This post is going to show a type of dream that Donny, Mithun and I have worked with a lot, and that’s a very common class of dreams that show things that are going to happen the next day or the next couple of days or even what happened yesterday. And while I’ve had dreams that show actual physical outer events symbolically, the type of dream I’m going to share here shows what’s going to transpire within us psychologically, how we’re going to react to things that are going to happen in the outer world. The dream I’m going to share today also shows, in my opinion, a psychological movement in someone else.
I should point out that this particular dream is related to sex and sexual desire, which in the yoga that I follow is something to be overcome, along with a lot of other things that come from the animal part of our nature, such as anger and fear. So my dream treats it as something dangerous even though it’s something quite natural, and for most people overcoming sex isn’t something required of them. Regardless the dream is quite clear, and thus a good example of the way dreams do things. So I would encourage everyone to keep reading, especially if you’re someone who has a sexual deviation that makes your life miserable or even hurts others, because then you’ve got a good reason to get sex under control.
This dream, which I call ‘The Queen Dream’, forecasted an uprising of sexual desire that occurred in me later that same day. The dream also gave a warning, and I’ll relate the consequences that uprising of desire had on my state of consciousness.
When the dream began, I was in State College Pennsylvania, where I went to college at Penn State. I was somewhere that was sort of like a commune in the middle of the city. The focus of the place seemed to be gardening, as there were lots of potted plants around. A number of people were living and working there. I can’t remember if I was staying there or just visiting.
There was also a group of pretty, young, dark-skinned women there, wearing long dresses of different bright single colors. One of them was the queen, and it was forbidden that any man should touch her, though it was understood that once she got married her husband would have that privilege. The punishment for any man that touched her was death. She was allowed to touch men though, because at one point I was close to her, and she affectionately reached out and touched my stomach, but there was nothing overtly sexual or flirtatious about it. It was clear though that she was fond of me. Afterwards I asked a guy standing next to me, “If I just bumped into her by mistake, would I be killed?” He said, “Yes.”
So that’s the dream. Now what’s important to mention is, while I can feel attracted to all types of women, the kind of woman that gets my blood burning the most is a dark skinned woman like the queen. It’s the queen of my desire you might say. When Donny and I discussed the dream we both agreed the queen represented my vital/sexual attraction to this kind of woman. That touching the queen in the dream, means death shows it isn’t good for me sadhana-wise in the way that dreams tend to exaggerate things. The fact that there were potted plants around where the dream took place indicates the vital since plant life such as forests, etc. often indicates the vital part of the being, as does the color green. In addition, the fact that the larger setting of the dream was State College, Pennsylvania also brings lower vital indulgence to mind since it’s a renowned college party town. However, Donny also suggested that the setting was a college town since I’m dealing with sex on the ‘college level’, in other words, a more advanced level than say would be represented by high school or grade school. Regardless, we see that everything here points toward the vital, a vital atmosphere or a vital movement. So keeping in mind that dreams often show symbolically how we’re going to react psychologically to something the day after the dream (or how we reacted the day before), let me tell you what happened in the outer world that sparked my desire that day.
The evening after the dream, Midhun came into my room talking on his phone with a girl, and I wondered if it was his sister Priyanka, who’s a pretty young Indian woman I find attractive, though I’ve only met her once in person, since she lives three hours away. Under the influence of what I call ‘color’, I said loudly enough that she could hear, “Hi Priyanka!” Now what I mean when I say ‘color’ could be described as a mild form of sexual attraction, which makes us want to interact with, in whatever way we can, the someone we have color for. Color also makes it easier to be more kind, patient, helpful or understanding with people who fall within the range of our attraction. So I had said hi to Priyanka just to have the thrill of a little contact with her, but then Midhun handed me the phone so I could actually talk to her. So I said hello to her again, and she said hello back in a friendly way. She’s actually quite happy with me because I helped her and Midhun put together a video of her singing a song for her boyfriend as a birthday gift. I should mention she has a very sweet singing voice, which is another thing I find alluring about her. Anyway her English isn’t very good, so I just wished her a nice evening and that was it. Midhun left the room, and then I suddenly felt a rise of desire for Priyanka enter me like a breath, and the urge to fantasize about her was strong. I remembered the queen dream though and could see the connection. That is, the queen in my dream represented my attraction to this type of woman and this current state of arousal that was bad for my sadhana. That made it easier to stand back from the desire and let it settle down.
Now hopefully I have explained things clearly enough that the reader can see the connection between the queen in my dream, the symbol of my desire for dark skinned women, and the state of desire that was sparked by my interaction with Priyanka. I think it’s important to note that this dream was at the end of a long sequence of lucidity where I was going in and out of different dreams, and having varying levels of lucidity. This I believe is why the dream is so simple and clear. It was a purer dream or a deeper level of dreaming that doesn’t have as much weirdness or bizarreness as a lot of dreams do, even if they’re meaningful dreams. This dream was straightforward and to the point.
