A certain type of people seems to be an unavoidable constant, like plagues, disasters and taxes. I’m talking about the snarky, cynical nihilists, of the kind that keeps saying that nothing matters, and people who think something matters are but fools to be ridiculed. To take anything seriously in their world is to declare yourself a boring idiot, because serious equals boring, and to take anything seriously means you don’t understand anything. Since there’s no point to anything and nothing really matters, they just “want to have fun”, which translates as get drunk and try to fuck something, where the person they want to fuck is an unimportant consumable, like the condom they will use and throw away afterwards, because to take another person seriously would be so stupid and boring. They are all atheists, of the most vulgar materialistic kind, and their reaction to every mention of God and Religion is such, that it manifests all symptoms of demonic possession. I think it is indicative of something – they don’t think God doesn’t exist, because they also think Star Trek doesn’t exist and yet they usually have it all memorised and practically worship it. They think unicorns don’t exist and they couldn’t care less about them. But the very idea of God fills them with absolute rage, because they know God exist, but they hate him to the point where they want to kill him, and punish everybody for believing in and loving the object of their hatred.

My feelings for them are essentially a reflection of their feelings for God, but there’s more to that. My contempt for them is especially strong, because I completely understand them. I know the inner workings of their minds. I know how their consciousness is basically a festering wound that became a worldview. I know it because I was there, I was one of them.

Almost nobody knows me as such, though, because that person died somewhere in 1993, but before that I was an absolutely terrible whoreson. That was so, because by that time I was what Satan wanted me to become. I was a product of my family’s upbringing. That’s one of those things that I sometimes hint at, but never talk about in detail, not because there’s some unresolved trauma there, but because I don’t think it’s useful to traumatise people with the horror stories of my youth. But I think this story needs to be told, because it explains how one can become one of those people – a nihilistic, godless creature of Satan.

My mother was an only child of loving, devoutly Catholic, middle class parents. She was their whole world, their golden child, someone who ended up studying French and Italian language and literature, along with all kinds of atheist and feminist ideology by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir among others. She lived and breathed entitlement, the feeling that she’s so much better than all those other, uneducated working class people who didn’t have golden Omega watches, fancy fur coats and jewellery and didn’t read obscure books in French. She acted as if there was a force field around her that communicated all the things the world owed her because she was special, and she knew it owed her. She adopted some of that attitude from her father, because he too thought he was better than all kinds of people, those not from Zagreb, for instance, those who are not Croats, and so on. But he was a hard working, self-made person who started as an orphan on the streets when his parents died young, and he probably had to have something to boost himself up emotionally because the rest of the world sure wouldn’t. But with my mother, it was something else. It was pure, pro analysi hubris and entitlement. My grandfather sounded bigoted because the world wanted to crush him, and he said “I’m better than you, so you can all get fucked”. My mother was a princess in her own mind, better simply because she existed, and deserved everything because, well, she existed. It was not a coping mechanism against tragedy. She was just a spoiled piece of shit, whose mantra was “I’m nobody’s servant”.

She also felt that kindness was weakness, and she lusted for power over others, when she was not busy reading feminist magazines in her bed all day, crying because she wasn’t getting all the power and wonders the world owed her, and it was her husband’s and her children’s fault, especially mine because I was her first, and if she didn’t have me her life would be nothing but glory, power and fame, because she was born to be a star and she was a princess or a queen in her own mind. When she wasn’t crying about not getting what she was owed by life, she was complaining how hard her life is and how much she’s working at home and nobody appreciates it, despite the fact that she wasn’t actually doing anything; she’d make a half-assed attempt at lunch, usually heated up leftovers from the day before or something equally trivial that she could get over with quickly, and I learned not to complain because I would get beat up. At first she would beat me up herself, but her hand would hurt so she changed strategy. When father would come home form work, she’d be her normal dark cloud of gloom, and then she’d tell him how that’s because children (and that usually meant me, because I was older which means everything was automatically my fault) were “naughty” and were driving her crazy by all things that basically meant existing, and he would not question her veracity and would just take his belt off and beat the shit out of me, and that was my day, basically from the age of 6 to the point where my brother and I attempted suicide when I was 18 and he was 14, and that, too, was presented as my fault, because I was older and my brother already had a learned strategy of avoiding their violence by basically getting out of the way while they were beating the shit out of me with gleeful joy.

It was not just the part where I got beat up every day or at least five times a week with any available excuse or just because someone was in a bad mood; it was actually much worse. You see, the way those people interacted with me was to just hit me in passing – slap, elbow, something – just for the sin of being there, the same way a normal person would hug a kid in passing or ruffle their hair or kiss them. I absolutely despised my mother. She was cruel, psychotic, stupid, incompetent, a liar, and had an incredible love of violence; she just sucked at it, so she outsourced it to her husband. My opinion of him was different. He was intelligent, hard working and competent, very disciplined and organised, but cold, cruel and dangerous, because the only emotion he allowed himself was anger, and when he was angry he got violent, and the only outlet for violence he allowed himself was children, and that usually meant me, because my brother learned how to walk the path of silent cowardice and apparent victimhood and let me get my ass kicked. Father never hit his wife, regardless of how abusive and cruel she was with him, because with her he was a “good Christian”. He always took her side and believed all her lies, and as a result, my life was a never-ending nightmare, and his was no better, because, well, she was his wife, and his attitude meant she just got worse, and worse, pushing the limits until she openly conspired to get him locked up on some contrived charge of violence she tried to provoke, thinking she’d get all his money and who knows what else was rotting in her diseased, evil mind. Eventually, her behaviour was so much of a direct threat to him that he moved out and divorced her, but by that time I was long gone.

