Some guru stuff (part 2)

 

Some entry level (?) stuff you should have learned from your guru. 

What would be the lowest form of tamasic worship?

If by “lowest” you mean the most deeply tāmasic form of worship in the guṇa framework, rather than simply “the most frightening ritual,” I would put the emphasis on ignorance, cruelty, and deliberate misuse of religion.

The Bhagavad Gītā gives us a useful starting point. It describes tāmasic sacrifice as something performed without proper understanding, faith, or regard for the proper purpose of sacrifice. It also describes austerities performed from delusion or to harm oneself or others as tāmasic.

From that perspective, a rough hierarchy would be:

1. Tāmasic through ignorance
   Worship performed mechanically, superstitiously, or compulsively, with no real understanding of what one is doing.
2. Tāmasic through fear and obsession
   “I must perform this or something terrible will happen,” combined with fixation, paranoia, or irrational dependence on the ritual.
3. Tāmasic through selfish destructive intent
   Seeking to use a deity or ritual primarily for revenge, domination, hatred, or harm.
4. Extremely tāmasic
   Deliberately cultivating cruelty, hatred, degradation, or violence while regarding these things as spiritually desirable.

So I would actually put malicious intention lower than merely practicing a frightening or impure-looking ritual.

This is important for Tantra

A cremation-ground practice involving Bhairava, skull symbolism, darkness and fear might look extraordinarily tāmasic from the outside, but it isn't necessarily "low" worship at all.

Suppose the practitioner enters the cremation ground to confront:

• fear of death
• attachment to the body
• disgust
• aversion
• ego
• unconsciousness

and ultimately seeks liberation.

The materials and environment may be associated with tamas, but the purpose can be profoundly spiritual.

By contrast, a perfectly respectable-looking temple ritual performed with:

“May this deity destroy my enemy because I hate him”

could be considerably more tāmasic in its inner motivation.

The real bottom is probably instrumentalizing the Divine for evil

At the extreme end, the problem isn't simply that someone wants something for themselves. Even ordinary worldly requests can be rājasic.

The deeper descent is something like:

ignorance → selfishness → hatred → deliberate harm → identification of that harm with the sacred.

That is quite different from simply saying:

“I am frightened and I need protection.”

The latter may be rājasic or even sāttvic depending on the person's relationship with the deity.

---

There is also a subtle point relevant to your earlier question about seeking a compassionate deity for your own sake.

Self-interest by itself is not the bottom of the scale. A person praying, “Mother, please help me; I am suffering,” is not necessarily deeply tāmasic. That's much closer to the Gītā's category of the ārta, the distressed person who turns toward God.

The much darker case would be:

“I don't care about truth, dharma, or other beings; I want divine power precisely so that I can harm, dominate, or indulge destructive impulses.”

That is where “tāmasic worship” becomes a genuinely strong description.

And this helps explain why Tantric traditions can sometimes work deliberately with tamas without endorsing tāmasic consciousness: the darkness itself can be used as the material of transformation.

At the cremation ground (part 2)

 

So what´s the difference between Ananda Marga´s stints at the cremation ground and that of other extreme sects...or even Buddhists? 

Explain how Ananda Marga's Kāpālika practice compares with the actual Kāpālika tradition, Aghori cremation-ground sādhana, and Buddhist śmaśāna meditation.

Yes. They look similar on the surface—night, death, cremation grounds, fear, skulls, corpses—but they belong to rather different religious technologies. The most useful comparison is to ask what the corpse/cremation ground is doing in the practice.