If you remember, at the beginning I said I felt the dream also showed what was going on psychologically in someone else. This has to do with the action of the queen in the dream, who touched my stomach and not my penis, and she did it in a fond and affectionate, but not overtly sexual way. And this is how Priyanka actually responded to me in our interaction because as I said, she is grateful for the help I gave her. She has a vital friendliness towards me like the queen did in the dream.
Now of course I didn’t literally die from all this, but it did have an effect on my consciousness. At the time of the dream I was getting a little bit of steam going sadhana-wise, and I had actually been lucid in another dream a few days before that. In addition, I was somewhat detached overall and able to keep from giving sanction to reactions that were rising up the way they do in life in response to this or that. I was also having periods of time where I was more conscious than normal of the constant stress, dissatisfaction, unease and grumpiness that is my vital’s default state. Hand and hand with this there was the recognition that things don’t have to be this way, that these moods are just habits of the vital, and it really is possible to be content and carefree instead. I know you might be sitting there saying, so what? But there was a knowing quality to it that isn’t there now when I think these same thoughts. I was really aware of the truth of this in a way that was subtle, but yet more substantial than just a thought in the head. All this up-buoyancy ended after the sexual uprising, which opened the door to other lower movements getting in. My little bit of detachment was replaced by a state of perpetual irritation with virtually everything and everyone that lasted for weeks and was frustrating because, try as I might, I couldn’t get a handle on it. It was an unpleasant drop in consciousness and the ‘death’ you could say of a more positive state.
But perhaps this was a drop that was avoidable. As I said at the beginning, this dream was a warning, or could have been, if I had taken it in the right way. It was showing me that something was going to happen soon regarding my sexual desire. The problem is, I wasn’t vigilant, and the dream went out of my mind after Donny and I discussed it in the morning. If I had used the dream as a tool to keep on the outlook for something, I may very well have caught myself before I blurted out, “Hi Priyanka!” with so much color. Regardless, the remembrance of the dream, after the desire had gotten in, did aid me to let it go faster than I might have otherwise. So it still helped. I want to mention that I also find it interesting that I didn’t actually touch the queen in my dream. This further makes me wonder if this little misstep was avoidable.
Now, in contrast to all this, something else very interesting happened that same day. Earlier in the day, before the phone call, Midhun was resting and had a very vivid vision of Priyanka, who reached out and touched his heart. He said he could feel her sweetness and her love for him, and that he was very happy to see her, actually felt like he was in her presence. In the vision he smiled, and when he came out of the vision that same smile was on his face. Now something like this represents, in my opinion, an actual contact with someone. Perhaps it was just him receiving a strong formation of love from his sister Priyanka, generated, no doubt, while she was thinking about him. Or perhaps it was her inner being, which came and paid Midhun a visit. Priyanka adores her little brother and makes lots of sacrifices for him and his musical endeavors, buying him first a keyboard and then a laptop, which is a lot of money for the salary she earns here in India, even though she has a college degree. Now, I think it’s fair to assume my dream and Midhun’s vision we’re related somehow, but what exactly that relation is, I can’t really say.
Now in closing, I’d like to come back to the subject of ‘color’, this low level action of sexual attraction that influences most, if not all of us. It’s something we’re all familiar with, though most of us probably don’t give it much thought it’s so natural. It brings to mind the image of the high school nerd following the gorgeous cheerleader around like a lost puppy dog carrying her books for her, even though he has no chance with her at all. So with this in mind I’d like to invite the listener to take a closer look at color in themselves and color in the world outside and see what a large part it has in making the world go round. If you look deeply enough and attentively enough, you might find yourself shocked at how pervasive it is, and how it’s showing itself in places that your unsuspecting mind would never have thought to find it. I will say though that while color is an insincerity, a form pf preference, there’s something true about it at the same time. At its fount and origin, it’s still love, despite what happens to it when it manifests on the surface of ourselves, that is, in waking life and in normal human consciousness. Anyway, nuff said!
In my mid twenties to early thirties the inner doors were flung wide open. Especially intense were the 3 and a half years immediately following a spiritual experience that happened when I was 28, and I was able to consciously explore not only dream and transition states between waking and sleeping (hypnagogia and hynopompia) and the trances such as the cataleptic (sleep paralysis) that sometimes accompany them, and consequently too the out of body experience often resulting from such a trance, but also dreamless sleep. There in the deepest most hidden place inside me, in my center, way beyond or behind dream, I entered into the realm of soul, just a short baptismal shock, but in that journey, a very involved inner journey that took a number of stages and a week or so, I took my conscious, that part of me that thinks and feels and dreams, down into my center and connected it to the soul, and why I call it the soul is the spirit of this article.
