think that if you remove karma you’ll end up enlightened, in a state of pure atman/brahman. That is not so. Vedanta misunderstood the entire concept and Buddhism got it right. The difference between you and a bacterium isn’t that a bacterium has more karma to work out. The difference is that it has almost no karma to speak of. All the sophisticated spiritual substance that allows you to form complex ideas and inhabit a human body is absent in a bacterium, and its “soul” is so insignificant it can only create a slight energetic shadow around a single-cell organism. Compared to that, you are almost god-like in size and sophistication of karma. Karma is, essentially, the spiritual energy that makes up your spiritual body and defines who you are as a person, it defines your relationship with reality as a whole, and, primarily, your relationship with God. What you actually want to do is not remove karma, because that would mean spiritual suicide, not enlightenment. You need to purify your soul and increase its specific energy, because the similar stuff applies to spirituality and physics. You can have something that’s essentially carbon, but in forms of graphite and diamond. You can have good stuff with poor structure, and you can have inclusions of weak substance that would make an otherwise strong crystal fragile under pressure or impact. You can have ordinary gas, and you can have a fluorescent lamp. Your soul-stuff will behave differently if exposed to different influences, and it will change structure and nature if you make choices of different quality. If you choose to be an asshole it will degrade, and if you choose to be kind and supportive to things that are good and beautiful, it will improve. If you’re confident a shield will develop around your spiritual body that will protect you from harmful influences, and if you’re insecure your spiritual body will be vulnerable to various intrusions. Essentially, your attitude, choices and character have enormous influence on your spiritual nature and destiny. You don’t get enlightened when you have no karma, you get enlightened when your karma is an unbreakable clear diamond through which the light of God is clearly seen. You’re enlightened when your spiritual body is the perfect vessel that is filled with the light that is God. The Buddhists call this “the jewel in the lotus”, mani padme. They got it right and vedanta got it wrong.

Fourth, and probably the most annoying thing, is the “inner peace” that is supposed to be attained with spiritual progress. The origin of this nonsense is a misunderstanding of a verse from Yoga Sutra, that yoga is citta vrtti nirodha, which really means “cessation of fluctuations in mind-stuff” and is mistranslated as “calming of the mind”. It has nothing to do with either calming or peace of any kind. What it wants to say is that you need to transform your mind from being a lightbulb into being a laser, collimated and coherent. Collimated means that all photon-paths are parallel, and coherent means that they are all of the same wavelength. It doesn’t mean that you become a hippy. It means you become a weapon for destroying bullshit.

So, what is the point and the goal of yoga? Let’s put it this way. Brahman is indeed the highest reality. This world is an n^th order metasimulation (simulation within a simulation within…). What you need to remember is that if you have a computer and it runs the operating system within which you run a virtual machine within which you run another operating system and so on recursively, it all runs on hardware. It is all executed by the CPU and stored in memory. That’s what vedanta wants to say when it claims that all is brahman, it says that all software, no matter how many levels of simulation removed, is actually hardware. There is no software, there is only hardware in all its power and richness of innate ability. Brahman didn’t go anywhere just because there’s maya, and within it the causal reality, and within it the astral reality, and within it the physical reality. It’s like my computer that’s running Windows, and within it Virtualbox, and within it Linux, and within it the word processor. It looks like it’s so far removed from the computer, but the instructions are running on the same hardware. It’s still the same computer. Brahman isn’t a billion lightyears away, it’s here, now. It’s not removed in space or time, it’s removed in several reality-levels. When you’re thinking about how you don’t get it, your thoughts are made of Him. When you’re angry because you’re separated from Him, He is your anger. Yoga is about figuring that out, about aligning and restructuring the energies and reality-abstractions in a useful way. If it looks complicated, that’s because it is. It’s not for stupid people, and that’s why when stupid people try to attain enlightenment, they get fucked up in some cult. Even being smart doesn’t make you immune to fucking up, but being stupid assures it. This whole theoretical framework isn’t something you should memorize; it’s actually not very useful. I didn’t memorize it, I simply pulled it out of my sleeve just like that, like you’d pull a description of a smartphone from your sleeve if someone asked you; you’d probably take it out of your pocket, take a look at it and describe what you see. How did I get there? I followed Ariadne’s thread, one corner of the maze at a time. That’s all it takes.