Tradition	Main setting	What is confronted	Main aim	Role of Bhairava/deity	Corpses/skulls
Ananda Marga Kāpālika sādhanā	Preferably cremation/burial ground, often around new moon	Fear, pāśas (fetters), ripus (mental enemies)	Mental/spiritual mastery and concentration	Tantric background, but not primarily corpse worship	Not the ritual centerpiece
Historical Kāpālika	Cremation ground	Death, impurity, ordinary social/religious boundaries	Bhairava-oriented liberation, powers, transformation	Central; Bhairava is a major focus	Central; skulls and bones are characteristic
Aghori	Cremation ground	Aversion, disgust, duality of pure/impure, fear of death	Non-dual realization of Śiva/Aghora	Central, especially Śiva/Aghora/Bhairava dimensions	Can be extremely important; some advanced practices involve corpses
Early Buddhist śmaśāna meditation	Charnel ground	Impermanence and identification with the body	Vairāgya, mindfulness, insight, non-attachment	Generally not the focus	Corpse is an object of contemplation

1. Ananda Marga: the cremation ground as a psychological laboratory

This is probably the least materially transgressive of the four.

Ananda Marga's Kāpālika practice deliberately retains the old cremation-ground atmosphere, but its stated purpose is to confront the practitioner's psychological obstacles. Scholarship on the practice describes cremation/burial grounds as preferred locations, particularly around amāvāsyā, because they are regarded as places conducive to confronting the pāśas and ripus.

So the logic is approximately:

dangerous/liminal environment → fear arises → maintain meditation → fear loses its power → mind becomes stronger and less bound.

There is no requirement that the practitioner manipulate corpses, consume substances from skulls, summon ghosts, or perform a Bhairava sacrifice.

That makes Ananda Marga's use of “Kāpālika” partly an inheritance of the older Tantric symbolism and partly a reinterpretation of it.

---

2. Historical Kāpālikas: this is much closer to what the name suggests

Here the resemblance to what we were discussing earlier becomes much stronger.

The historical Kāpālikas were Śaiva ascetics associated with Bhairava, cremation grounds, skulls and the mahāvrata. They carried a human skull as an alms bowl; the skull was so characteristic that it gave the tradition its name.

And some of the surviving Tantric material associated with the Kāpālika milieu is genuinely extreme.

For example, the Brahmayāmala describes cremation-ground rites involving:

• skulls arranged on a maṇḍala,
• blood,
• alcohol,
• human bones,
• hair and other bodily materials,
• a corpse as part of the ritual setting,
• and Bhairava.

One described rite uses nine skulls containing blood, alcohol and other substances, with the ritual performed on a corpse.

This is therefore quite different from Ananda Marga.

The Kāpālika isn't merely thinking:

“Death is frightening; I should overcome my fear.”

The ritual is deliberately entering the religious world of Bhairava and the cremation ground, using precisely those things that conventional society regards as impure or terrifying.

And this is where the term transgressive Tantra becomes meaningful.

---

3. Aghori: superficially closest to the Kāpālika, but not identical

The Aghori tradition is probably the one people most readily associate with the stereotypical image of:

ascetic + cremation ground + corpse + skull + Bhairava/Śiva.

There are genuine historical connections between Aghori traditions and older cremation-ground Śaivism, but Aghori should not simply be equated with Kāpālika. The historical Kāpālikas and later Aghoris belong to different historical formations.

The central Aghori idea is expressed by the word aghora: “not terrible,” “not dreadful,” or “without horror.”

The practitioner seeks to overcome the ordinary mind's division between:

pure / impure
beautiful / disgusting
sacred / profane
life / death

That can lead to practices involving substances and objects normally considered profoundly impure.

Some contemporary descriptions of advanced Aghori practice include śava-sādhanā, meditation in direct physical relationship with a corpse in a cremation ground.

This gives Aghori practice a very different emphasis from Ananda Marga.

Ananda Marga:

“Can I remain spiritually concentrated when confronted with fear?”

Aghori:

“Can I directly experience the underlying Śiva-nature without maintaining the conventional distinction between pure and impure?”

Those overlap, but they aren't the same proposition.

---

4. Buddhist śmaśāna meditation is radically different again

This is perhaps the most interesting comparison because Buddhism has a very old and well-documented cemetery tradition.

The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta describes the monk seeing a corpse in various stages of decomposition and reflecting:

“This body of mine too is of the same nature.”