I understand now that such an opening of the inner consciousness is unusual, where you can consciously explore the inner life with as much conscious awareness and will as you have in waking life, where you have lucid dreams most every night, or frequent cycles of that, can learn to go from waking to dreaming consciously, from dreaming into the states between sleeping and waking (twilight I call them), from twilight into the cataleptic trance, and from there out of the body, but my list isn’t to suggest OBE is the direction of the exploration. For me this opening was temporary, and it slowly closed, not completely, but the unusual degree of opening I’m describing, especially the last two items, cataleptic trance and OBE, were the first things to go and in the ensuing years to become rare events.
I suspect in a future humanity such a metaphysical opening to our inner consciousness will be the norm, a spiritual opening as well, but for now it’s rare to experience even a short period of this, more common to have a smaller opening, where things like lucid dreams and OBE’s happen a couple of times a week, using those two inner experiences because they are now the most talked about net-wise, interest in sleep paralysis notwithstanding, but even this more common smaller opening is not yet common in humanity.
If you find yourself experiencing such an opening, large or small, and many are today, though not enough to light an inner revolution in humanity, not even enough to make the nightly news, you have a rare opportunity to experience firsthand what most everyone else does secondhand. You can know and not only believe that consciousness transcends material process, a knowledge that can transform your life if you understand what it means. To see it firsthand, however, involves conscious inner exploration, which is more than awakening within dream and trying some technique like looking at your hands or some trick to manipulate the dream more. In other articles, such as “The Epic of Man”[i] and “You’re like Wow, That Really Was Enchanted With a Rock”,[ii] I try and give a sense of what inner exploration is and where it can lead to in relation to its transcendence over material process. Here my direction isn’t towards the outer world or inner worlds but inside to the well of soul, our center.
The following inner journey took place around 1989 when I was 28 I believe, some months after the spiritual experience I mention above, before the net I might add, and before I aligned myself with any spiritual tradition or teachers, when I was exploring on my own and not a part of any group involved with spirituality or dreaming. It took place over the course of a week.
It’s night, and I’m alone on the football field I played on in junior high school, and I become lucid. Since I have an avid practice in waking life of meditation and pranayama, I decide to try it in dream, and so I begin to sit down in a meditative posture, but as I do a monster jumps at me out of nowhere, it’s eyes wide gyros spinning madly. It scares the hell out of me, and I wake myself up.
During the next day I got the suspicion that the monster was trying to prevent me from meditating, and so I resolve in my next lucid dream to follow through with it no matter what I may encounter to try and prevent me. I was just exploring dream and didn’t even have a destination in mind, at this point just trying to find doorways of dream to go deeper.
I’m in a huge motor pool, in a part of it where there aren’t many vehicles parked, and I see in the distance the buildings of the motor pool change colors, one color just following another, and the anomaly triggers lucidity, as an anomaly in dream often can. I remember my intention and sit down to meditate, but as I do I hear a blaring horn and seeing coming directly at me a mac truck. I settle into my resolve not to be scared out of the sitting and continue to settle into meditating. When the truck gets to me, up until that point being everything that looks and sounds real enough to run me over, it vanishes, doing that over me, its form rapidly turning into nothing as my eyes close and I see nothing. Instead of going into another dream or waking up in my bed as often happens when a dream goes blank, I remain in the blank but have a sense of falling. This blank falling state I’ve known many times, since it so often occurs in transitions from one dream to another or to waking consciousness. The difference here is that I see I can stay there, am not being captured by another dream image or by waking. I remain in that falling place for perhaps a minute or more, and then I open my eyes and am awake in bed, the falling state itself being so close to waking all you have to do is open your eyes.
I thought about that falling place for a couple of days or so, during which time I encountered a phrase in an English translation (prose) of Hesiod’s Theogony that speaks of a hammer that takes nine days to reach Tartarus, and while I didn’t believe that falling place I had found led to Tartarus, I believed Hesiod talks about inner journeys in-between the lines sometimes, using symbol imagery to describe it. The phrase led me to the idea that the falling place led to a destination, but what that was I had no earthly idea. I made the determination next time I became lucid in dream to get into and remain in that falling place until I arrived somewhere.
I don’t remember the context of the dream the next time I was lucid within one, only that I get into the falling place via meditation and remain there, knowing if I just open my eyes I’m awake in bed. Something happens to my sense of time, and I don’t how long I’ve been falling in that blank space. I almost reflexively open my eyes, and become cross with myself for not continuing onward. I decide next time to count as I travel in that blankness.
