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.
"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."
Why are laypeople completely irrelevant when it comes to having an opinion about darshan? Darshan always has its characteristic nature. Two entities come into contact — let us call them the embodied yogin and the non-physical spiritual being. For the very idea of contact to have meaning, communication must obviously be possible, and it has to occur on the plane of the higher being; otherwise, it would merely be a mental artifact, something the mind is capable of producing. But darshan implies that the yogin fully finds himself on the level of the non-physical being — the Deity. That is the characteristic of darshan: the yogin is no longer a being with an earthly mind, but a being into which the Deity mirrored.
And now the craziest part: the yogin we are talking about is awake and here in the body on Earth. He is not off somewhere meditating in seclusion; you can encounter him — and most often this is the case — in a public place, surrounded by people.
And of course, people in the situation described are unable to comprehend what is happening — after all, it is hardly to be expected that the Deity would descend to the level of average human chatter.
And that is the point at which compassion for good beings makes sense.
I talked to people on the Internet, mostly either formally religious or materialistic, for more than a decade, and by the second year of that I could already write out their arguments better than they could, and they were always the same, as if I was talking to a winding toy that always makes the same movements. At some point I got completely bored of dialogue as a rhetorical form, because it was very limiting – the same kind of fool inhabiting multiple bodies always has the same arguments which insist on the trivial and completely miss out on the important stuff I would actually want to talk about. At some point I would start topics myself and explore all kinds of questions nobody would otherwise ask, and when I wrote books, the text was of the highest quality because it contained no distractions, stupid repetitive questions, or quips and trolling designed to make some fool feel important.
However, now at least I know what those people would say, so I can easily simulate them, ask their obvious questions, answer them (because there's always the answer they missed because they are nowhere near as smart as they think they are) and move on with the argument.
Those talks are the reason why I have no respect for the atheists. What respect I had in 1996 when I started talking to people online soon evaporated, because they turned out to be the dumbest, most repetitive and brainwashed, and most insistent to dismiss valid evidence, of all groups. All their arguments are circular and they are for the most part just arguing out of ill will.
The religious people are more willing to think, but they soon bump into their dogma which limits what they are willing to consider, but their arguments about issues that are not dogmatically sensitive to them are usually very good, and unlike those including the atheists, can in fact be very well thought out and elaborate. However, they get very predictable; if you know their beliefs, you can easily predict what they are going to say, so that too becomes limiting. As a result, I now mostly resort to monologue that includes understanding how people in the audience will think, what questions they would ask, and what questions need to be asked regardless of the audience's ability to see them.