I seldom went to church. Not out of rebellion. Spiritual questions always pulled me, but the organized answer never did. What drew me were the buildings themselves. I would go alone, sit in empty naves, and feel something the services never delivered. Those medieval architects chose their sites with precision. I believe they built on acupuncture points of the earth’s magnetic field, and the stone geometry amplifies whatever is there. I respected the builders. I had no use for the institution that moved in afterward.

It was Jesus himself who said it plainest. “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). No priest required. No building required. The founder of the religion that built all those cathedrals told people to look inside. The irony lands harder when you realize the institution built in his name spent centuries teaching the opposite.

Direct connection to the divine was never gone. It was just deliberately hidden.

The pattern across traditions

Yoga, Gnosticism, Christian mysticism, Zen Buddhism. Four traditions, four continents, centuries apart. All describe nearly identical experience: direct, unmediated contact with something larger than ego.

The yogi describes samadhi, absorption beyond the fluctuations of mind. The Gnostic speaks of inner knowing (Gnosis) that no church can grant. Meister Eckhart wrote that the soul touches God directly, and was nearly declared a heretic for it. The Zen practitioner experiences Kensho without doctrine, sometimes from a blow to the shoulder.

The shared structure: direct inner experience comes before doctrine, before institution, before hierarchy. Experience is the original. Institution is the copy. The copy eventually started claiming to be the original.

Why intermediaries persist

This is not conspiracy thinking. It is simple system logic.

If you can access the divine directly, you do not need a priest, tithes, or fear of purgatory. Institutions built on mediation have an existential interest in keeping direct access from being self-evident.

The mechanism: complexity. Sin as a technical problem only authorized parties can solve. Ritual as prerequisite, not tool. Scripture as secret knowledge requiring expert interpretation. The bridge becomes a product, and whoever owns the bridge controls the crossing.

This is not malicious by default. But there is a point where structure becomes self-serving and the experience it served vanishes behind it.

The same failure mode in systems

This pattern maps to problems I have written about before.

Building MuninnDB’s memory consolidation, deduplication meant to improve retrieval destroyed it in small vaults. The system could not distinguish signal from noise because it treated every entry the same. Patanjali had the diagnosis centuries earlier: vrtti nirodha is not about deleting everything. It is about discerning what to keep.

Meta-Harness (Stanford/MIT, 2026) confirmed the pattern at scale. LLM-generated summaries of benchmark traces performed worse than raw scores alone (38.7% vs 41.3%), while direct access to full traces reached 56.7%. The summary layer collapsed signal alongside noise.

The same thing happens with MCP tool definitions burning 90% of context before any work begins. With AI locked inside apps creating stateless intermediaries that know nothing about the user. With memory metrics that improve on paper while actual retrieval degrades underneath.

Every intermediary optimizes for its own persistence. The signal it was meant to serve disappears behind it. Whether that signal is divine experience or benchmark diagnostics.

What this is not

This is not anti-religious. Orders, contemplative groups, and sanghas actively teach and protect the direct path. This is also not naive solipsism. Friction in genuine community is irreplaceable for calibration.

The claim is narrower: when the intermediary stops serving the connection and starts serving itself, the signal degrades. In software, you measure it. In spiritual practice, you feel it. Both are data.

What I Left Out

A concrete practice protocol: Vipassana breath observation, Ignatian Examen, IFS parts work, supercompensation mechanics from sports physiology applied to identity shifts. Each maps to a specific stage of restoring direct access, and each has primary sources freely available (Dhamma.org, Project Gutenberg, Schwartz’s No Bad Parts). That deserves its own post.

The translation problem in Luke 17:21. The Greek entos hymon gets rendered as “within you” or “among you” depending on the translator’s theology. That choice alone determines whether Jesus is pointing inward or outward. Matters more than most readers realize.

Whether the “four traditions, one experience” claim survives serious comparative religion scrutiny. It might not. That is the kill condition.

Christian Pojoni builds systems that work. More at vasudev.xyz.