The next lucid dream, which doesn’t happen that same night but does the next night, I again get into the falling place and began counting the seconds like I learned to do out loud parachuting out of aircraft in the army, counting then to only 4 seconds until the chute opened, or was supposed to. I count to know how long I’m falling, but here the counting goes on and on, and again I lose the sense of time, losing count as well, and, though I resist the strong sense to open my eyes, I cannot shake the growing sense of terror that’s welling up inside me, like I’m falling into a bottomless pit from which I shall never again return. Then I hear both my mother and sister as though they’re standing over me, pleading with me in voices I know are their most fearful and most sincere, to open my eyes because I’m being tricked, and I’m in the hospital in a coma. The sense is that if I don’t listen to them I will never return to them, or the outer world either for that matter. It so happens that my greatest attachments at that time are my mom and sister, and my greatest fear is going into a coma during inner exploration, not to some never ending dream-state experience but to a blank alone like this darkness. I open my eyes and am not in the hospital in a coma but am simply awake in bed, nobody there but me. I see quickly that I’ve been fooled and resolve next time to go all the way until I get there, still not knowing where there is but more assured it’s somewhere significant because something very smart is trying to keep me from getting there.
Whether it’s the next night I fall again I’m not sure, but it’s very soon after the above dream, though it’s not exactly a dream but inner travel, and I don’t remember the process of becoming lucid or getting into the falling state, only that I’m there and determined to go all the way. I lose sense of time again, but there is no welling terror, or any real fear, and no intelligence trying to stop me. I have no idea how long I fall, but it’s a long time to my notion of time. Suddenly with a great shock I arrive somewhere. It’s like I’m immersed in a limitless ocean of a whole other order of existence, one formless save for identical small objects sparsely floating around that appear somewhat like half-notes or arches, and though they appear to be objects, I feel them as beings. Outer space would be a way to give some picture of what this ocean is like, but there are no celestial bodies or blackness, though it is dim. It’s lit but with a different kind of light than we know here, giving the space a glow that’s now glowing in me, and I feel the warmest and safest I’ve ever felt, and this place is so familiar to me, like I’ve been here many times but only have forgotten about it. An immense force is rushing through me, and I feel its intense vibration in every part of me, but it’s so comfortable I only want to bask in it. It seems there’s a sound to the place, which I feel in me as well as without, but it’s not sound as we know it that you hear with your ears. It’s like the sound silence would make if it made any sound if that makes any sense. I see myself floating towards one of the little arches, and I unwillingly go through it, hoping I don’t harm it by doing that, but I see it on the other side of me unchanged. Then, as abruptly as I found myself there, I find myself out, and I come awake in my bed and marvel at how I could come up immediately from such a deep place, although I am still glowing from its warmth and power.
This experience did not change my life, was only significant in that I knew I’d reached some place of spirit in me because the experience there was so different than anything else I’d ever experienced in existence, making spirit the only word that fit. At the time I didn’t think of it as the soul or its well within us, was not at the time even considering the soul as something that existed in us a destination I might explore. That interpretation was to come years later when I read both my teachers, the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, describe the journey down to our soul center as a journey downwards through a long, dark tunnel and as a journey very difficult, and very rare, to accomplish. This is that journey in my own personal terms, an inner journey that has come to be more important and singular to the results of my inner exploration over the course of time, not because my teachers have said such and such, but because it was the moment when my conscious connected with my soul, and that’s revealed itself to be its importance, and that in itself, the strengthening of that soul connection, or really what you’re doing, surfacing the soul, has been and continues to be a journey much like this one to the well of soul, which took stages, days, to complete, wasn’t somewhere I got to in one go, was somewhere I had to overcome my greatest attachments and greatest fears to get to, where there was something[iii] very intelligent that knew me like a book, something hostile and tricky (a hostile being, a demon in common parlance, attached to my life), trying to stop me from going to, which was a destination where I went out of this material existence into another kind of being, into Spirit.
What put this experience, and others I was to have that followed, into a context of finding of the soul is, as I’ve described, the teachings of Mother and Sri Aurobindo, which I was to encounter and immerse myself in, starting on a visit to Auroville, India, in 1995. And I’m not speaking of just the writings and talks they’ve left behind, but of inner contact with them and with my soul (or psychic being, who they point you to more than they point to themselves as your guide) when I’m speaking of their help in putting this inner journey into a context of a stage in the journey of finding the soul, help I’m getting in the writing of this article[iv], which has gone through a major rewrite based on their criticisms of the first draft, which had to do with, among other things, not clouding this journey over with descriptions here of experiences that didn’t happen during it but relate to it, things I’ve written about elsewhere or will write at some point.
