I was thinking about something for the last few hours; about what strikes me as the most important things about Gods, their mutual relationships, and the nature of heaven.

Religions speak about God’s love, but love is a word I don’t like because it means whatever anyone wants it to mean, and most of it is something I don’t like at all. Sure, it can mean putting yourself as a shield between those you love and harm. It can also mean the state where you feel good. Or it can mean some hedonistic, selfish nightmare. Rather, I’d tell you a few stories from the Hindu scriptures, about Gods.

For instance, the way Shiva calls Vishnu his Divine Guru, or the way Vishnu calls Shiva the Great Lord, and how when they talk about the other behind their back they can’t stop singing praises to the other one – how he’s magnificent, transcendental, omnipotent, omniscient, and wonderful, they’ll tell stories about how the other one saved them or did some magnificent deed nobody else could, and so on. Once Shiva got in a pretty big fight with his wife, because she heard him praise Vishnu and then wanted to test Vishnu to see what that is all about because she didn’t believe it could be true. The level of respect they all have for each other is absolutely insane, and when there’s talk about Divine love, I don’t imagine unconditionality or any such thing humans would think of; rather, I feel this level of respect. Each praise the other above all, they marvel at each other’s feats and achievements, and if they want to match them it’s not out of envy or competition, but out of admiration. If one needs to go to hell, the other will volunteer to go with him to watch his back. None of them is ever alone, because the other one is his shield and his sword.

That’s what heaven is like, and what relationship between two different persons of God is like. The Christians talk about Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, but this imagery doesn’t resonate with me. Other persons of God illustrate what I feel much better, for instance when Krishna thinks Rukmini got a bit conceited he pranks her by telling her what a loser he is and that he’ll leave her and go to the forest to practice austerities; and then she simply passes out from shock. Then he gets scared for her, apologises and tries to wake her up, and when she does, she praises him endlessly and the undertone is “don’t mess with me like that because you’re my whole life”. The second undertone is that she might be just a bit conceited about him loving her more than anyone else, but beneath that is the unimaginable level of connection, sincerity and depth that surpasses anything usually called love. That’s how a female person of God feels about her male counterpart. It’s the level of devotion, connection, trust, respect and adoration that makes those two a Divine dyad. When some idiot brahmana thought it was a good idea to test how sattvic the Gods are, first he insulted Shiva and then Shiva got pissed and his wife had to stop him from killing the dumbass. But when he went on to insult Vishnu, Vishnu merely smiled, but his wife was not amused and cursed both him and his entire line to never have happiness and fortune. Nobody is insulting her man. To that, Vishnu just smiled again, in a sense, yeah, actions and consequences, those tend to go together. Fuck around, find out. As Christians would say, offend the Son, and he might forgive you, but the Father might not, because he loves his son and you’re not fucking with him. One God might forgive you, but his buddies and wife are watching you and they love him more than you can possibly imagine, and you’re just so incredibly fucked. Pray to one of them because you dislike the other, and that one you’re praying to will make sure that people who want to find you need to take a shovel to hell in order to dig you out. Offend Vishnu and Shiva will make a battle flag from your hide. Offend Shiva and Vishnu will make sure you eat all the shit in the world before you’re forgiven. That respect, which is the manifestation of real, Divine love, is what heaven is made of. The Gods have each other’s back. They look out for each other, they watch over each other’s best interest, and they praise each other behind their backs endlessly.

Conversely, hell is the opposite. Hell is disrespect. Hell is where demons and evil souls slander and diminish each other, where they look for weaknesses and sins to exploit, where they betray each other to their enemies and laugh, and so on. In Heaven, Gods each praise the other as the ultimate and supreme, while demons in hell diminish others and tell them they’re worthless and sinful and they need to die in their sin.

I keep hearing human idiots talking how heaven is boring, and hell is one big party. No, that’s not what it is. Hell is a nightmare where your peers will stab you in the back and laugh at you with your other “friends” while you bleed, mocking you for your foolishness and trust. Heaven is where Gods worship each other’s greatness and if you want to hurt one of them, you will need to go through all of his friends to get him; where you can’t attack one while he sleeps, because his friends stand guard, and they never, ever have anything better to do. Catch one at a point of weakness, only to find out that it’s protected by either his friends, his wife or both. Slander one to praise the other, and have the one you praised that way punish you. Heaven is a place where Gods are bound by connections of such immense love, trust and respect, that you can’t even imagine it if you didn’t feel it firsthand. Hell, on the other hand, is a party of the kind where everybody will laugh at your expense in the most hurtful and damaging way possible, and each of those laughing will stab the others in the back as soon as they sense any weakness.