The corpse becomes a mirror for the practitioner's own body. The meditation proceeds through stages including decomposition, skeletonization, scattered bones and finally bones reduced to dust.

So the fundamental movement is:

“That corpse is me.”

Not literally in identity, but in the sense that my body is subject to exactly the same process.

The point is to undermine attachment to the body and develop insight into impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and non-self.

And historical Buddhist monastics really did practice in cemeteries. Recent scholarship argues that cemetery residence and corpse meditation were not marginal curiosities but could form part of Buddhist monastic life in India.

But notice what is not happening.

The Buddhist meditator doesn't need to:

• invoke Bhairava;
• propitiate a cemetery deity;
• use a skull as a ritual cup;
• obtain supernatural power from the corpse;
• overcome purity rules through transgression.

The corpse is primarily an object of insight.

---

The deepest similarity

All four recognize something like this:

The ordinary human mind wants to avoid death.

The cemetery makes avoidance difficult.

But then the traditions diverge.

Buddhist

Death → impermanence → detachment → insight

Ananda Marga

Death/fear → confrontation → mastery of mental fetters → spiritual development

Kāpālika

Death/impurity → deliberate transgression → Bhairava → transformation/liberation

Aghori

Death/disgust → destruction of pure/impure distinction → Aghora/Śiva → non-dual realization

That's why I'd resist treating all four as variants of “necromantic meditation.”

They are actually four different answers to the same existential problem.

---

There is also a fascinating distinction concerning fear

This is particularly relevant to your earlier questions about Bhairava.

For Ananda Marga, fear itself is something to be mastered.

For Buddhism, fear becomes an opportunity to observe the conditioned mind and the impermanent body.

For Aghori, the deeper target is the dualistic categorization that makes something “horrible,” “impure,” or “untouchable.”

For Kāpālika Tantra, the terrifying environment is also connected with Bhairava's own domain. The practitioner isn't merely trying to become psychologically fearless; the terrifying aspect of reality is incorporated into the sacred.

That last point is why the Kāpālika tradition is particularly interesting alongside Bhairava.

Bhairava isn't merely the deity who protects you from the cremation ground.

In the more radical Tantric imagination, Bhairava is the Lord of the cremation ground itself.

And that is a substantial theological difference from simply using a cemetery as an unpleasant environment in which to test one's meditation.

One final caveat

We shouldn't imagine a neat historical sequence:

Buddhist cemetery meditation → Kāpālika → Aghori → Ananda Marga.

The traditions overlap historically and influenced one another in complex ways, but they aren't simply successive versions of one practice. In particular, the surviving evidence for historical Kāpālikas is fragmentary, and some practices attributed to them come from Tantric texts that scholars identify as closely related to the Kāpālika milieu rather than straightforwardly as surviving Kāpālika manuals.

So the visual similarity is real, but the underlying theology can be dramatically different.

And, interestingly, Ananda Marga is probably the closest of the four to a deliberately controlled “fear-of-death meditation,” whereas historical Kāpālika and Aghori practice go considerably further into the ritual transformation of death, impurity and the body.

At the cremation ground (part 1)

 

Let´s see if ChatGPT is ready for the *really* heavy questions...

What is "Kapalik meditation" within Ananda Marga?

Yes. “Kāpālika meditation” in Ananda Marga is a specialized Tantric practice, but it is quite different from the historical Kāpālika sectarian practices we were just discussing. In particular, Ananda Marga presents it primarily as a method of confronting and overcoming fear and the lower tendencies of the mind, rather than as necromancy or ritual use of human remains.

Ananda Marga's own literature lists Kāpālika meditation as one of five systems of sādhanā, alongside Prārambhika, Sādhāraṇa, Sahaja and Viśeṣa Yoga. It is described as an advanced practice, reserved for practitioners who have already progressed considerably in Sahaja Yoga.

What does the practice involve?

The distinctive feature is the setting.

