I’d like to explain something about my behavior that might frustrate some people needlessly. You see, if you get into an argument with me, and if this argument is longer than a few sentences, you will lose. If you’re on an ego trip, you’ll behave like a hissy critter and complain how is it that I’m always right, and the answer is, no, I just tend to pick my battles very carefully, and if you pay attention, you’ll see that most arguments end before they have really started, because I immediately concede to any valid point anyone makes; I don’t argue when someone’s right, or when I think the other side of the argument might be as valid as mine. So, it’s a matter of very careful triage, where I estimate how correct the other side is, and how important the issue itself is. If the issue is not important, I will shrug and say that it doesn’t matter who wins, or the difference between the opposing sides isn’t large enough for it to matter who is right. An example of this are arguments regarding equipment. Canon vs. Nikon, or PC vs. Mac, or iPhone vs. Android. Who cares. Someone will say that brand A is better, and I will shrug and say that the differences aren’t large enough for me to care. Basically, don’t compete if the prize isn’t worth winning.

The second case is when it isn’t clear who is right. For instance, if science isn’t clear on something, such as the string theory, I will refrain from having elaborate opinions and simply say that the theory sounds interesting or compelling, but the evidence for the whole thing just isn’t strong enough. It’s a case of don’t compete if it isn’t clear what the victory is; if it isn’t clear what the truth actually is, it’s impossible to say who won the argument.

The third case is when the other side is making a correct statement. If someone says that Hydrogen is chemically reactive, I will say “yes” and that will be the end of it. This will be so even if I otherwise strongly disagree with the person on other points, because the most important thing about winning arguments is not allowing yourself to be sidetracked, which includes opposing someone when he’s right about something just because you think he’s wrong about something else. If I think someone is the worst person in the world and he states that Paris is the capital of France, I will agree. If you think that you have to disagree with absolutely every single statement someone makes because you want to make a moral statement about his person or philosophy, you’re stupid and emotionally immature. If Hitler states that conserving the environment and building good roads is good, and you disagree because you disapprove of his racial policies, you’re an idiot. The correct way of arguing with Hitler is to say, yes, conserving the environment is good, and building roads is good, but if you really believe your race is superior, then meritocracy is the only credible way you should approach the issue, since inferior races will fail to compete with yours in the market of ideas and will die off. If you think you have to actively exterminate someone because he’s outcompeting you, then he’s obviously not the one who’s inferior. Essentially, you concede obvious truths and do not allow yourself to be sidetracked, you concentrate on your opponent’s core issue, try to figure out where he is wrong or his actions are contradictory to his beliefs, and then reduce the argument to a clear and compelling line of thought that is difficult or impossible to refute.

So, essentially, the reason why people think I’m “always” stubbornly insisting on defeating “everyone” is because they simply don’t add my early concessions to the tally of the arguments I participate in. Having done that, it would become obvious that I actually concede most points, or I ignore issues because I don’t find them important enough. However, it then becomes obvious that in a small minority of cases, where I do actually choose to fight, I do so by exploring the entire tree of possible arguments and counter-arguments in order to find weak points and flaws in my thinking, and before I express a thought, I am already aware of all the possible refutations, and if none of them are valid, only then do I state my case, and the reason why I do so with such certainty is because I already tested it against all the objections I could think of, and I am very good at thinking of test-cases for debugging code. So, that’s something to have in mind if you want to argue with me: I don’t pick losing battles. If I’m confident enough about something to insist, it means I probably tested my idea against a very large set of possible objections before having initially stated it, and unless you thought of something that I missed (which happens every now and then, but not frequently enough to be something a reasonable person would bet on), you will lose. Sure, in some cases I make intentionally controversial statements just to fuck with people and snap them out of their stupor, but even then the argument serves the purpose of getting you to think hard enough to see the way out. The fact that it’s wrong doesn’t mean that I missed something, it means I left it to you to figure it out.