Your choices in life will, of course, determine which “party” you will join.

There are a few more things I want to talk about, regarding all that mess with students and failed student candidates I was involved with over the early years.

The first thing is the concept of “testing”, that arose multiple times in two forms – them testing me and me testing them. That’s one of the first concepts you read in those silly books about zen and what not – you know the drill, the guru leaves the student candidate waiting in front of the locked monastery doors overnight and tells him to leave multiple times, to test his resolve, and taking him in after he persists. I find that both stupid and offensive, to be honest, and I would never do that. It’s like a girl telling a guy “no” multiple times and expecting him to continue pursuing her to test his resolve. Today, in “no means no” times, that would be grounds for imprisonment. Also, I’m not a person who messes with people and tells them falsehoods in order to test them or fuck with them. If I tell you “no”, it means “fuck off”, not “do try again”. However, testing is important since you don’t want to end up with people who are not serious, especially if you’re doing things that cost you and are potentially damaging. Also, you don’t want to be involved with people who are not serious, because they might get hurt doing things they aren’t supposed to do, and then they’ll blame you.

I honestly have to admit I didn’t even think about any of this, because it’s not like I had an idea about teaching people and had to figure out how to attract students and reject wrong candidates. I was basically blackmailed by God into the whole thing. I wanted to take students about as much as I wanted to get crucified, which is to say not at all. I was an introvert who meditated and read books for fun, and after the first initiation I was so serious about attaining enlightenment that humans never even crossed my mind, except as something that causes disturbances that I want to avoid. I didn’t even know how to express complex ideas in form of a rhetorical narrative, because all the serious talking I did was with my brother, in form of our internal shorthand with abundance of telepathy. How would I even approach teaching people? It was a ridiculous concept that I never gave a single thought. However, after getting that offer I couldn’t refuse from God, I started practicing thinking in ways that would be conducive to explaining complex spiritual concepts to people, and combining it with my telepathic abilities in ways that would do more guiding than explaining. Still, the concept of testing people didn’t even cross my mind. The reason for that is simple: I expected God to do that part for me. What I had to do is become a visible target for them to find, and I expected God to basically send the right people to me. Of course I expected the wrong ones to be attracted as well, but I had a very simple way of filtering them out; I expected them to hate me. I formulated thoughts in very straightforward terms that was meant to be attractive to people who have a transcendental longing or connection, and repulsive to everybody else, basically mantrically charging my speech so that it sang of God and transcendence. Basically, my approach was “if you hate me, excellent, and please tell all your friends to hate me as well so that none of you would bother me in the future while I focus on what’s important”. Basically, I wanted to look like an angry porcupine to all the wrong people, so that they would fuck off, while at the same time looking exactly like the goal the right people were looking for. This worked well enough, in a sense that none of the right people were rejected, but I got plenty of false positives from people who found my bristling style attractive for wrong reasons. The second layer of filtering happened when I would meet them in person, enter a meditative state where I was God’s presence, and opened this to the candidate. If they didn’t react well, or at all, I would consider the filtering process complete. If they reacted and experienced some degree of spiritual awakening, often if not always accompanied by Kundalini awakening, this would mean that they accepted God’s offer and became official student candidates. I would consider someone a proper student once they did the next level of acceptance of initiation, and actually made effort to keep and deepen what they received; basically, I defined a student as someone who is not only open, but accepts what’s been offered and applies their will and effort in order to retain it and go in that direction by their own power and choice, actively holding on and working rather than being held.

The third level of testing was something both God and Satan did and I had nothing to do with it. Basically, Satan provided temptations and tricks, and God created situations where they would actually make choices that were just hard enough to be workable, and withheld “candy” so that he could tell that they actually chose him, and not merely to feel good. As you can expect, that minor test created a wall that was impenetrable for people who didn’t make right and serious choices. Also, all seem to have been offered things that embodied their worldly desires, and they could get all the things they seemingly wanted God for, and the test was whether they were here for those things alone. Also, super easy test, and also, total failathlon.