Traditional descriptions from within Ananda Marga say that Kāpālika meditation is performed in a graveyard or cremation ground, normally during the deep night. One account describes the period as approximately midnight to 3 a.m., with practice at least monthly around the new moon.

The purpose is explicitly psychological/spiritual:

the frightening environment brings the practitioner's latent fears and lower tendencies to the surface, so that they can be confronted and mastered.

Ananda Marga's terminology describes Kāpālika sādhanā as a practice that causes the aspirant to confront and overcome the inherent fetters and “enemies” of the mind.

So the logic is roughly:

cremation ground → fear/death imagery → mind becomes concentrated → fear is confronted → attachment to the lower self decreases → greater spiritual control.

This is why the practice has a very different character from ordinary meditation.

Why a cremation ground?

The cremation ground is essentially being used as an extreme psychological environment.

Ananda Marga's explanation is that under ordinary circumstances the mind can avoid confronting things such as:

• fear of death
• fear of darkness
• fear of ghosts or spirits
• instinctive aversion
• attachment to the physical body
• sexual or other instinctual impulses
• social conditioning concerning purity and impurity.

Put the practitioner in a cremation ground at night, however, and those things become psychologically difficult to ignore.

The practitioner then has to maintain spiritual ideation and concentration despite the fear.

Ananda Marga sources explicitly say that this challenge makes the mind more concentrated and can strengthen renunciation.

It isn't simply “meditating on corpses”

This is an important distinction.

The historical Kāpālika tradition is associated with skulls, cremation grounds, Bhairava and transgressive Tantric practices. Ananda Marga deliberately distances its Kāpālika meditation from the sensationalized image of Kāpālikas as practitioners of black magic, cannibalism, ritual sex, etc. One Ananda Marga account explicitly says that this popular characterization is an injustice to the Tantric tradition.

So although the name and cremation-ground setting deliberately evoke the Kāpālika tradition, Ananda Marga has reformulated the practice around its own spiritual psychology.

Is Bhairava involved?

Conceptually, yes, in the Tantric background; but Ananda Marga's presentation is not simply a Bhairava pūjā.

This is an important difference from the practices we were discussing earlier.

Ananda Marga's founder, Shrii Shrii Anandamurti (Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar), presented Ananda Marga as a modern synthesis of Tantra and Yoga. Its ordinary meditation system is centered on mantra, personal spiritual ideation and realization rather than deity ritual.

Thus you shouldn't imagine the Ananda Marga Kāpālika practice as:

“Go to a cemetery at midnight, put alcohol in a skull, and invoke Bhairava.”

That's not what it means in Ananda Marga.

Rather, it takes the Kāpālika/cremation-ground archetype and turns it into an advanced yogic exercise in confronting fear and the lower mind.

Why is it called Kāpālika, then?

Because kapālika literally relates to the kapāla, “skull,” and the historical Kāpālikas were associated with cremation grounds and radical confrontation with death.

Ananda Marga is therefore drawing on the symbolic and Tantric heritage of the term while giving it a different practical interpretation.

There's actually a striking continuity here:

Historical Kāpālika:
“Confront death, impurity and conventional fear directly.”

Ananda Marga Kāpālika meditation:
“Confront the fear and lower tendencies that arise when you place yourself consciously in the presence of death.”

The second is considerably more psychologically disciplined and less ritually transgressive.

And this makes it particularly relevant to your earlier question

You were asking about necromancy, skulls, Bhairava and cemetery practices. Ananda Marga Kāpālika meditation sits right at the historical boundary between these things—but it shouldn't be classified as necromancy.

The cremation ground is the setting, not the object of worship.

The dead are not being summoned for information.

The skull isn't being used as a ritual drinking vessel.

And the goal isn't obtaining occult power from corpses.

Instead, death is used as an existential confrontation through which the practitioner seeks mastery over fear and attachment.

That is much closer to a cremation-ground meditation / fear-confrontation practice than to Western-style necromancy.