In an earlier article, one actually published and not just posted on my blog, I describe other experiences in relation to the soul and put the above journey in the cosmology of the Supramental Yoga and as well the cosmology of science if it would ever consent to see beyond the material envelope and the cosmos, but the article’s not just a regurgitation of their teachings. It’s based on descriptions of personal experience that confirm, for me at least, the yoga’s cosmology.[v]
If in this inner journey I describe I did indeed reach my soul center, I by no means experienced its full scope and depth, and I imagine we can go much deeper into it than I did in that very brief baptism. It’s the way with me; I get a taste usually and not a full course dinner. Be that as it may, I didn’t go anywhere anyone else can’t if they have the inner opening to make such journeys, and not everyone does, probably not even most. Though we all have the right to be treated as human beings equally, we are not equal in everything, especially in the most essential thing, which is the development of our soul, and we are all at a different stages of soul development, something too personal and ineffable to set as any standard whereby someone with a more developed soul would be considered more important or superior than someone with a less developed soul or would be treated better or even afforded more respect. These are things of soul, not ego. It depends on how developed your soul is, your psychic being, as to whether you have an opening of the inner consciousness to make such journeys as I describe. If you don’t, you probably aren’t too interested in making them anyway, since your soul isn’t at that place of contact with your surface self, your ego, and pushing you to.
I will speculate though, whether your soul’s nudging you some from behind the veil or not, whether your psychic being is mature enough to do that, that you’ve made this inner journey many, many times, especially when you were a child, make it now though more rarely, but have no recollection of it at all. It’s difficult enough just to remember our nightly dreams. How much more so what we experience in dreamless sleep. You’ve made the journey when you wake up feeling like you slept like a log, like you’ve been replenished, like you had your batteries recharged. It would stand to reason that, if it’s true we are souls that have put on this material envelope akin to the way a deep sea diver dons a diving suit, or however you want to look at it, we’d need to come up to the surface every so often to get more air and sustenance, what we do when we go down into our center, the well of soul.
When you make journey consciously, however, you connect your conscious with the inmost deeps, make the hard link whereby your soul can come out more from behind the curtain of thoughts and dreams and be your guide on the way. On the way to God the soul would say.
[iii] I had met this ‘personal’ demon some weeks before, not its true form but one it wore in its manipulations of me as a small child. That experience I describe in an article posted on our blog: https://harms-end.com/2015/11/19/breaking-silence/ I’ll only mention here that it was on that first visit to Auroville that I met its true form, a story I have yet to write.
[iv] Writing this I was reading Notes on the Way, a compilation of talks by Mother. Though perhaps only a disciple would see this as a synchronicity, I feel it’s no accident I read the following immediately after making the revisions: “The other day when Z read to me his article, it was neutral (vague gesture at mid-height), all the while neutral, than all of a sudden, a spark of Ananada; it was this which made me appreciate it.” It might add to the possibility of synchronicity if I said that Douglas had just bought me the book that morning in our weekly sitting at their Samadhi. Notes on the Way, courtesy of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1980, 2002.
He broke down and cried.
When I was theirs.
Do you have any idea what this does to you?
Couldn’t get me enough.
Perfection
in the skills necessary to be with children
terrible.
Take some in my mouth and go.
Whatever else I am, in my origin in the outer world I’m a Duke. Whenever I see that name on something or somewhere, I know to pay attention because of a line of muse some years back, “Wherever you see Duke, the heart there will it be.” My family broke my heart, gave me years of emotional pain. For 15 years I cried in dream, and, though it’s been a long time since I have, I did this morning as I awoke from a dream about my Uncle Jerry, the one who had to field the phone call making me an outcast where I was cut off like a cancer and never spoken to again by all but three people not in my immediate family. Now no one in my family will have anything to do with me, but that’s changing, as I’ve made contact again because I’m sending this article to them. I don’t know the reception I’ll get. The net has changed so many things, particularly morality, and particularly when it comes to minor attracted people. The social stigma was bad before, but my immediate family would talk to me at least. Now, I’m ignored by almost anyone in the whole wide world that knows my sexuality save Douglas, my blogging and Facebook partner – the friend of a lifetime.
It was working through that heart pain my family gave me that I learned it could be done in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, where you’re aware of yourself where you lay, and the space or room is only slightly different from waking reality, and you’re in vision. With me it’s usually in the mornings I find myself there, every so often, coming up from a night’s dreaming, a station right before waking up fully: hypnopompia. I either lay there and experience electrocutions streaming through my subtle body, which gives you a life-force charge that lasts for days, or I take the opportunity to let out heart pain, just wail or cry like a baby. It allows for its expression, out-gassing I call it, on the inside where it better helps to work it out, as visions often accompany it showing you the heart of the matter. When you let it out on the outside, while that’s needed too, you weaken yourself and indulge the vital. When you’re not doing sadhana that’s not a big problem, but when you are it can be.