So, no, I didn’t do any testing, at least not in the way you would read about in spiritual books. I was serious and straightforward, offered everything I could and expected people who came claiming they want God to act accordingly. The actual tests were done by God, who has no habit of allowing undeserved spiritual promotion, and Satan, who has no habit of allowing anyone to escape him if he can at all help it.

The second type of testing is the supremely silly idea that students will test the guru. I say it’s silly because God told me he’s sending me people who depend on me being there for them and who will instantly see me as the reason they were born here at all. So, if someone wants to test me, it means they are not one of those people and I will intentionally fail all of their tests just to get rid of them more quickly. The ones I was expecting had much better things to do when they found me, such as having instant spiritual experience and crying tears of joy. If someone wasn’t reacting that way, instead playing intellectual games, it means they weren’t the ones I’m here for, game over.

There was also a third type of testing – whether I will be able to recognise people who are super powerful, but super fucked up, and filter them out from people who were fucked up but because they are sinful and wrong. I think I passed all of those, but I can of course never be sure. You see, a rough diamond, uncut, looks like a piece of gravel. A piece of gravel also looks like gravel. Also, a piece of nicely cut glass looks like a diamond. Zirconium oxide also looks like a diamond. A diamond with inclusions that will make it shatter when you attempt to cut it can also look like a prime stone when uncut. Sorting those out caused me endless trouble, because I didn’t dare let go of possible prime people I was waiting for, to the point of keeping the wrong ones around for far too long, allowing them to create all sorts of mischief. However, sometimes the best people created mischief themselves while they were sorting themselves out, and had I been more strict, it would create all kinds of fail. This was the worst, most expensive and damaging part of the whole process, and I had to let some students create terrible problems to others, but I don’t think it could have been helped, because those creating mischief contained both some of the best and some of the worst, and those who were adversely influenced by them also contained some of the best and some of the worst. It was an incredibly complicated mess, and people looking from the outside probably thought that I handled things poorly, but that’s because they didn’t know what the stakes were and how layered and intricate the problems were. Yoga is a process where you start fucked up and gradually sort yourself out. Expecting people to not be fucked up in the beginning is both naive and dangerous. However, how do you tell who’s fucked up in what way and for what reason, and what’s going to prevail? You essentially can’t, you just need to support them all to the point of decision, and possibly somewhat further just to make sure, even if it costs you.

So much for the concept of testing. Essentially, I considered myself unqualified for it and outsourced it to God, and to the people themselves. They did it all for me, I just had to draw the line at some point.

The second concept that was sometimes introduced by some students, candidates and others, was whether this relationship was completely one-sided or mutual, in a sense of me getting something from them in return.

This one is tricky. On one hand, I had no personal desires in the matter. God told me he has a plan, that plan went completely against both my expectations and wishes, but I accepted it because, basically, my wishes are where God is, so that’s that. This produced a complex set of results. On one hand, it was incredibly taxing and hurtful for me, and on the other hand I learned about Satan, I got access to him because of his acts against me, I learned what this is actually about, and I grew so much stronger in the process it’s not even funny.