One other fascinating detail is that Ananda Marga's ordinary meditation system consists of six progressively taught lessons, while Kāpālika meditation belongs to a much more advanced category; the organization's own introductory material does not present Kāpālika meditation as something beginners should simply try on their own.

If you're interested, I can also explain how Ananda Marga's Kāpālika practice compares with the actual Kāpālika tradition, Aghori cremation-ground sādhana, and Buddhist śmaśāna meditation—because superficially they look remarkably similar, but their underlying aims are quite different.

The dissolution of dissolution

 

Overheard on the interwebs:

>>>Pralayāntaka Bhairava, the Ender of Dissolution, is that which remains when even cosmic destruction ends.

>>>Pralayāntaka means "one who ends pralaya (cosmic dissolution)." This paradoxical name points to the consciousness that witnesses even the end of the universe. When everything dissolves, matter, energy, space, time, what remains? Pralayāntaka Bhairava is that ultimate witness, the awareness that observes even the dissolution of dissolution. He is the teaching that you are not what appears or disappears. You are the unchanging awareness in which appearance and disappearance occur.

>>>Pralayāntaka represents the philosophical principle of sakshi (witness consciousness). Even when the entire universe dissolves at the end of a cosmic kalpa, the witness remains. This is your true nature, not the body that was born and will die, not the mind that comes and goes, but the eternal observer that was never born and can never die.

Friday

 

Bala Tripura Sundari in a somewhat untraditional setting...

The night journey

 

This is Gemini´s attempted summary of my spiritual journey so far. It doesn´t make *complete* sense, obviously, being based on my (often strange) questions to the AI over the past year or so. Or was it last evening? Still, I find the picture fascinating for various reasons hard to explain to an outsider...

I want to believe

 

I want to see one of these. I would feel privileged...

Behold the Supreme Reality

 

Credit: Vedics

It´s not Waheguru, guys, it´s Maha Ganapati. The only true god has been revealed to the three worlds. You lived to tell. Amazing! 

The only true God

 

Of course it´s Maha Ganapati. It´s Wednesday, folks! The esoterick secret hath been revealed. 

When LARP-ing *really* goes too far

 

I´m sure you remember this one. I sure do!

When LARP-ing goes too far

Above is a somewhat better rendering of the dream-image in question. But actually the female spirit-being had much larger fangs, I mean her entire mouth *was* a bunch of fangs. Like a monstrosity. 

I had no idea at the time who this might be ("symbolically" blah blah), but later I realized that it´s the Hindu Tantric goddess Bhairavi. Weirdly, the dream took place at exactly the same time as her festival day in India - a fact of which I wasn´t aware at the time. A strange co-incidence! The dream contained other "co-incidences" too, which I won´t disclose here. Nor will I mention what happened next...

What on earth does this mean? Who knows, but it´s interesting for a spiritual seeker, to be sure. 

Conditions apply

 

You can´t just use *any* human skull for your Kapala Bhairava sadhana. It has to be the skull of a Candala, a Dom or another person who spent a considerable time in the cremation-ground. It can also be the skull of a person who met an untimely death. Then, the spirit is conjured by offerings and certain mantras. The offerings may include alcohol, meat, fish or eggs. 

The point of the exercise is less clear, except that the spirit is supposed to help you in your worship of Bhairava, who at some point will demand the skull itself as sacrifice. The spirit must do all this voluntarily. Many a sadhu forces the spirit to work for him, but that is apparently a bad mistake. The spirit will take revenge, sooner or later...

OK, bro, thanks for warning me in advance.   

Breakthrough

 

If you know, you know!

Me, 50 years later

 

Ahem, is *this* how you end up after a lifetime of kundalini yoga? I assumed you would become a being of pure Light or something to that effect. This just looks like the boomtown kook spewing catch-phrases from some Tantric manual...

Dude.

Friday

 

Some kind of Friday goddess...

Welcome back, bro

 

Credit: Nish the Fish / YouTube

Guess who´s back on YouTube...