I was 26 and in my junior year at the University of Houston (1987), and I went to visit my father’s family for the weekend, who lived on a small 200 acre farm north of Houston, around 4 miles from the small town of Jewett, Texas. My grandparents had 6 kids, and at one time or another all 6 have lived in homes and trailer houses scattered on the property, which was field and forest, like a family clan, poor working class people for the most part, but now things have changed and some have moved up the social ladder. When I lived among them in the late 1960’s, my grandfather, the farmer, was still farming.
He had first used mules to plow until he got a small John Deere tractor, and he put out a cash crop every year, wheat I think, and he usually had a side crop of corn or potatoes and had a herd of cattle he tended. He was a very hardworking man, could not stop working even when he got old. He died building a fence for some neighbor, what he did along with chopping cords of firewood for a living when he’d stopped farming. We kids occasionally worked in the fields too to bring a crop in, worked often in our little garden plot in front of the trailer, except in winter of course. It was me dug the near quarter mile trench through the woods to our hand dug well, what we had until we got one dug near the house by professionals. My dad was also hardworking and wanted me to be the same, but I’m more a writer than a working man, more a story than work with my hands. He marked off a few yards a day I had to do when I got home from school before I could play, nothing too much really, but if I didn’t finish I got a whipping (if I couldn’t remember the name of a tree he’d showed me I got one too, got a lot of whippings). I also got up at dawn every morning to feed horses and farm animals.
I’d lived there for a couple of years as a boy, from 9-11, because my father wanted me to live with him, and marrying and moving to the farm was a way to get my mother to agree (they were divorced, and I lived in Houston suburbs with her and my sister Gwen, a momma’s boy hook, line, and sinker) and to teach me the old ways as he called them, clearing land from the forest and home setting, though after living in an old school bus and homemade camper we got a trailer house, didn’t build a house, only added a big wooden room to it. My dad was not a hippie but a red neck, didn’t smoke grass but drank home-made beer (it was a dry country), but this was in the 60’s when a lot of people were going back to the land.
That experience, though I had a mean step-mother and yes two step-sisters, and I had to roam the forest alone when my dad wasn’t home or she’d tear into me if I were even in earshot, was probably what brought me to deep thought and God, as that’s what I did as I roamed pining over my mother like a lost puppy: explored the forest and thought about God, not Jesus because I wanted to go directly to the source. My thoughts had more to do with asking him if I could live with my mom, but the nature of God, what must he be, came up naturally again and again.
The Dukes are a proud upright family, and because we lived literally on the other side of the railroad tracks among the poor blacks (whom my dad referred to with a racial slur) and what’s called white trash, my dad talked a lot about how we were better than most of the other families that had places scattered up and down that dirt road that since has been paved. The difference was the Duke family pride he said. Our places were clean and tidy, our men not known for causing trouble, but working hard to support their families (my dad and uncles were welders and worked building an electricity plant some 80 miles from home) and our women known for faithfully doing their duties as wives and mothers.
My step-mother, on the other hand, was an outsider, and there came a time when her abuse of me became known, but then quickly forgotten. She did, however, take very good care of us working as she did, as all the women did, under harsh conditions, doing all the cleaning, cooking, and shopping. It was just she hated me. To give a picture of that, she got me out of bed for school oftentimes by saying, “Get up you little bastard it’s time for school,” a couple of times yanking me up by the hair of my head. I remember her favorite saying to me, “I know you like a book. You’re no good and your father’s no good.” I say that to my dogs a lot, in jest when I’m petting them, with minor variations like, “your dog father that is, (because I’m their daddy), but the pain is still there behind the words, and I say them to remind myself of her abuse because, though for a moment the way she treated me got out, later I was called an actor and a liar because the abuse was just so horrible, and no one in a proud family wants to admit things like that happen. Even my mom denied it, and I understand why; people just don’t want to see what they allow happen to their most dear loved ones. Ruth, however, my step-mother, remembers I’m sure. She’s never admitted to it.
