by Donny Duke

Posting this song around the net takes a great leap of faith. (You can find the link to it at the bottom of this article.) The world has become explosively reactionary, due in large part to the Internet. It’s put a microscope on us, shows us stuff about us that’s always been there but that we just haven’t seen so pronounced and in our face, ugly and dirty things, and, self-righteous and hypocrites that we are, we weren’t ready for the vision. Who can show this to us? If you think about it, there’s no better person than the kind of person most react to, explode upon, once they’ve been unjustly lynched in the net of public opinion and reason comes onto the scene. The person, however, has to show their soul, and that’s just what I aim to do.

The soul is as misunderstood a concept as God, used to mean a variety of things. While it’s been talked about in both religion and the arts for thousands of years, I’d argue true knowledge of it has not yet entered the public mind. We know of enlightenment, but we don’t generally know of the soul change, that our soul not only influences us from within, turns us towards God, more and more as we allow it, but it can also surface and replace the ego once we are in the emptiness of enlightenment liberated from ego. My use of the term comes from my own experience informed by the teachings and inner guidance of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Since my aim here is not to introduce the soul but its power, I won’t elaborate on what the soul is, as my teachers and I see it, or its evolution for that matter, though in a future article I may do so, one I’m planning to write about the finding of the soul.

I would imagine the soul’s purpose is more varied than the universe, and as it evolves, or its evolving aspect the psychic being I should say, the dynamic personality of the soul, it wouldn’t necessarily take on some aspect of the world to help set right, some world problem to help solve, but as my psychic being has reached the place of maturity where it’s free to choose its comings and goings[i], it has donned the scapegoat process. I should stress here I’m speaking of my soul and not Donny, and while it would stand to reason that Donny too should be as developed as his soul, soul process is irrational, oftentimes runs contrary to our reason, is free to don a very fucked up outer personality for some purpose the likes of which you see playing out here: Donny coming online, or getting in line with his soul I should say, in order to help with the huge obstacle in our collective evolution, the making and maintaining of scapegoats, and as well help remove an equally huge obstacle, the abuse of children. The song I’m introducing holds this double purpose, sings the removal of both obstacles simultaneously, what can only be done by the seeing of the soul, not by a blind one-sided world power making the pedophile the seemingly foolproof universal scapegoat.

While the word scapegoat and its use is cliché, and today we seem more comfortable with the less defining phrase the ‘other’, the making and persecution of scapegoats is still the big hold up in realizing a viable human unity, what we’d need to achieve if we’re going to make it on this crowded planet. Put simply, a ‘humanity’ scapegoat is a group of people who are what they are by nature, not by choice, not speaking of quirks in the nature, but things fundamental like race or sexuality, whether they like or want to be that or not, speaking of sexuality, people who we don’t have to treat as fellow human beings with the same rights as everyone else, people we can vent on, who it’s generally socially acceptable to bear ill will towards, to hate, people on whom we project human evil so we don’t see it in ourselves, people we blame for the problems in our world so we ourselves can feel free of responsibility for those problems.

Though it may not be readily apparent, the scapegoat is as much a part of life in ego consciousness as the alpha male or female, what can almost be called a need of the ego and its maintenance, a need of the animal we are evolving out of I might say, equating here ego identity with animal identity. The scapegoat’s scope and purpose is quite visibly illustrated in the book and film 1984, and I’d argue 1984 is not only showing a frightening future to try to avoid, but at the same time doing what creative expression often does so closely aligned as it is with dream, albeit largely unconsciously. It’s showing the present social conditions of the writer in an exaggerated and larger than life form. What in 1984 people go to an auditorium to do, vent their penned up hatred and frustration on the scapegoat as he’s flashed across a screen, so they don’t turn that on the system, we do in the auditorium of our hearts and minds. It’s like the book and film is showing us what we do on the inside, using the outer symbol of an auditorium, even if such wasn’t intended by the creators, since, in any genuine creative expression, something of the representative nature of our world comes into play, and we see a little behind things, see much more than the human creator envisioned.

