There’s a question people always seem to ask in a discourse about Christianity: why did God allow Satan to exist and tempt people, causing all sorts of suffering? Isn’t it God’s choice then, the outcome being his responsibility as well?

The Christians then talk about free will until they are blue in the face, but I have a somewhat different perspective. You see, there’s a thing God and Satan actually agree on, and it’s that undeserved salvation is abominable.

Satan had terrible motives hidden behind the apparent noble motives, but it’s like American financed opposition in some country America wants to destroy. They always protest against corruption, nepotism, and all kinds of scandals in order to gather support, but their actual cause is to destroy the country and allow the West to come in, break it up and sell it for raw material. That’s why Satan seemed to object to all kinds of beings inhabiting heaven, that would fail even the lightest imaginable test were it administered. Of course, he wanted to destroy everybody by making a test nobody could pass, but that’s a different matter. His nominal cause – pressure testing souls to see if they actually want God, or if they actually just want to feel good because that’s the consequence of God’s proximity – was something God seems to agree with.

Sure, they do it for different reasons. Satan sees beings who are of higher stature than him and feels jealousy, and wants to find a way to degrade and destroy them, and embarrass God for elevating them over him in the first place. God wants to be surrounded by beings who would be faithful to him even through greatest of hardships, instead of betraying him at the first sign of discomfort. Basically, what God wants from souls is similar to the situation a very wealthy man would want from his wife. If everybody knows he’s wealthy, all kinds of gold diggers will try to be his wife, but you don’t want to marry those because they will leave you as soon as they think the money is going to run out, someone better came along, or they think they can gain more from divorce than from marriage. What he would want to do is create a scenario that would filter out all the gold diggers, and leave only those who are there only for him, and would stay with him no matter what.

So, both God and Satan agreed that there needs to be some kind of a stress test. Satan wanted to make it a test everybody fails. God wanted to make it a test the truly loyal ones will pass, and not only that, but make it actually rewarding for them, and not just a terrible ordeal they were subjected to for no good reason, only to return to what they had before. No, there had to be a potential reward to match the potential doom.

So, this world is created by Satan in order to destroy you by testing you in a way you are not likely to pass, because the assumption is that you will want to choose the pleasant and the comfortable instead of God, and you will seek God in the direction of more power, more wealth, more pleasure, and that’s where the worldly traps are. You are not expected to recognize God without all the external things expected to accompany him. You’re not expected to recognize him if he were a shepherd or a carpenter, because you look for a king or a billionaire.

The trap looks terrible, because it bifurcates the essence from the energies that are expected to accompany it, and forces you to choose, with fatal outcomes if you choose wrong. Satan created this and thought nobody will pass, and was happy with his work. God saw this and thought, if someone passes this level of deception, they will indeed have proven themselves worthy and reliable, worthy of highest power and authority. Interestingly, the souls who looked at the test all thought it was easy and they could all pass. They all thought they could recognize God anywhere and remain loyal through anything, especially some illusion.

There were rules, of course. Both God and Satan were allowed to tempt and provide choices, but not directly influence outcomes. God wasn’t allowed to manifest Divine nature in a way so compelling that it would remove all possibility of doubt. Satan wasn’t allowed to use his authority over the world in order to kill. God is allowed to enter the simulation in order to present himself as a choice, but he needs to do so in ways that divorce him from his power, that would otherwise influence beings. Both shared profound contempt for spiritual gold diggers.

Satan thought he managed to hide his true intent from God. No, he didn’t. It’s just that God had his own plans and this seems to have played right into them. Also, Satan kind of had a valid point, the way all those colour revolution people kind of have a valid point about corruption. God’s way of filtering souls by allowing them to choose greater participation in virtues, but without a stress test, isn’t really effective. Basically, if you’re rich and handsome, how do you find a wife that isn’t a gold digger? All the gold diggers will swear they want you for your soul and your sense of humour and spiritual kinship or whatever. What you actually want is the one who would choose you over rich people even if you were a shepherd or a carpenter, and when she makes her choice, you remove the illusion.

God doesn’t like fair-weather friends. Satan is an envious bastard who will say everybody who loves God is a fair-weather friend. Both agreed there needs to be some kind of a test. Both agreed it needs to be hard and realistic. Where they didn’t agree, they agreed to limit both of their ability to influence outcomes.

And so, here we are.

I’ve been thinking about that previous article, where I said that my motive for doing the right thing was not disappointing people, among other things. That’s actually not completely true, now that I think of it. I don’t like disappointing people, but I will do whatever I deem necessary and correct from the position of the vertical connection I’m maintaining at all times. I am under no obligation to be rational, or to do things that will maintain a certain perception of me. That is ego structure, and although I maintain its appearance, in essence this is not how things work. If I had a pattern of behaviour that was predictable in this way, Satan would’ve made short work of me decades ago.