The thing with the spiritual practice of yoga is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but in the theoretical landscape of vedanta. And what vedanta tells us is that everything that we are and everything we perceive in any way, takes place within the mind of God, who is the only reality, the Absolute, level 0 reality.

When you realize that from a first-person experience and decide to tell others, you are a guru. When you hear about it, believe it is so and start doing something about it, you are a yogi. That’s the yogi approach to things: change yourself in order to stop being deluded by things that are not the highest reality. The reason why you don’t see God isn’t because God doesn’t exist. If you look through a microscope and don’t see the stars, it’s not because there are no stars, it’s because you’re stupid.

When I say that this world is software and not hardware, that it is an illusion and not the actual reality, what do I actually mean by that?

The concept of world as an illusion is not new. In vedanta, it is known as maya, the dreamlike world-illusion that obscures the reality of brahman. The problem is, people take this too literally and then they fail to take this world seriously enough, which is a very dangerous mistake, because this world is not an illusion on the same level of understanding on which your dreams are illusions, or where hallucinations are illusions. In order to understand this properly, we need to introduce the concept of “reality levels”. Reality level 0 is the absolute reality, which is not defined in anything other than itself, and in which every other, lesser reality is defined. What vedanta actually says, is that brahman is reality level 0, and reality level of this world is > 0.

As an example, let’s say that reality level of this world is 1. My physical body, chair, desk and computer are defined on that level; they are all objects on reality level 1. However, reality level of Geralt and Yennefer characters in the Witcher game is 2. I we extend the level of abstraction more and make it possible for the virtual character to be conscious and to have dreams, his dream’s level of reality would be 3. So basically as we spawn illusions within illusions, we increase the reality level, or, more accurately, illusion level.

Many “battles” were fought over this within various schools of vedanta, because they didn’t define things properly, and I remember a funny story about one of the gurus of the Gaudiya-vaishnava sect (known in the West as the Hare Krishnas) who used to beat the advocates of advaita vedanta on the head with his shoe until they admitted that the shoe is real and not an illusion. What the vaishnava guru didn’t understand is that for the shoe to hurt the head, the shoe being real isn’t really a prerequisite. It only needs to exist on the same level of reality as the head. For instance, in the Witcher game the wolves don’t need to be real in order to hurt the main character. They only need to exist on level 2 reality. If they exist on level 2, they can hurt Geralt, and if they exist on level 1 they can hurt the player, but not Geralt. If they exist on level 3, basically within Geralt’s dream, the worst they can do is wake him up.

So, what advaita vedanta actually says, and what Hare Krishnas fail to understand, is that atman/brahman is level 0, the whole maya concept is level 1, mahat-tattvas are level 2, universes with mahat-tattva specific laws are level 3, and so this Universe we live in is a specific case of a level 3 reality universe, and within that all material entities are level 3 real. This means that shoe and head are both level 3, and that they interact on the same level of reality, but that the entire thing is an illusion 3 levels removed from the actual reality, which is atman/brahman.

I introduced the term “mahat tattva”, which is usually explained in very obscure ways but it’s actually very simple. It’s the basic set of laws that makes a Universe. You can have a law-set that spawns astral universes, a law-set that spawns causal universes, and a law-set that spawns material universes. In programming, you’d say that a mahat-tattva is a class, and a universe is an object. An object always belongs to a certain class. I might have slightly modified the original teaching of Vedanta here, but this modification is an improvement for the sake of clarity.

The next thing that seems to be poorly defined in Hinduism is that mahat-tattvas are not parallel, but nested. This means that within maya you have causal mahat-tattva as the “root directory”, and within it you have instances of causal universes, within which you can have causal entities of all kinds, among which one is the astral mahat-tattva, as a subdirectory within which you have multiple instances of astral universes, and within each astral universe you have many astral structures, worlds and entities, one of which is the material mahat-tattva, as a subdirectory within which you have multiple instances of material universes. Since astral entities and structures have ownership structures, the being who thought of making a material mahat-tattva actually owns it, and if any astral or higher being wants to experience this sub-directory of the astral universe, he can do so only with permissions that are less than those of the owner.

It sounds complicated, but this is actually the most organized and simplified explanation I could think of, and the original explanations of vedanta are much more chaotic, laced with mythology and more difficult to grasp.