My psychic being became a conscious soul two lifetimes ago. It had donned the life of a black man in the South (of the U.S.) just before the turn of the 20^th century, a person who “could play the guitar just like a-ringing a bell.”[ii] He played with his soul, that is, his soul was involved in his music to the point you could hear its qualities, as it was reaching adulthood. The scapegoat of his day, African-American, he was killed by the KKK, for playing his guitar in white establishments, and because he was on the edge of fame. I re-experienced the last day of his life in one of those dreams that last much longer than the time it takes to dream it and one where it was as though I was here in the world, not in dream, as there was no shifting of either the material in the dream or its field until the very end. It was as though I actually re-experienced the last day of his life. I was lucid but inside him experiencing both myself and he, aware of my thoughts and feelings and his thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations, except at the very moment of his death, when the flames reached him as his home burned down,  his wife and children screaming as they were burned alive, when I became the fly on the wall observer outside of him. There was no need to feel the whole brunt of that moment a second time.

In my last life I was a Jewish man in Nazi Germany, the scapegoat of his time and place, of historic proportions, as African Americans were in the Old South. Though it was also a dream that showed me this, or the defining moment I saw it was in a dream, a very recent one, I’ve dreamed all my life of having a Jewish identity, inexplicably, since neither my mother nor father are Jewish, as I had dreamed of that black man in various stages of his life throughout this life, and I am neither black nor mulatto, although he wasn’t a guitar picker until that defining dream but someone of great talent or intellect, like an artist, a scientist, a university professor, and so forth. The remembrance of past lives is like that. It comes not as some instant revelation, although the defining moment is pretty revealing and may come as somewhat a surprise, but as an essential piece of your personal puzzle falling into place, fitting essentially into your process.

It’s not details such as names, addresses, and the like you remember, or it hasn’t been with me, and nor is it in the teachings of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo (I can’t tell you the name of the guitar picker or even what state he lived in, despite such a revealing dream about him, as those details disappeared upon awakening), but moments when the soul comes to the surface or very near, like the last day of the guitar picker’s life.[iii] I should also say these two recent lives are the only ones I remember, and my memory of them comes as a necessity of my present life, to do the work my soul has set before me. To truly remember your past lives, “one must become a wholly conscious being, conscious in all its parts, totally united with one’s divine origin.”[iv]

With the Jewish man the defining dream was full of all the shifts and strangeness of dream material, where he was part of a small group of Jews being hidden by farmers in the countryside, the railroad tracks leading to the death camps a central feature of the dream, that threat and utter despair over the whole situation taking him to rock bottom. The dream revolved around a soul moment when he had a momentary experience of liberation from ego, enlightenment. It’s not only sadhana that can take us there; sorrow can too if it hits the right note, a soul note.

In the dream there were a score of others who experienced the same, and I feel that represents an unknown aspect of the holocaust: out of the millions who suffered the horror there were those whose soul was reaching maturity, and they experienced the spiritual liberation or a flash of it. You might imagine some marched into death triumphant. Neither the Nazis nor any hate group has any control over the soul. You might also imagine that, in a representative world, nothing and no one can touch the soul, it being the reality in it and behind it, all else mere symbol and representation, the will-o-wisp of dream really, even Nazis.

Such definitive soul contact did not arise automatically. In this my present life, soon after reaching maturity as man, when I was around 30 years old, I made the inner journey to my center, the well of soul, connecting my surface conscious with it. It’s a lengthy story I won’t relate here other than to say that I’d opened the inner consciousness, was not only lucid in dream very often but also learning to try and remain conscious as I fell asleep and during a full period of sleep, all the way through a night’s dreaming, and it was in dreamless sleep I found my soul, “on a remote extremity of sleep,”[v] but it was a journey in stages, over the course of several days, a journey I made one time, a journey that had me face my greatest fears and overcome my strongest attachments. You might imagine that to find the soul is actually to find it inside you, and that, while a strong belief in it or feeling of it can bring or indicate contact with it, you won’t have the definitive concrete contact until you go to the deepest most remote place inside you and find it.