Also, God communicated something rather shocking to me once, months ago, when I asked why he deliberately left me hanging when I desperately needed support. He said that getting rid of traitors and self-serving bastards that were hanging on me at that time, pretending to be my students or pretending to want God if that could incur benefits for them, was so important that my interests were deliberately sacrificed, and that’s not seen as important because I’ll get all of my stuff back in the end, but those people needed to get reasons to betray me and fall off on their own, because the connection was formed in such a way that I couldn’t just cut them off on my own, and they needed to go at all cost. It can feel, sometimes, that God hates some people more than he loves me, but I think that’s just a human perspective, from a point in time, not from the eternity. From a higher perspective, this body is here with a purpose, and it’s mission first, and the tool doesn’t even have to know what the mission is, exactly. It needs to know what to do at the next step.

So yes, I will always do what I feel I have to do, and some of those things are deliberately tailored from above so that someone will get their reasons for fucking the hell off. It’s weird, and somewhat disturbing, but that’s much closer to how things actually work than what I wrote before.

I think my last articles surprised people quite a bit, but probably not all for the same reasons. If I talked about anything spiritual in the recent years, it would usually be the unpleasant stuff such as karmic transformations, and for some reason I think people interpret that as me being fucked up and inventing some rationalisation to explain it as something non-obvious, and since I didn’t mention God much either they concluded it’s because I’ve fallen out of grace or something. Also, the fact that I write about photography or politics doesn’t mean I can’t write about other things. It’s just that writing about God isn’t my only way of writing about God, if you get what I mean.

Also, I did not get weaker over the years and decades. Someone will say “who knows when that darshan he’s talking about happened, it might be decades ago”. No, it was last week, and again yesterday as I wrote the last article, thank you for asking (she made a comment). However, the last time before that was in the late 1990s, if I recall correctly. Too long; 27 years or something, unless you count being married to her tulku as a form of darshan and lila, which you actually should, in which case it’s a whole different story. Then someone’ll say it might not be real, it might be my mind playing tricks because I was feeling terrible and it’s a coping mechanism. Sorry to disappoint, but during those 27 years I felt mostly terrible and during the entire time I couldn’t even remember something like that well enough to fake it, or even well enough for it to be any comfort, let alone pull the experience out of my ass. It just doesn’t work that way. You see God when God wants to be seen, not when you want it or need it. Why now; I don’t know. Why not before; I don’t know that either. However, feeling terrible means I’m doing my job of being an anvil that breaks all hammers, not that I have fallen from God’s grace.

Some are asking the right questions, such as who the fuck am I, really, if all that is true? Well, that’s the worst kept secret of all time, I guess. Some will be in the “we knew it!” camp, others in the “oh fuck…”, but I have no wish to waste time spelling it out for you. But yes, I also take pictures of heather bushes in the sunset, and I also write political commentary and spend inordinate amounts of money on gear. 🙂 You might ask “why”, and the answer is “why not?” I’m not a fan of pompous and pretentious bullshit of any kind; in the afterlife, I’d be the one in jeans, chatting up the team over some equivalent of coffee that they have there.

A while ago, when I was writing about the Judges of Karma, I remembered all of them that I knew personally, and they were all male. I wondered about that, thinking if there’s a reason for that, when one of them came into my context; she felt like an older woman, kind and smart, and with an undertone of gentle humour said/thought/communicated “Not all of us are, apparently”. I found it strange that she chose the appearance of old age, but I thought she probably found it appropriate since she was a very serious person, something you would expect from an old university professor or a supreme court judge, or some similarly dignified role. She could manifest as a woman in her 20s, but I’m sure she would find it immature and frivolous.

Then I started thinking how interesting it is that I didn’t see her “physical” form, or any astral equivalent thereof, I didn’t hear her voice, just felt her presence, and I could immediately tell her sex/gender. Just a touch of her mind to mine, and I could instantly tell it’s a woman.

In the lunatic asylum also known as America, the debate is currently between people who think gender is a social construct and so anyone can be anything if they feel like it, and on the other hand there are the conservatives who think gender is an immutable physical property, defined by chromosomes and primary sex characteristics, and that’s that. If they even bother to think about soul, they would probably say that the sex of the soul matches the sex of the body, or that the soul is a sexless spiritual entity devoid of such inherently material designations.

I heard multiple variations on that theme; basically, sex is a property of the physical body, which soul transcends as it gets more used to its purely spiritual nature, and so on.

My experience is exactly the opposite. The lower the level of a spiritual entity, the harder it is for me to establish its sex. Something that would live in an insect or a bird has nothing I could recognize as sex/gender. It’s an amorphous structure, quite nasty, and has as much sex as a rock. Humans are usually easier to identify, but interestingly, sex of the soul doesn’t always match sex of the body. Someone will now say “aha, that must be explanation for the homosexuals, transsexuals and the like”. I don’t think so; things aren’t that simple. Homosexuals sometimes register as very feminine, sometimes as very masculine, and sometimes as just strange, weird and wrong, as if their sexual pathology is merely one of many aspects of their spiritual pathology. Also, sometimes I can tell that a soul had a male prior incarnation, but is a completely normal feminine heterosexual woman in this incarnation. Essentially, I’d say things are just complicated, and understand this in the least judgmental way possible. In that sense, the Abrahamic religions are just wrong in their judgmental attitude. They are so wrong, that they got exactly nothing right.