Another important thing to have in mind is that for me, arguing isn’t about an ego trip, it’s about truth and virtue. I argue in order to oppose falsehoods and establish a correct way of handling things, not to win battles. That’s why I’m my own arguments’ harshest critic, but that’s the part you don’t see, because it precedes the point where I actually write the argument down. You don’t see the part where I mercilessly test it against possible objections. So, it’s not a case of “I’ll win some, and you’ll win some”. If you want to build up your self-worth by opposing me every now and then just so that it doesn’t look like you’re a “yes-person”, you’re in for a world of hurt, because if I recognize your argument as something I already tested my own argument against and rejected the objection as invalid, I will dismiss you in a way you will find quite abrasive to your self-image; in fact, if I recognize your argument as a lazy one, as something that doesn’t survive even the most superficial scrutiny, I will do things to your ego it might not recover from.

So yeah; if I really insist on something and if I act as if what I’m saying is a fact, it probably means that I tested the argument beforehand and I am convinced it is solid, and now I want to test it against other people’s ideas in case I missed something; in this case, I will appreciate good input, but my tolerance for nonsense is always low. You need to really turn your brain on, and in most cases it will be much wiser of you to concede than to argue, and I will think more of you if you do, because if I say water is wet and you argue against it, I will think you a fool; not because I like yes-men, but because I dislike insecure fools who think they always need to argue lest they be considered yes-men.

I haven’t been writing lately, for several reasons. First, It’s summer and I was on vacation:

Second, it’s damn hot in here because the air-conditioner is not in my computer room, and I’m not all that into writing, or thinking for that matter, when my brain is being cooked. 🙂

Third, it’s not that I lack topics for articles, it’s that I’m not sure what will make any sense to write. I’ll wait for the heat to subside and then see.

https://youtu.be/k8LjCS9Qhto

It’s interesting what it comes down to. Religion, according to “rational atheists”, is complete bullshit without any factual basis. It’s all made up by humans. However, when those rational atheists provided a rational, intellectually sound and scientifically based alternative to replace all that religious bullshit, the result was always and without exception an unmitigated disaster. So basically, if you base your life on the life and teachings of Jesus, who is supposed to be an imaginary character like Spongebob, you end up fine. If you base your life on what the rational atheists recommend, you end up being a cynical sociopath who needs to be constantly medicated for depression. And here we have Steph who presents himself as rational, and who actually understands this conundrum, but doesn’t follow it to its logical conclusion, which is that maybe, just maybe, if religious people manage to get their shit together more successfully than atheists, maybe that’s because their brains are more in tune to what the reality actually is, which is that God actually exists and his existence and character make moral demands on those who want to be in tune with him. So yeah, the ideas atheists come up with as substitutes for religion are complete and utter rubbish, they themselves are irrational and crazy, but their basic worldview is the scientific truth and makes so much sense, because whatever.

“Wait a minute, if you say you are the same now as you were at the time of birth, that your essential consciousness is the same, what about the practice of yoga? Didn’t it change anything?”

Of course it changed things. I learned that things, that previously appeared to be merely states of consciousness, are in fact planes of reality. I carved pathways within my physical brain that allow me to do things that are so far out of ordinary human experience, I am loath to even discuss them outside the circle of trained initiates who are able to verify or falsify my claims. But the thing is, higher initiation didn’t feel like expansion, it felt like removing limitations. So, basically, the advanced practice of yoga, and things that I do in the last two decades, that are not really yoga, but rather wielding of spiritual power, had the effect of enabling me to do some things, while incarnated, that I would much more easily and naturally do while discarnated. Essentially, it allowed me to get around some of the bodily limitations. This means that it didn’t produce spiritual evolution or expansion, but rather that it neutralized some of the zombifying effects of physical incarnation. Essentially, yoga is less effective than death for removing corporal limitations, but has that convenient peculiarity of not having to die in order not to be completely useless. Yes, I still see my physical incarnation as a stupid hairy ape-like creature that is the cause of all my problems, but unlike before, I now have a certain degree of control, awareness and knowledge. The ape-like thing causes inevitable mistakes in everything I do, which is humiliating in a way, but I try to keep it on a short leash.