I always though the concept of original sin to be a rather stupid idea. For those who don’t know, it’s a concept according to which the entire humanity inherited the sin of Adam and Eve, as well as its consequences. It’s basically a concept according to which you are always guilty of something, regardless how pure and faultless your life is. It is actually quite likely that the concept was intentionally developed by the Church in order to foster dependence, because they supposedly own the intangible cure for this intangible but deadly problem, which is by definition genetic, but is somehow cured by accepting Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

Of course, someone somewhere inevitably asked how was Jesus supposed to be sinless if he inherited the original sin from Mary? The answer was that Mary was excepted from the original sin by an act of God, since her conception. That’s the origin and meaning of the dogma of the immaculate conception; that’s actually a description of Mary, she’s the immaculate conception.

So, what do we know about the original sin, according to what the Christians believe? It’s pervasive, with only two exceptions throughout history (Mary and Jesus), and two trivial exceptions (Adam and Eve before they believed the snake and ate from that tree). It’s something that causes a fatal conditioning of some kind, precluding salvation, and required a very serious personal intervention from God in order to make a special exception for those who accept it.

It sounds like worse bullshit than it actually is, because the Christians don’t really believe in the existence of Adam and Eve and they think that this entire story is some kind of an allegory for mankind’s relationship with God. Well, at least the Catholics are smart enough, I’m sure there are literalists, especially in America, who are so lacking in their understanding of the mythological part of the scripture and so untrained in reading through such material they would be sure to flunk the first year of Catholic theology, but they boastfully think themselves to be the true believers. So, idiots aside, the smart Christians know it’s some kind of an important message cloaked in myth, but I don’t think they have a singular and consistent explanation of this message. They would usually say that the message is that God created human souls in a perfect state, and then they were seduced to commit sin against God, by separating their choice from God’s will, and then had to suffer the consequences of this separation. I never heard a good explanation for why this would be heritable. I also never heard a good explanation for why it was irreversible, and why God couldn’t simply give humanity some kind of a temporary lesson instead of a permanent exile. Considering how they believe God to be forgiving and merciful enough to sacrifice the life of his own Son-person for their salvation and as payment for the collective sins of mankind, this makes very little sense and that’s why I decided that the entire concept is so profoundly flawed, it may only cause spiritual harm if it is taken seriously, and I always argued against it.

But then you get the nagging question of what was it that Jesus actually had to die for? Let’s take it from the source – what did he say about it?

“Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (John 12, 31-32, NIV)

“You heard me say, ‘I am going away and I am coming back to you.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. I have told you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe. I will not say much more to you, for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over me, but he comes so that the world may learn that I love the Father and do exactly what my Father has commanded me. (John 14, 28-31, NIV)

But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. When he comes, he will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because people do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; and about judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned. (John 16, 7-11, NIV)

As you can see, there are three very notable details. First, all quotations are from the gospel of John. Second, there is no mention of the original sin in any way. Third, what is mentioned, repeatedly, is “the prince of this world”, who is to be “driven out”, “has no hold over him” but will be the direct cause of Jesus’ suffering and death according to the will of God, and, after Jesus’ resurrection, “stands condemned”.

There are, of course, other parts that are often quoted as supportive of the original sin and redemption thesis, like John 3:16-18, but if you extend the quote to the verse 21, it suddenly sounds different, because it’s not about the redemptory value of his sacrifice, but redemptory value of recognizing the light that he is as that of God, and opting for it and not against it:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God. (John 3, 16-21)

So, I’ll express my own little theory here. Jesus didn’t think that people were to be saved because he did some magical act of removing their sins. He thought that he’s the pure light of God, and whoever recognizes him as such, chooses him over everything else and believes in him, will be saved by the virtue of that spiritual choice. This is supported in numerous places across the gospels:

Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty … For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. … I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” (John 6;35,40,51 NIV)

From the context it is obvious that the “disciples” took this metaphor too literally, but to me the meaning is obvious, and it’s actually the repeated preamble of John’s gospel:

Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. … No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

Basically, Jesus is the pure and unadulterated nature and character of God that is manifested in this world, without any stain or confusion, and it is there for people to be able to choose it over all other things and thus attain salvation. It is hinted that it is his sacrifice that is for their salvation, but the most straightforward explanation is that it is painful for God to be born as a man and it is a great sacrifice God was willing to make in order to give people the chance to see him and choose him in this world and thus be redeemed from the snares of illusion, because of which the pure nature and character of God are unknown to them.