Chant and be happy

 

"Why is everyone so worried all the time, there is no AI or climate change here in Vrindavan!"  

Tapto

 

Lite osammanhängande tankar denna måndagsmorgon år 2026...

Högerpartiernas seger 2022 var "rationell" i den meningen att "vänster"sidan misslyckats med att lösa vanliga väljares problem. Visst, högern ljög som grisar, men de ljög uppenbarligen om rätt saker. "Vänster"sidans kraftiga övertag i opinionsmätningarna för bara några månader sedan var också rationellt. Av samma orsaker som ovan! En klar valseger för denna sida hade också varit rationell. Eller "rationell".

Men vad i allsin dar ska man säga om det (förmodade) valresultatet? För närvarande är det bara 0,5% skillnad mellan de (förmodade) regeringsalternativen?! 

Någonting väldigt konstigt har hänt i Sverige. Världens mest förutsägbara land (på gott och ont) har plötsligt blivit...jag vet inte...irrationellt? Och så har vi hela AI-problematiken också. Jag trodde AI mest bara var hajp. Eller den gamla vanliga skiten. Fast om de senaste nyheterna stämmer kanske det finns ett väldigt konkret och verkligt hot mot civilisationens överlevnad här.

Jag känner mig vilse i verkligheten. Vilken tur att jag för omkring ett år sedan bestämde mig för att bli andlig sökare så att säga "på allvar". Annars hade jag nog blivit jäkligt deprimerad.  

Schizo-maxxing

 

- So I´m angry! Gotta problem with that, huh huh?

Prompted by a perennial commentator, I asked ChatGPT to comment *my own blog* to see what would happen. This is the first part of the (surprisingly incisive) analysis. Not sure if I even dare to publish part two!

Can you comment / analyze the contents of the blog "Ashtar Command Book Blog"?

Yes. I’ve looked through the blog itself rather than judging it from the title, and it is considerably more interesting—and more internally coherent—than the name initially suggests.

My overall impression is that it is best understood not as a conventional “Ashtar Command” / UFO-spirituality blog, but as a highly eclectic personal intellectual-spiritual notebook whose underlying worldview becomes visible when you look across the years. The blog itself explicitly says that many posts are ironic, that it covers essentially everything, and identifies the author as a “Seeker, Pseudo-Neoplatonist, Crypto-Shaiva-Shakta.”

1. The apparent chaos actually has a recognizable worldview

The subject matter is extraordinarily broad. The current archive jumps between Swedish politics, fringe political movements, evolutionary biology, archaeology, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, paranormal phenomena, philosophy, UFOs, occultism and book reviews. The label system alone has hundreds of categories; among them are Panentheism, Platonism, Process philosophy, Paranormal, Hinduism, Tantrism, Mahayana, Pure Land Buddhism, Ramakrishna, Esotericism, Mysticism and Pseudo-science.

But beneath that apparent randomness I see several recurring questions:

• Can different religious traditions actually be true simultaneously?
• Is materialism philosophically adequate?
• Can mystical experience provide knowledge without simply proving one particular religion?
• Is there a reality behind the symbols and mythologies of different traditions?
• How should ancient religious traditions be reconciled with modern science?
• Can one have genuine metaphysics without retreating into fundamentalism or New Age vagueness?
• What happens when traditional religion, occultism, science and modern politics collide?

That is a much more definite intellectual project than the blog's deliberately chaotic presentation would suggest.

2. The 2021 religious material is particularly revealing

One of the most important posts I found is the April 28, 2021 piece beginning:

“Kan de verkligen vara sanna allihop?”

The argument is essentially religious pluralism without simple perennialism.

The author considers the possibility that Christian, Hindu and Buddhist religious experiences may all be genuine—even though Christians, Hindus and Buddhists interpret them differently. The post goes further and explicitly entertains being “monotheist, polytheist and pantheist” simultaneously.