However, in a sense those people usually meant, thinking we’re in some kind of a human mutual relationship where both sides enjoy each other’s company and no side has debts towards the other, that’s not at all what was going on. The point where I would actually consider the relationship mutual would be where the other person would completely accept God, and then from this acceptance of God manifest Divine energies towards me as both a physical and spiritual person, manifesting towards me what God would do in their place. That would be a mutual relationship, and in Hindu terminology it would be called a lila. That’s basically what happens when two Gods agree to incarnate together, for instance Shiva and Vishnu who alternate as each other’s guru, because both have immense respect for each other’s transcendence, wisdom and virtue, and would hardly trust someone else with it. Also, when Krishna and his Goddess incarnate and she’s his wife, and that’s an actually equal partnership because for him to have a normal human female soul as a wife would be like marrying your dog. So, all kinds of things took place there, from relationships that are completely one-sided, where I’m offering everything and paying all the costs myself, and the other person is just benefiting from it because I thought I owe it to God, to relationships where the other person is so powerful I’m basically looking at my female counterpart, only with a physical brain that lacks training, and it’s someone who can actually help me and make me feel better and is an actual partner. So, the answer is, it depends – yes, no, first no then somewhat or yes, and so on. It also had nothing to do with how that person presented themselves; sometimes people assumed that someone is my partner and they were merely a very arrogant student candidate who mostly subverted me before outright failing. The most powerful person I ever met would act like a small kitten that you carry in your coat pocket. The more one would act powerful and independent, the more you could tell they are a failed candidate. I can honestly say I’ve seen it all, and for the most part I could only do my thing and let things sort themselves out, because chaos is always part of the process of growth and purification. It’s always messy, hurtful and nasty, like throwing a hand grenade into a septic tank.

I perceived something both strange and expected when parsing the stream of karmic garbage that went my way to be processed. It seems that lots of people spent lots of time and energy trying to find fault with me in order to justify themselves – either not choosing what I offered, or lying to me, or betraying me, or not having enough courage to overcome their limitations. They always have a list of all the things I did wrong, or at least I did wrong in their mind, as if my perfection were a prerequisite for them to even start doing the things I told them to do. Basically, they seem to believe that if I didn’t prove my perfection to them, they had no obligation to be faithful and obedient.

The reason why I find that funny is that God never had a problem with any of that. I actually did – I used to whine, bitch and moan to God about how I did something wrong, how I must be a disappointment to him, and unworthy of trust he bestowed upon me by entrusting me with leading people. The answer I got to one of those tirades was quite revealing. Basically, I was suddenly in a state of darshan and God conveyed understanding that I am exactly the way I am because he made me that way. My apparently flawed, vulnerable and frequently damaged condition was his design. It was not my fault. I just chose to be faithful and loyal to him, and he did everything else. That was somewhere around 2007, if I remember correctly, when all hell conspired to destroy me, and I felt that it was doing a good job. I was never more damaged, prone to mistakes, or spiritually injured and under attack than at those times, and God’s opinion on that was “yeah, I did that because you trusted me into it; none of it is your fault, and I’m certainly not judging you for it”.

So, it’s an interesting contrast; the humans who were entrusted to me were basically maintaining a mental list of all the things about me that were too human, not Divine enough, where I said something wrong, where I didn’t look the right way, where things happened to me that looked inconsistent with what they expected someone entrusted by God to be experiencing, and I myself would show a similar list of my own making to God, and he was basically “yeah, sorry about doing that to you, but that’s what the path of surrender to God looks like”. My first reaction was shock and disbelief. My second reaction was “oh, so maybe I didn’t actually fuck things up and fall out of God’s grace”.

I’ve also been thinking… people seem to obsess over what they did wrong, over their imperfections, flaws and things that are human nature, but they have somehow been made to believe that they put you on the wrong side of God’s temper. On the other hand, the only thing God expects of them is to be obedient and faithful to him. Basically, to keep doing what they know is his will even when they can’t confirm it, the way they keep brushing their teeth every day regardless of the lack of confirmation that it’s good and useful. God isn’t expecting you to solve Bessel equations to prove that you’re good enough. He’s not expecting you to do any of the silly things people equate with sainthood either. The only thing he expected you to do was to remain loyal, to obey his will, and to keep the faith forever.

Some people think, somehow, that if they give God a list of all the things I did in less than absolutely perfect manner, they will be absolved of any and all crimes, because God apparently doesn’t know who I am. If God only knew how imperfect, vulnerable and flawed I was, of course he wouldn’t demand that they follow me unconditionally or to obey me.

What a wonderfully innovative concept. It’s not like it’s been tried before. God will surely side with you and against me, because you are many and I’m one, and it’s a democracy. If you all testify against me, I’ll be in so much trouble. It’s not that God’s been there when you were thinking what kind of bullshit to invent to get yourself off the hook. Also, God is going to be so surprised when you tell him your story, because he doesn’t know what I’ve been doing here behind his back, and when he learns, I’ll be in trouble and you’ll be vindicated.

That’s sarcasm, btw.