I mentioned the paradox that in darshan, what you perceive of a God has such properties that when you attempt to reduce it to its true nature, rather than getting less, you get more – you basically access the higher-dimensional reality of an incomprehensibly vast being. It’s like breaking a TV and rather than destroying the image and the device that creates it, you access into the movie itself. This comparison makes it obvious that this should not normally happen, so what are we dealing with here?

Well, there are several ways of explaining it. The first is that darshan is a translation – from higher reality of a God, to something human mind can work with. Essentially, true nature of a God would either go completely over your head, being as imperceptible to you as radio waves, or if you could actually tune into it, it would be so overpowering as to destroy you completely. What kind of a translation are we talking about? The simple demonstration would be a photograph of a statue. A photograph is a two dimensional entity, and one would expect this to be a very lossy representation, but a photograph can give you a very good idea about the statue. It’s not the full experience, of course, but you can get a very good picture, pun intended. If we extend the analogy somewhat and make it a video, if a camera moves around the statue you can get a very good impression of the 3d object on your 2d screen. Also, the analogy also applies in the sense that a picture is not a reduction of the statue – it’s an expansion. The statue didn’t become less; something more was created in addition to it, that presents it in ways that would otherwise not be possible – to a viewership at a distance, for example. However, the analogy breaks here because the image or a video of a statue is not actually connected to the statue itself, and you cannot access a statue through it, and in case of a darshan, not only that you can, but the video actually is the real thing, extended towards you and communicable. So, when I’m talking about a God taking a human form – or at least humanoid, in a sense that it’s obvious that it’s not a biological being but a form made of astral light – the reality of this is that the God in question is the superset of this human form; he or she has absolutely everything that would make a human consciousness, but of course there is more. If anything, what makes a God’s astral form not convincingly human is that it’s so much better at it than humans are. The thoughts are cleaner, faster, better; the emotions are purer, more elaborate, complex and yet simple and straightforward. And also, every single simulated human thought and emotion directly links to a much more complex spiritual reality beneath, that you can follow if your abilities allow it. A human shape is often deliberately half-rendered, wisping into spiritual light that speaks of the casual immensity of power beneath it, and that, too, is part of the message. That’s why buddhist reductionism is silly here, because you’re not dealing with an illusion that is trying to deceive you, but with an expansion of a higher reality into just low enough to communicate with you or teach you, and deliberately unfinished enough as to make it obvious what it is and what immense forces lie at its origin and in its true nature. It’s a translation added upon the original while being obviously transparent to the original. Essentially, you feel the human mind of a God that wisps into light at the edges where it’s deliberately not rendered, and at those edges you feel the spiritual presence and energy of such power that it fries your mind if you touch it, or it shifts you into your true form if you’re an incarnate God yourself.

When I say that a God is a superset of that astral simulation of a human mind and form created in darshan, I think it’s hard for anyone to understand how much of a superset it is, so let me explain. A typical human soul is a wisp of astral gas. It can vary in complexity and size, but a gaseous astral soul of not particularly great size can incarnate as a human being in all of its complexity and provide it with intuitive connection to the transcendental. If you make that soul much bigger and more sophisticated, you get a small spiritual crystal, essentially not wispy, smoky light of a gaseous being, but light so dense and hard that it’s a rock. This would have a sophistication and holiness of a saint, and you can say that it’s a saint’s true spiritual form, and when that crystal touches your mind, it can communicate with you in as human way as it feels like, because it contains everything that a holy and super-sophisticated human being would have, but you’re looking at the actual karmic body of that saint, stripped of all possible expansions into astral humanoid shape or incarnation as a physical human body. The core of spirituality, transcendence, mentality and depth of feeling is there, as a superset of a human, meaning that it needs to reduce itself to be merely human. So, every single small vajra-crystal is a soul that far exceeds a normal human wisp-of-light soul, that’s mere astral gas. And then when you see an astral manifestation of a God in a humanoid form, with all sorts of jewellery, every small jewel on that God is a holy soul of a saint who belongs to that God; larger, more prominent jewels are of magnitude that’s hard to even comprehend because they can be condensations of whole aspects of reality, or something like that Jewel that is the rendering engine that powers this virtual reality of a universe, and that’s merely one of the jewels that adorn a God, when he or she creates an astral presence that’s not an illusion, but a translation and a presence of the real thing. And then you feel the actual body of said God, and you understand why all those jewels adorning them are in fact beings of an immensely great order that belong to a being of an unimaginably higher order, so much higher that cosmic consciousness is merely a laughable term unworthy of describing its reality.

And the craziest thing is, that immense being is often funny, kind, considerate and gentle in ways that are even more mind-blowing than its presence, and you see quite clearly why those saints and aspects of reality want to belong to it as jewels adorning its body, or serve it as clothes, weapons and armour, because being in God’s presence just makes you a better version of yourself, it’s greater than any meditation or experience, and no matter how great you are, the mere presence floods you with more greatness, more of yourself, and more that you can become. It’s like being an intelligent person in the presence of intelligence itself, and you understand that it’s creating everything that’s good about you, and making you into more. It’s unimaginably awesome stuff, and none of it’s an illusion. It’s an extended hand, it’s an expansion of transcendental divinity into a sphere that you can comprehend, translating it into a language that you can understand best, that your entire system is wired to accept.

Also, when you see those ornaments and jewellery, clothes and weapons on the body of a God or Goddess, you understand that those things aren’t just there, they are also powering aspects of reality, they are manifestations and crystallisations of transcendental concepts such as intelligence, or luck, or fortune, or fulfilment, or memory, and they are also conscious beings, and all those things are manifested and interactive, and not only are they not an illusion – everything else that you can imagine is an illusion compared to them, because they are aspects of Reality, taken form so that you can not just see them, but see into them, to the reality on the other side of appearance, into the actual function.

When I said “tread lightly in the presence of That, which makes the saints and angels shiver”, I wasn’t joking.