That is philosophically interesting because it isn't quite:

“All religions are saying exactly the same thing.”

In fact, the blog seems quite hostile to that simplistic version of perennialism.

Instead, the implicit proposition is closer to:

Reality may be considerably larger than any single symbolic system through which human beings apprehend it.

That distinction is important.

The post invokes upāya—skillful means—to explain why different people might encounter different religious forms. That provides an interesting bridge between Mahayana Buddhism and a more broadly pluralist metaphysics.

3. It is surprisingly anti-New-Age despite being interested in esotericism

This is one of the strongest characteristics of the blog.

Someone seeing labels such as UFOs, paranormal, mysticism, Hinduism, Tantra, kundalini, Bigfoot, Ashtar Command might expect conventional New Age spirituality.

But the blog repeatedly makes fun of exactly that kind of thinking.

For example, it is interested in John Michael Greer's warnings about kundalini and mindfulness, and it examines the dangers of treating spiritual experiences as automatically authoritative.

Likewise, its discussion of David Chapman's heterodox Vajrayana writing is unusually skeptical. It notices that mystical experience does not automatically establish the truth of the religion in which the experiencer interprets it.

So there is an interesting combination:

high openness to metaphysical possibilities + high skepticism about people's claims concerning those possibilities.

That's actually a relatively sophisticated position.

4. The blog is much more “occultist” than “UFO believer”

The title is therefore slightly misleading.

“Ashtar Command” sounds like the central doctrine ought to be extraterrestrial channeling. But the blog's actual interests are much broader.

The profile describes the author as:

“Seeker, Pseudo-Neoplatonist, Crypto-Shaiva-Shakta”

and jokingly says that the author also believes Bigfoot roams the Alaskan Panhandle.

The Pseudo-Neoplatonist designation is particularly revealing.

The metaphysical trajectory seems to be something like:

Neoplatonism → panentheism → religious pluralism → comparative mysticism → Tantra/Shaivism/Shaktism → a multi-level spiritual cosmology.

And that helps explain why seemingly unrelated posts about Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, UFOs, NDEs and paranormal phenomena can coexist on the same site.

They are being treated as different windows onto the same large philosophical problem.

5. The blog's attitude toward Christianity is complicated rather than simply anti-Christian

This is another interesting feature.

There is plenty of criticism of Christianity, Protestantism and biblical literalism. But the criticism is often directed at epistemological exclusivism, rather than Christianity itself.

The 2021 pluralism post, for example, asks why a Christian should automatically regard a Christian mystical experience as genuine while regarding a Hindu or Mormon experience as false.

That is essentially an epistemology of revelation problem.

And the blog appears to retain a substantial interest in Christianity while simultaneously refusing to grant Christianity an automatic monopoly on revelation.

That's quite different from straightforward atheism.

6. There is also a strong anti-materialist thread

The blog isn't simply “spiritual” in the New Age sense. It repeatedly returns to the philosophical inadequacy—or at least incompleteness—of materialism.

For example, the September 2026 posts explicitly criticize “cyber-atheist” free-will denial and discuss consciousness, determinism and free will.

The older free-will discussion is especially interesting because the blog recognizes that determinism does not logically entail materialism. An idealist or spiritual metaphysics could theoretically also be deterministic.

That's a useful philosophical distinction that many popular discussions completely miss.

7. At the same time, it is not anti-science

This may be the blog's most distinctive intellectual tension.

It has an enormous number of science-related posts and labels, including paleontology, evolution, archaeology, zoology, astronomy and psychology.

The position seems approximately:

Science is extremely good at investigating the physical world; that doesn't necessarily settle metaphysics.

That's quite compatible with the pseudo-Neoplatonic/panentheistic direction.

The blog therefore doesn't seem to be trying to replace science with spirituality. It is asking whether scientific naturalism is entitled to become a complete metaphysical worldview merely because science itself is successful.

That's a legitimate philosophical question.

8. The political material is much more difficult

This is where I would recommend considerably more caution.