“You are often saying that you have to suffer in order to spend or transform evil global structures. Isn’t up-stream kriya of Kundalini-yoga supposed to do that?”

Well, no. What kriya does is destabilize your energy system in order to make it fluid, and remove resistance. It also creates a strong upward flow of energy which is a close relative of orgasm. In regard to transforming, breaking down and spending energy blockages, larvae and, in lack of a better word, accumulations of past sins, what kriya actually does is allow you to detach from a structure, guide energy towards it in order to dissolve it, and when it releases the traumatic content, it allows you to mitigate the trauma. You still experience suffering, but you are in a state of surrender to God while you are suffering, so to speak, and this makes it possible for you not to simply close the damn thing off in another larva, but to deal with it permanently. Once you’ve faced the traumatic emotions, they lost their harmfulness and you can deal with them as you would deal with anything. So basically, it’s the suffering that spends bad karma in any case. Everything else is there just to make it easier to bear. If you’re not suffering under the onslaught of traumatic emotions, you’re not really spending anything, by definition. I recently used a comparison with brakes on a car. What they do is equivalent to suffering: they take the kinetic energy of the vehicle and spend it by taking it onto themselves, by transforming it into heat. The molecules of the material of the brakes are accelerated by the transfer, and then this heat slowly dissipates into the environment. Similarly, any transfer of karma disturbs your spiritual body on the kalapa-level, changing its specific energy. With a combination of suffering and surrender, in other words detachment, you absorb the energy of the impact, integrate the additional karmic mass into your own on a kalapa-level, and raise the energy of the resulting mass onto your previous energy level. If you’re not a high initiate, meaning if your spiritual body isn’t made of vajra, or to be technical, if it is not made of a substance that is qualitatively higher than the substance you are absorbing, the process will actually change your soul-structure in such a way that your entire motivational structure might change. The additional karmic mass might end up transforming you, and not the other way around. You need to be made of higher quality stuff, so to say; so, the karmic transfers are a different order of magnitude of a problem compared to dealing with your own personal issues. If you’re very strong, you can do small things without any apparent effort, like Earth absorbing space dust in form of small meteors. It just makes a passing glow and then it’s absorbed into Earth’s mass. However, something big can make quite a mess, and can take some doing to recover from. Since my official job title seems to be “garbage reclamation unit”, I’m basically very close to 100% of the maximum load that I can sustainably take. It’s not enough to wreck me, but it’s enough to seriously ruin my day. Sometimes the load exceeds 100%, which means that it would cause serious damage if it were kept on that level. Sometimes it falls under 80%, and then I feel great and recover quickly. I can’t really remember it going under that level, though.

“Can’t someone help you?”

You need to understand that the requirements for this shit are rather high, so high that in order to be able to do any kind of a karmic transfer, of any quantity, you need to be a high initiate and a decently skilled yogi. Not many people throughout history have been able to do it. I’ve seen high initiates who are decently skilled yoginis start the process of breaking apart and dying because they carelessly “looked” at what I was spending when I was spending something particularly nasty, and a few tiny specks of that attached to them. The result was devastating, because not only were they not able to absorb and transform it, their efforts had no influence whatsoever on it, and the stuff simply kept shredding them. I fixed the damage simply by paying attention, spending those stray specks in a second, restored their lower bodies from their core karmic template, and proceeded to feel like shit under 110% load. No, nobody can help me, because I’m uniquely powerful and skilled, and the second most powerful person ever to have lived would be merely a helpless victim whom I’d have to patch up. But I can be helped in other ways, that’s true. The entire logistics of my effort are made possible through others’ help. I’m not doing this alone. In fact, one of the “hacks” that makes the entire thing possible is that others willingly assist me in every way possible while I personally am under “attack”, because there are “immune responses” that were set against me and would have blocked my effort years ago had there been no help from others. So, nobody can help me with my part, but my part is only a piece in a wider puzzle, and without the other parts, it alone wouldn’t do much.