So, in other words, the way Jesus saves you isn’t dying for your sins, except maybe in a stretch of metaphor, because if it weren’t for your sins he wouldn’t have to come get you out. He saves you by showing himself here in order for you to be able to know God, and if you know God, in his true character and nature, and if you choose him and believe in him, you are saved, not because of magic, because it’s all about choices and their consequences. If you align your spiritual vector with God, you end up with God. Of course, in order for Jesus to give people this option, he had to pay a great personal price of being born and dying in this awful place. If there is any place that is at the exact opposite end of all existence from the bright and glorious throne of God, it’s here, and for God it’s such a sacrifice to be born here, that the addition of being flogged and crucified is merely a matter of degree.

So, the concept of Jesus dying for our sins is a completely arbitrary reading of the text. It’s not straightforward or clear. However, Jesus dying because it’s the will of God, and because it will defeat the prince of this world, which is his name for Satan, that’s a very straightforward reading. But what the literal hell was that all about?

Let me tell you how I read it.

This world is not God’s domain. It has another ruler, who is God’s personal enemy. How that came to be is another matter, but it is very clear that God has no sovereignty over this world, that it is the principality of Satan. Also, human souls are under the power of Satan and cannot escape it on their own. Showing them God’s pure nature, in this world, seems to be something that breaks their spell and provides them with Ariadne’s thread that will eventually get them out, if they remain faithful.

As corroborating evidence I cite Buddha, who also claimed that this world is within the sovereign power of a demon of illusion called Mara, whose temptations and challenges were the last obstacle for him to break before attaining buddhahood.

I don’t think it’s a metaphor. It’s too much of a coincidence. I think it’s a description of the actual state of affairs: this world is not the real world, not the domain of God. It’s some kind of a very consistent, persistent and spiritually influential illusion created by a being who is, essentially, the opposite of the bright light of truth, reality, knowledge and bliss that is God, and whoever gets stuck here, for whatever reason, is in a very grave situation because the truth of God is so obscure, hidden and difficult to recognize and opt for in this place, one is apparently stuck. That is what came to my mind when I was thinking about the original sin, and its possible interpretation that isn’t silly or outright foolish. Humans made a certain kind of choice by which they ended up here, in the domain of Satan, the enemy of God. They were probably seduced by the promise of spiritual evolution that is possible only through difficulties and in separation from God, because they can’t learn how to discern between good and evil if everything around them is good and there’s no possibility of evil. They need to go to Satan’s private illusion of a world where both good and evil are possible, where knowledge is an option and not the normal state of things. When they, in that state, choose the light of God, it will be an actual, not a trivial choice, because it’s easy to believe in God when he’s all around you and he’s impossible to deny. However, they would have to accept his rules when they enter.

The problem is, how would God prove that Satan did the entire thing out of a malicious intent, out of hatred for God? If it were obvious, we probably wouldn’t have a problem. The easiest way to prove it is to have God personally enter the trap and see how Satan treats him. This is, obviously, what Jesus thought: that Satan will choose to kill him in order to hide the pure light of God from people, and in doing so, he will condemn himself in the eyes of God, revealing his true intentions and thus opening himself to righteous punishment.

However, I don’t think it worked the way Jesus planned. I think Satan was smarter than him, and simply introduced the explanation stating that he allowed Jesus to be killed and to resurrect from the dead in order to provide a glorious beacon of light throughout history, for people to be able to see and choose the light of God, not only in the physical presence of Jesus, but through authentic testimony. And, since that is a very credible and convincing explanation, I think Satan completely evaded condemnation and punishment, at a price of actually having to leave an Ariadne’s thread in his maze.

Of course, he also used his power to confuse the matter and obfuscate everything with doubts to the point where few will actually understand what’s going on here, what’s at stake and where they will actually use the instrument of salvation that they have at their disposal, but that, of course, is a matter of choice between good and evil, between light and darkness, ignorance and truth, and here Satan was actually true to his original promise of making things exceedingly difficult.

So, that’s my take on it.