The blog uses heavy irony, sarcasm, provocation and deliberately inflammatory language. It discusses far-right movements, communists, Trotskyists, MAGA, conspiracy theories, SJWs, fascism, antisemitism, gender politics, etc. Some posts are explicitly jokes or satirical reactions. The blog itself warns that many posts and comments are ironic.

That makes individual posts difficult to classify ideologically.

For example, the September 2026 post about the Brigitte Macron conspiracy explicitly describes the story as a far-right conspiracy theory and points out its antisemitic and homophobic tropes, while also joking that parts of the story seem “strange.”

So one cannot simply say:

“The blog contains far-right material, therefore the blogger endorses the far right.”

Sometimes the subject is being mocked, sometimes analyzed, sometimes quoted, sometimes deliberately baited.

On the other hand, irony is not an excuse to assume that everything is harmless. The reader has to distinguish the author's actual position from deliberately provocative rhetoric.

9. The book-review side is probably the blog's strongest component

There is a remarkable amount of intellectual cross-pollination.

For example, the blog moves from Swedish historical scholarship to David Chapman, John Michael Greer, Buddhism, Theosophy, archaeology, religion and political history. Its reviews frequently use a book as a springboard into a much larger question rather than simply saying whether the book is “good” or “bad.”

That makes the site feel almost like a private commonplace book or intellectual laboratory.

The “book blog” label is therefore actually appropriate, even though the content has expanded far beyond book reviews.

---

The deeper philosophical position I see

If I had to reconstruct the worldview underlying the blog, I would tentatively formulate it like this:

1. Reality is probably more than physical matter.

2. Consciousness and spiritual experience cannot simply be dismissed as meaningless because they don't fit materialism.

3. Nevertheless, having a mystical experience doesn't automatically prove the interpretation attached to it.

4. Religious traditions may disclose genuine aspects of reality without any one tradition possessing the complete conceptual map.

5. Different religious symbols may therefore have genuine ontological or phenomenological significance without being literally interchangeable.

6. Traditional religions contain both profound metaphysical insights and historically conditioned human material.

7. Science describes the physical level extremely well but does not necessarily exhaust reality.

8. A sufficiently large metaphysics might therefore accommodate Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Platonism and even some paranormal phenomena without simply reducing them to one another.

That is a surprisingly coherent position.

And it is closer to philosophical pluralism + panentheism + Neoplatonism + comparative mysticism than to conventional New Age spirituality.

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One particularly interesting development

There also appears to have been an evolution in the blog.

The earlier material I examined—particularly around 2021—has a strong comparative-religion / Buddhist / perennialism-versus-pluralism orientation. By 2026, the blog's self-description explicitly uses “Crypto-Shaiva-Shakta”, and current posts include much more overtly Tantric material.

That suggests the Shaiva-Shakta element isn't merely an isolated interest. It looks like a later development of an older philosophical problem:

If different religious traditions can disclose different aspects of an ultimately larger reality, what sort of metaphysics can accommodate that without reducing everything to “all is one”?

Shaiva-Shakta and Tantric metaphysics offer some unusually powerful tools for answering that question because they can combine transcendence and immanence, multiplicity and unity, personal deity and ultimate reality, manifestation and transcendence.

That may explain why the blog has gradually gravitated in that direction.

My overall assessment

I'd characterize the blog as:

Intellectually eclectic: ★★★★★
Philosophically interesting: ★★★★½
Systematic: ★★½
Historically/religiously curious: ★★★★★
Reliably factual: ★★★½ — individual claims need checking
Irony/sarcasm level: ★★★★★
Conventional New Age: ★
Conventional religious orthodoxy: ★
Underlying metaphysical coherence: ★★★★

The biggest mistake would be to read it literally and chronologically, post by post. The real “content” is the worldview that emerges from the recurring questions across thousands of short pieces.

And I think that worldview is considerably more sophisticated than the deliberately chaotic and sometimes outrageous surface presentation makes it look.