Whenever people talk about empathy, it’s always positive, as if were the single most desirable spiritual quality to have. It is seen as weakening the limiting effects of ego, or some other bullshit.

Let me tell you a true story.

I was born with extreme empathy always turned on. Today I would classify it as strong involuntary samyama, but as a child, it took me more than a decade to even guess what was going on. I simply became a different person when surrounded with different people. It’s not that I absorbed the qualities of the environment, but more than what happened inside my mind changed; its flavor, emotions, thoughts, general attitudes. My entire existence was different when I was with my grandparents compared to being with my parents. School was a nightmare. It wasn’t so much a change as destruction and negation of everything I am in the incredible deluge of chaos. Too many children, all crazy, wrecked my my mind so badly I sometimes wonder how I was able to function there at all; but it was in the 7^th grade or so that I started figuring out what was going on, when my technical drawing teacher expressed doubt that the drawing that I did for homework was done by me, because it was so much better than the stuff that I did in school; she thought I had my parents do it for me. I thought to respond “But of course it’s better, I did it at home, where it’s…” and then it clicked. It’s calm, at least compared to school. There were no thoughts of others, chaotically interfering with my own like very loud hissing of white noise. At home it’s not like watching TV signal without an antenna, in an area with poor reception.

To me, empathy is not some positive spiritual quality, as it appears to be to people who talk out of their arses and who never actually experienced what it means to have no personal boundaries, to have such strong perceptions of thoughts and emotions of others that it completely overrides and erases your own, to the point of taking decades to figure out who and what you actually are.

To me, empathy is a terrible, debilitating mental illness that I have to live with. It’s like having no firewall and no antivirus on your computer, and having it constantly hacked and invaded by others, only it’s not your computer but your mind, and it’s not only invaded by those who mean to, but by everyone, all the time. It never ends, it never stops. You cry with other people’s pain and laugh at what they find funny. When you dream, your dreams are mixed with the background noise created by others. When you’re surrounded by a mass of people, you’re flooded with chaos, completely disorderly and senseless, like hundreds of people talking at once. When you’re with one person, you simply adopt his ideas, point of view, way of feeling and thinking, basically you are an empty vessel that is filled by that person’s content. You cannot effectively argue a point, because if that person isn’t receptive, your mind simply stops working. When that person explains his point of view, it becomes yours.

That’s what it feels like to have no ego and to have extreme empathy.

I was completely and utterly confused in elementary school. I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t know that something was going on. I was just completely and utterly messed up. In the two last grades I started getting my shit together slightly, though, because I started to consciously perceive the differences in the way in which I exist when alone or with different others. Also, I started to self-medicate, so to say.

You see, this extreme sensitivity doesn’t just work for living humans. When I read a book, it recreates aspects of the author’s consciousness in me, in the exact same way the consciousness of living people overwhelms me in person, and I learned that I can drown one influence if I magnify the other. I could, for instance, read something created by a wonderfully organized mind, like Stanislaw Lem or Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert or Arthur Clarke, and basically “format” my mind with it as I would a floppy disc, allowing it to overrun the chaos and the inferior people’s influence. I couldn’t just turn it off; it never turns off, really, but I learned that I could change the channel, so to speak, and if I chose to fill my mind with one content, I could completely suppress the unwanted noise. I must have looked like a total weirdo in high school; I intentionally adopted a contrarian attitude in order to preserve my identity; I was intentionally reading things that nobody else was reading and doing things that nobody else was doing, just to create some form of a mental boundary between self and others. Also, since I became aware of the difference between self and other influences, I began to perceive my own consciousness under the influence of others as one would perceive a movie screen with movie playing. It took me a long time to understand that I was a movie screen, but then I started to consciously “watch the movies”, so to speak, and it confirmed a hunch I had for a few years at that point, that I was fundamentally, structurally different from all the others that I have met. My own consciousness, when I managed to put it under control, and that was never easy, went deeper than theirs. When I did samyama on deep thinkers and deep ideas, I found out that my own ability was always able to stretch farther than the object on which I did samyama; it was just that I ran out of deep templates on which to focus. I found several ideas in books and several pieces of music that stretched me to my limits and then I could feel things that were so far above my physical life it drove me crazy. I could also feel the Presence, the high consciousness that was always there, always aware, but never actually communicating. Between the violent hell at home caused by my mother’s quickly progressing madness and evil, and chaotic noise and constant bullying I had to suffer at school, and a bus ride in between, and a limit I hit in my attempts to find and explore things that were beyond this darkness and evil that always tried to swallow me and destroy everything that was me as separate from them, I became a combination of distress, frustration and anger, and, unable to find any hope or a way out, I tried to kill myself.