“Turn Around Soul”, the song I’m introducing, was shown I feel in the dream of the guitar picker, specifically in the dream short that came at the end of the dream, a dream short something that comes often at the end of a powerful dream that’s a basic summation of the dream, a symbolic representation of it, so different from the dream itself as to seem another dream, but there is no interval between it and the dream it’s symbolizing. If this song does get heard by my society then it is what that dream short was showing: being heard. I was watching a man with a guitar on a high ridge overlooking a large valley below. He was both black and white, not mulatto but actually a black man and a white man at the same time, an impossibility dream can do. There were lay lines along the ridge, and he was trying to hook his guitar into one so to be heard in the valley below. He made some unsuccessful attempts until he was finally able to hook into the one closest to  him, which made his acoustic guitar electric, and it was like he was inventing the electric guitar by hooking into that lay line. When he connected, his guitar music resounded throughout the whole valley, and it was more than sound I heard. I heard reality resound, a common feature of powerful dream, it ending with a sound, simply a large ‘crack’ in some cases, that you feel in your very soul.

I doubt most will believe that the soul can do what I show it doing here, write an entire song. While many believe in the soul, few know that it’s capable of healing us, as individuals and as a society. We not only have an immune system to heal our bodies; we have one also to heal our hearts and minds, to set right what’s messed up about us. It’s this innate and largely unknown immune system I want to show with my song, a system of soul more powerful than any world system, what sets worlds right.

The lyrics were sung to me over a period of months, via inner voice and vision. First came the two lines that form the backbone of the song, “Hold on tight. Turn around slowly.” It was sung by a female singing group complete with musical accompaniment and had a pop sound to it. Knowing there was no way I could manifest it into outer reality with my not so great voice and guitar skills, I nonetheless focused on it so that a full song would come, something I’ve learned to do with voice and vision over a period of some 15 years. With this song, unlike my others written from inner vision, I accepted only lyrics that I knew were from my soul, not from anywhere else, not even from the divine. Years of soul contact has enabled me to distinguish its voice from any other, knowing also that it often sings when it does speak to me.

After the initial lines, more came but very slowly, one or two lines a day (and not every day) that not only fit into the song but were also what I needed to hear that day, what I needed to see. Soon I had a skeleton of a song but didn’t even know what it was about. By the time I knew it was about what it’s about it was too late to turn back, and I couldn’t deny I needed to sing it and my society needed to hear it. I must say this is embarrassing for me, or for the ego I should say, and singing so openly about being a pedophile in today’s society is not what I want to do, why no doubt my soul kind of snuck it up on me, knowing I’d not have completed it if I had know what it was about from the first.

Then came some months of the song being filled in, one or two lines a day, with many, many corrections to the lyrics, all of which were sung to me, now in my voice and guitar, and in a couple of instances, where I was having a hard time, even my hands were shown playing the guitar in vision so I’d know the right cords and right way to sing it. I still haven’t gotten it all right, very far from it, but this is the best I can do with the talent I have. It would be appropriate to mention here that my family, especially Douglas, my psychic being partner, a life partnership other than romantic/sexual not yet generally known to be possible, had a lot to do with the development of the music. He and my family kept it from getting out of  hand,  making sure it matched my so-so voice and guitar skills, else I would sound like an out of tune hillbilly.

It’s a contemporary folk song, a person and their guitar singing about their society and their between a rock and a hard place position in it. You have to engage with the lyrics to appreciate it, which are largely symbolic, poetic even, and it’s not so much meant to stir the emotions as much as it’s meant to stir the soul. No doubt it’ll make a lot of people mad as hell. That’s not my intention, and if it makes you angry, figure out what it’s saying and then see what you got. It goes from the general to the specific, each verse getting more specific, taking you on a soul journey. So what you’ve got is a soul, and by showing you mine, I hope you hear yours. At the very least, you should be introduced to the soul’s power.

Please click here to hear the song.