The higher the beings, the more clear and defined their sex, in direct opposition to expectations. They don’t feel like amorphous and generic sources of light or whatever; they feel extremely defined. Female deities are the most feminine beings I’ve ever met. Male deities are always absolutely and distinctly male. I never had a situation where I couldn’t tell their sex instantly, before I could register anything else they were communicating. Also, I never saw it visually, nor do I hear their voices, so that I could tell from that. Obviously, sex is a fundamental spiritual category, divorced from any physical characteristics of sex, something I can tell from the mere presence of a soul, without sight or sound that would communicate sex it in the physical realm.

You will be justified in asking how this is possible. Well, I have multiple hypotheses and I’m not sure which is right. The first one is that this world is designed to mirror and interface with the real world. If you design something like that, you want it to match realities as closely as possible. This means that the primary incarnation vehicles of choice were designed to be as similar to spiritual realities, and then causality was stretched backwards to create the timeline that would result in that.

The second hypothesis is that we perceive everything through the physical brain here. Absolutely every spiritual experience is translated by the physical brain into the closest equivalents that exist within the brain. This means that when I perceive some spiritual being as female, it’s merely the closest possible translation the brain could provide. However, I think this hypothesis can be easily falsified. You see, I had experiences that couldn’t be properly translated at all, but I still remembered them as they were; I just couldn’t translate them into anything useful. Also, when something has an undefined sex, like some demonic entities, I perceive it exactly as it is, buzzing energy of low specific “vibration level” and all. I don’t automatically translate it as anything. This brings us to the third hypothesis, that spiritually high beings meet me halfway and create something I can perceive in ways that will give out a message in itself. I’m sure there are some people who would very much want something of that sort to be true, just so that they don’t have to accept a reality where after death they meet a “being of light”, and that light is clearly either male or female.

There is also a hypothesis according to which souls evolve mostly through physical incarnations, and physical experience shapes the identity of the soul itself, which then usually keeps the appearance and sex of its last incarnation. That one might be true to a large extent, despite the fact that physical incarnation might not really be the primary method of spiritual evolution, and despite the fact that souls might choose to incarnate in bodies whose sex differs from that of their soul.

Whichever it may be, it makes things much more interesting than one would expect. Even I am not immune to such expectations; for instance, I understood that Biljana is a tulku very early on; the design of her “soul” looks like a mathematical equation, there’s not a trace of the messiness of karma that always follows from multiple successive incarnations and spiritual evolution. She looks like someone created her with a magical spell, and considering how precise and mathematically perfect the spell is, I was kind of intimidated by her “casting entity”; I expected it to be some huge Divine being of bright light that doesn’t give a shit about anything even remotely human. And then I met her, the “casting entity”, and understood that not only do I know her since forever, but she’s the girliest girl from girl world you could possibly imagine. It’s just that she’s so holy that saints and buddhas evaporate from the ground she walks on, and so powerful that time, space and universes are something that’s created, modified and destroyed in her wake. So yeah, the most powerful being I ever had darshan of is also the most clearly female being I’ve ever met. So much for gender being a social or a biological construct. If anything, it’s the most fundamental spiritual evolutionary attractor.

A conclusion I draw from that is that when two sides argue, the truth is not necessarily in the middle, or on either side. Sometimes, both sides are completely wrong and the truth is nowhere near anything they could imagine.

I was thinking about something related to the previous article, and I think it’s so important I can’t let it go.

You see, when I was talking about not speaking about spiritual experience in order to protect their sanctity and privacy, there’s an aspect of it that I’m sure everybody missed completely. I didn’t mean protecting my own privacy. I meant primarily protecting God’s privacy.

You see, to me God is not a resource, or a treasury, or a power source you exploit endlessly. God is family. God is not just someone you ask for things, or protection. God is also someone you protect.

When I was much younger, in my early 20s, I read a book by some American Christian, Billy Graham I think, and of course his instruction was to accept the redeeming sacrifice of Christ, to accept his payment for your sins in order to be washed clean. I felt a sudden fury at the idea, and I thought, “I refuse”. The idea of letting God suffer at your behalf was so offensive to me that I instantly felt a surge of defensive anger. “In fact, I offer to take His place at the cross, any time, to protect Him from people like you, who would crucify Him for their benefit”. It was probably the most clear and defined thought I ever had in my life at that point. I would absolutely protect God from any harm, at my own expense, without a second thought, any time it’s necessary. It must sound weird, that my most basic instinct was to shield God in my protective rage, and take any harm that would befall Him upon myself. However, this is my nature. God is family. You stand between family and harm.

That, first and foremost, is why I refuse to talk about some spiritual experiences. They are something private that happened within my family. What happens within family, stays there. God is a protected family member whose privacy is sacred to me. So yeah, I understand that there are malevolent assholes out there who interpret my silence about these things as their absence, and they then interpret that as a sign of my spiritual fall or apostasy. Feel free, as far as I’m concerned, because you don’t matter. I prefer evil people to think whatever evil shit about me, if it means that all their thoughts, as if bullets, darts and rotten vegetables, hit me as a shield forever standing between their malice and God. I swore to protect God from harm and I meant it.