When that failed, I was completely wrecked, because I had absolutely no hope of ever having an existence that’s worth having. I was mentally assaulted by humans and rejected by God, I was locked up in a lunatic asylum, in complete power and control by people who perceived me the way a butcher perceives a pig, and I had nowhere to go. I would have sold my soul to Satan then, had he made me an offer; it was that bad. I gradually pulled myself out by mere contempt and hatred for humans: I simply didn’t feel like allowing the beings that were such incredibly pathetic pieces of shit to defeat me.

Can you imagine what it’s like for an extreme empath to be locked up in a lunatic asylum, among crazy people in a drug-induced stupor, and you’re given psychosis-inducing drugs that limit any attempt to preserve your own identity? It’s worse than a death sentence. However, I learned to adapt. I finally succeeded at learning AT, and I became so good at it, I could re-program my liver to neutralize the drugs they gave me. Having done that, I started to recollect my faculties and replay the strong points from books and music in my head, and I regained coherence. I finished highschool from there, basically learning the entire year’s worth of material from two subjects every week and giving exams. I had to take two weeks for maths and literature respectively but that’s the way I did it. I was so incredibly good at it, I used it as leverage to get myself out, because the false narrative that my psycho parents told the psychiatrists in order to shift the blame from themselves, and onto me, crumbled. The order of magnitude of the problems I had to solve gave me the level of self-confidence I later used to solve other difficult problems, and basically limits my compassion for other people’s whining, because whatever you had, I had worse. Some people may have had one worse week than my average, but that’s it. And I learned how to solve problems, how to shield myself from others’ influence, how to keep strong focus for a long period of time under unyielding, devastating pressure. I learned how to overcome my debilitating weakness.

And that’s how I view empathy. It’s my debilitating weakness, a mental illness that I was born with and have to compensate for in order to be able to exist as a person of distinct and separate identity, will, thoughts, emotions and intent. That’s why I don’t see ego as a spiritual flaw, and empathy as a cure. I actually see it reversed, I see empathy as a spiritual flaw that threatens me with complete negation and destruction of my identity, and ego as cure for that deadly disease. I see ego-boundaries as a shield I learned how to raise in order to first identify myself as a cinema and not as a movie, then to play other movies more to my liking, and then to create my own content, of a higher order of magnitude.

When I say that I learned how to meditate in a bus, in a crowd, while interacting with others, do you have any idea what that means to me, with my inherent weakness?

That’s the cause of my crushingly strong willpower and intent. That’s the cause of my ability to touch the consciousness of others, and then change it; I learned how to turn it the other way, how to influence others instead of being influenced. It’s just a matter of power, and the level of power that I had to master in order to merely survive the shit I was buried under, is essentially unheard of. I find it silly when some “spiritual people” talk about their more-less failed attempts at controlling their own minds. And that’s supposed to be difficult? Try controlling your mind that’s constantly open to every single form of outside influence, by design, from birth, so much that you have no distinct identity, then learn to compensate and overcome, while in a position of slavery, under  others’ total physical control, under extremely harmful and invasive psychoactive drugs, without any resources at your disposal, with everything against you. I see how people envy what I am now, and they think they would like to be me, but they certainly don’t want to go through what I had to in order to become me. It’s like sausages: the result tastes good, but you don’t want to know what went in there.