I saw in a lucid dream in my travels as an adult that she hated me because I’d hurt her terribly in a past life, which brings up all kinds of questions about the soul and what it may or may not carry from life to life. I can’t answer those questions yet. In the dream, as I sat on the foot of a bed right next to her, her fuming with hatred and me able to actually feel love and understanding for her, that past life presented it before me in a flash, but I wasn’t able to grab a hold of it and see what I’d done to her to warrant such hatred and abuse. Suffice it to say she isn’t an evil woman, if anyone’s evil. Evil I think comes from outside of us, or, more correctly, hostile beings that whisper and push us from inside. My dad had made her send her son (my age) to his father in Georgia so I’d be the only son, and when you add that with the past life and those harsh conditions in them “damn woods,” you have a recipe for abusing your step-child so cruelly.
The sex with kids disorder didn’t come from the Duke side but from my mom, and I relate on my personal blog in various places her sexual abuse of me when I was an infant and toddler, not old enough to remember and only able to find out by her telling me and it coming up in dream, how it most often is in the making of a pedophile – you can’t remember because you were too young to post memories. Post 9, “Make Peace With the World”, gives the details you probably want to know. The Dukes did not touch their kids inappropriately, not at least my dad, uncles, aunts, and grandparents, one reason probably they had such an extreme reaction to me, but there’s more to the story than that, deeper hidden truth.
I do remember my Uncle Bobby, married to my dad’s sister, really liked kids and played with us a lot, but he never did anything to me or to my close cousins, that I heard about anyway. I only knew him as a kind uncle. It happened many years after this present story that my Aunt Sonia walked in on him sexually abusing their 5-year-old grandson, and she called the police and pressed charges, and Uncle Bobby died in prison within 6 months. We all knew it was from a broken heart, but by that time I’d already been made an outcast and heard about it from a distance. That physical distance didn’t matter, as I was still part of the family and felt its sorrows as my own. Although no one said it, said instead calling the cops was bad decision because of all the boy had to go through, it was pretty obvious his death of a heart attack pained them all and was probably the bigger reason Aunt Sonia, his wife, said it was a big mistake to involve the police, a point on which the rest agreed, because it was hard on the boy though, not his heartbreaking death, but I heard the story from a distance, and only knew what my grandmother was telling my sister Gwen about what everyone was saying. In any event, that no one, that I heard about anyway, expressed sadness at his tragedy had to do I imagine with they just didn’t want to concede they even cared. Such is the attitude of the general public with pedophiles, and that was almost 30 years ago. Now most people would celebrate his death.
So often, as in this case, the black sheep of the family carries its unconscious process, as the following prophetic dreams demonstrate. The first one I realate in an article in Pages of my personal blog called “The Epic of Man”, where I experience my grandfather’s death inside of him in some sort of spontaneous inner-body time-travel a couple of weeks before it happened. The second one happened right before my MeMaw died of a heart attack, the same thing that killed my Pepal, I met my Aunt Jackie, the oldest of the siblings, David’s mother, who appears a little later on, in a lucid dream where she tells me of my grandmother’s coming death from one. The Dukes don’t know of these things because I was only able to tell my father, and besides him not believing me, my name was not mentioned in the family circle and probably still isn’t. In such a position you wonder if you’re even remembered.
Apart from my immediate family, and my MeMaw, Aunt Sonia, and my cousin Rex, no one in the family had spoken to me (before she died and before my aunt knew about her husband) since the incident I’m about to relate. About three years after it my grandmother was in the hospital with a slightly broken neck, attended to by her daughter my aunt and her daughters, and it happened to be within walking distance from my apartment. My MeMaw had told my dad she really wanted to see me, which filled me with both joy and trepidation. I visited her with my heart in my hands but had decided not to be selfish and bring up my stuff, and I didn’t even tell her I didn’t do it, and to tell her that was screaming inside me, but I was a Duke, and Dukes consider themselves to be noble.
Though it’s another digression, it does bear on the story. Some months after she died, in a lucid dream, MeMaw was sitting next to me in my mom’s house, my mom across the room looking on in approval, and MeMaw looked very tenderly on me and exposed a breast and I suckled on it. Interpreting the dream, I thought she was accepting me back into the family fold, but nothing changed in outer reality with the family, and so she was just working through her personal stuff on the other side and had gotten to the wrong done to me, because, though she had wanted to see me when she was in Houston when weakened from her car accident, she’d been quite vocal, according to my sister, about blaming me for what happened with David Wayne, a 4-year-old, my second cousin and David’s little boy, who I was wrongly accused of fondling.