So, what kind of a person did that make me? Well, garbage in, garbage out, I guess. I treated other beings the way my parents treated me – cruelly, insensitively, as things you blow out steam on. They beat me up, so I’d beat up my brother and kick the cats “when they deserved it”, and I would torture insects and so on. My worldview was a nihilistic godless nightmare, and I would read science fiction and get into computers, because computers were something I could control and it didn’t derive pleasure out of hurting me viciously with a barely contrived reason or without one. Since I was emotionally bleeding and damaged, kids at school would instinctively bully me, so my nightmare never ended – it just alternated between school and home. I learned to harden myself, not be weak, feel only hatred, anger, spite and tenacity, because everything else hurt more.

Fast forward to my first year of college, and I was exactly the kind of a nihilistic bastard that reads my blog today and ridicules me for being an idiot for believing in God and virtue because it’s all obviously bullshit, and the only real things are having money, having fun, and not treating anything seriously because that’s so stupid and boring.

Actually, it’s not stupid and boring, it just hurts too much to face. One thing I had to face was listening to other students talking between classes, and realising they had normal parents, not psychotic and cruel ones who are a constant danger of violence, and who mock and belittle you with every word. I heard a girl talking to her friends about something and I realised that they are normal and I’m damaged. I couldn’t function in their world where you can be vulnerable and talk about your feelings; I was too damaged to be able to allow myself vulnerability, so I was just snarky, cynical and abrasive, and the only thing I could do is reproduce the vicious cycle of dysfunction and violence that was my whole life.

I saw that I was broken, but I had no way out. I was not completely godless and nihilistic, but my worldview was basically some kind of materialism expanded to explain the telepathic phenomena that were too strong around me to sweep under the carpet. I knew something existed, because I felt it, but I would sooner have though it were aliens than God, because aliens were more likely to exist in my world. I perceived things that couldn’t be explained with materialistic science, but I thought the answer was to extend science, that there must be some deeper layer that explains it, the way things were expanded with Einstein’s general relativity. This was more than just intellectual for me, but it still didn’t touch any of my core issues; basically, whether God existed or not, I’m still fucked in every conceivable way. I didn’t expect any real solutions, but I still tried to figure things out. I started to understand how broken I am, but I had no hope of things ever being better.

This is where I was wrong, because I expected things getting better to be a function of something somebody else did, but they actually started getting better as I understood the mechanics of evil I was doing as a consequence of the trauma-induced programming, courtesy of my parents and later bullies at school. I started understanding that if I want something good to happen in my life, I have to actually do it myself, because nobody else is going to. I started caring about what other people thought, how they felt. Crucially, I thought about that “non-God, because God is what idiots believe in” presence in my consciousness and just thanked it for being there for me, instead of just barking orders and desires like a demon. That’s where things started changing quickly, and the crucial point was my first darshan, or first initiation as I later called it. I told God he was awesome, and some veil was removed and I was flooded with what I understood to be the ananda aspect of God – the blissful joy that felt as powerful as an atomic blast that evaporates you to the bones, and so wonderful that absolutely noting can compare.

This was merely the beginning, and if I were at that point looking for proof of God’s existence it would have been absolute and undeniable proof; I wasn’t. I was looking for proof not that God exists, but that God feels that I matter enough to actually do something. What actually happened is that I got a glimpse of what God is about, what God is like, that the actual reality is not a cold abstraction and indifference, but something so awesome I didn’t know enough to imagine it, let alone want it.

I took the experience as a confirmation, and continued changing myself accordingly. You would never know what I was before, if you got to know me after 1993. I came to embody my own spiritual choices, and no longer the violence and madness of my parents. However, I understood that multiplying them with -1 doesn’t produce virtue, it produces another kind of fault. I couldn’t just completely renounce and remove violence, because it was sometimes necessary and good, so I had to learn balance, utility, necessity, and train myself to act in ways that reflect God, not just evil inputs from evil humans, or their geometric inversion. That was all hard work, and it took years of trial and error, and this work will continue until I die because it’s never really over. It’s a homeostasis between too much and not enough, between inaction and overreaction, between the wrong emotions, and the lack of right emotions. The path of right action is something to be carved between Scylla and Charybdis of failure in every thought, word and action, because everything matters. Everything is important, because we live in the mind of God, and we have to choose for or against this fundamental reality by choosing to see it, recognise it, talk to it in all things, negotiate between reality and illusion and choose yourself by choosing how you react, what you choose to become by doing, and what you choose to reject and turn away from, and both are equally important.

Everything matters.

So, to the nihilistic, materialistic bastards who read this. I know what you are. I was what you are. I hated it, I chose against it, and now I’m everything opposite to that. Because I hated myself when I was you, I also hate everything that you are. I hope you either die, or turn into your opposite; I don’t care, as long as you no longer exist as the disgusting pieces of shit that you are. Get fucked, or get enlightened, as long as you stop existing.