Turn Around Soul

1)
I’m sittin’ here on the bottom baby,
hold down tight,
standing all over town.
That would be
on the stairway.
I’m well armed.
I can’t believe he’s out there.
To keep them in line.
It’s huge practice huge practice.
Find it on the news.
Closed weapons by the rest of the world.
What a cost to our humanity.
Run around soul. 2x’s
How high we step there
and turn them in line.
God sent me to my soul, 2x’s
in a straight line.
Make you soul know you go,
hold south you fix.
Oh wave your fingers are you gone?
How should I change? 2x’s
Make a new world. 2x’s 

(Chorus):

Hold on tight,
turn around slowly today.
Inside out,
turn around slowly today.
Hold on tight
turn around slowly
in vision
will today
turn around soul. 2x’s
Hold on today. 2x’s

2)
To be somethin’ different
So keep it from runnin’.
To be somethin’ different
that warrant is for your arrest
on the 7 seas.
Take the best metro back there.
Walk heel in line. 2x’s
And that weakness was no longer
on the 7 seas.
The spirit was to find peace.
Entire soul. 2x’s
I can’t believe he’s out there.
To keep them in line.
One realize.
I promise I promise.
Come and speak,
cause I’m livin’ in a world that’s new,
vision of a world that’s true.
I saw the planet.
I am one another. 2x

 (Chorus)

3)
Find them and expose them
shows no solid arm.
Truth will be an attitude.
You have to live there.
I’ve seen him upside down.
I’ve seen him to my soul.
I am warm and I am cold
like the light of the world.
I’ll grow up
in the wild frame.
You hear Houston
name names.
My hand’s in the system
cause I’m livin’ in a world that’s new,
inner in the world that’s true,
when nature comes together,
from our door 2x’s
open.
What about soul? 2x’s
You can springtime
oh, oh, oh, oh,
above the world,
thunder like we’ll make together.
It’s a surrounding world. 2x’s 

(Chorus)

4)
Con you’re out there
problem in line.
You’ll have to see
how much we step there
over the years.
What in the a dark city?
Hold on out there.
With my hidin’,
with my terrorizin’,
In that flaming member you can’t decide.
The answer,
oh, oh, oh,
words of sound and murder came from his incantation.
What it cost to worlds.
What a cost to our humanity.
Run around soul. 2x’s
Dark science
turn of the century
pedophile. 2x’s 

(Chorus)

5)
Lacking in the system,
in the whole human race.
And there’s another thing
I didn’t question
in America,
when America.
Here’s something under there.
Don’t see my mind
and show of peace. 2x’s
You see what he means.
Allow this arm.
I’m well armed.
This could be real.
That was the most soul
word I ever heard,
a conscious soul. 2x’s
Oh the inner kingdom.
Of I’ve been born.
I’m the nineteen.
I’m your friend.
I’m the only romancing need
goin’ in the wind.
As long as it takes
if you mean work on one’s center.
Callin’ me today.
Please don’t put yourself in harm’s way.
Master and able it’s possible.
To believe. 2x’s
This is the melody.
Pledge the long road,
here in the top
in ‘bove the house. 2x’s 

(Chorus)

(addition to chorus, excluding last line “Hold on today”)
Turn around love,
yield today,
turn around love.
turn around soul,
entire soul.
It could be real,
a conscious soul.
I can have no beginning.
I can be soul.
What about soul,
run around soul? 2x’s this and above line
Turn around soul. 2x’s
It won’t be long. 2x’s

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[i] “The time [on the other side] depends also on the development and on a certain rhythm of the being – for some there is practically immediate rebirth, for others it takes longer, for some it may take centuries; but here, again, once the psychic being is sufficiently developed, it is free to choose its own rhythm and its own intervals.” Letters On Yoga, Volume 1, page 444, by Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

[ii] Lyrics from the song “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry.

[iii] “But this memory is not a thing of the mental kind. Those who claim to have been such a baron of the Middle Ages or such a person who lived at such a place and such a time, are fanciful, they are simply victims of their own mental imagination. In fact, what remains of past lives are not beautiful pictures in which you appear as a mighty lord in a castle or a victorious general at the head of an army--that is only romance. What remains is the memory of those instants when the psychic being emerged from the depths of your being and revealed itself to you--that is to say, the memory of those instants when you were wholly conscious. That growth of consciousness is progressively effectuated in the course of evolution, and the memory of past lives is generally limited to the critical moments of evolution, to the decisive turns that marked the progress of your consciousness.” From: The Writings of the Mother, Memory of Past Lives, 1958, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Savitri, Book VII, Canto III, by Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo Press