Many think this universe is based on morality, the fight between good and evil, and that when you die you get punished for the bad you’ve done and rewarded for the good. It’s not. It’s based on oneness. How you’ve treated others does bear on your afterlife journey, but it’s not reward and punishment you get but whatever you need to get to get you to accept the people you’ve rejected, which is doing them harm, whoever they are and whatever they’ve done, and when you outright harm someone you’ve rejected them on a fundamental level because you’ve violated the principle of oneness and haven’t treated your neighbor as yourself. So what you get appears to be punishment, but that’s not it exactly. If you are more accepting of others you simply advance faster, quite a reward, since that’s what we’re here for, to evolve oneness, the ground of God, and things get nicer for you as you know in your mind, heart, hands and mouth you share identity with everybody and everything, nicer in the very ground of your being where it counts. If you have inner peace what happens on your outside isn’t even a thing. Not many see what that shift in perspective from morality to oneness brings. They’ll be many meeting me on the other side. I’ve been rejected by so very many people, all the world.
Okay daddy, [Lydia’s voice, my grown (20) unofficially adopted daughter, Tamil]
just come along here.
That story’s painful
about the Dukes.
I’m just cryin’
and smokin’ cigarettes.
Tragedy
does that to you.
I want off the hook.
He didn’t do it.
The heart it’s been a long, long, long time. [sung, my voice, my Rainbow song]
Abusing your step-child –
step-children,
they need some help,
and this story can help you.
It’s quite a simple but sad story, especially for the boy, David Wayne, who has to carry this story around with him whether anyone speaks of it or not, and it didn’t even happen. My Uncle Jerry, whom I called to return his earlier call when I wasn’t home, the Monday after my return to Houston, spoke to me in a way I’d not ever heard him speak before, with a mean sneer, the way people talk to whom they consider vile and depraved, a lecherous beast. He said that they figured I must’ve taken him behind a car and put my hand down his pants because everyone was watching me every minute, but that’s not true, not only that I didn’t fondle him, but that I hadn’t been alone with him. I had been, when he came into the room I was sleeping in, I having spent the night with David, a favorite cousin of mine, the boy’s father. Ironically, I was sleeping in the same kind of custom room attached to a trailer house that I lived in when I lived in those woods. But that’s not the only irony. On the land lived the Dukes, Suggs (Uncle Bobby’s family) and Kings, and David was a King. There was often some kind of feud between the families, the Dukes and Kings especially, as the Dukes owned the land. The Dukes were proud, but the Suggs and Kings were more down to earth, another irony, if you pay attention to the meaning of the names Duke and King. Sometimes it’s just really clear a story’s to be told because it’s representative of a lot of family stories. Irony usually tells the tale.
What happened was this. The little boy cried as soon as I drove away the Sunday night I left, and my younger cousin Karryn, her older brother Eddie, Uncle Jerry and Aunt Sherry’s kids, and another person I don’t remember, immediately asked him if I touched him, and for some reason he said yes. The only thing I could think of that would make him say yes was the following story, but it would bear mentioning that I’d been good to that boy, had given him good attention, and a minor attracted person knows how to do that, and he was sad to see me go because I imagine he didn’t get much focused attention, not the kind I gave him, with no anger, boredom or distraction. His parents had met in the state mental hospital, and they had their own issues to deal with, though he was well cared for. He was just starving for attention, and I gave it. Though I was good with him, I was quite attracted to the little boy, him being quite young for my tastes though (9-11 was my bag, the age I lived in those woods, and it should be easy to put two and two together). I was proud of myself not giving him a slight of hand feel over his trousers or even looking at his stuff. For a brief moment it had given me confidence that I could always do that, and I was starving for that kind of attention too, but from the other end, and so we met one another’s needs, why, like I said, the kid cried when I left.
What might’ve given him some sexual impression was spying on me as I put my pants on in the room I’d slept in, where there wasn’t a door but a curtain that separated it from the hallway of the trailer. I always slept naked back then, and being alone in the room I did so that night too. The little boy came into the room early that morning and woke me up, asking me to read him a story, a children’s book about Robin Hood, and he wasn’t expected because of the situation, and it greatly surprised me, but I wanted to read him the story. I sent him out to ask his mother if that was okay, and when he left, knowing he’d be coming back and might be sitting in the bed with me, I got up and put my pants on. I wasn’t wearing underwear much back then either. I noticed movement in the curtained doorway, and he twisted himself around so I could see him, he wearing that grin toddlers get when they see your privates. I just pulled my pants up, not taking the opportunity that had presented itself, ignoring his devilish little smile, brushing aside his natural curiosity, and reading him the story, careful to continue to be upright with him, a control I’d put on myself in my visits there: not to even look at a kid’s stuff much less touch it, not even in play and tickling over the pants, what’s not hard to do even if you’re being watched by a hundred people.
When I told my uncle over the phone that he’d come to where I was sleeping and asked to be read a story, and I’d had him ask his mother, he said I was lying because they’d questioned her, and she said I’d not been alone with him at all while in the house. She really went off about the ‘molestation’ I heard later from Gwen, and there’s something up with that, some power or attention she wanted, what false accusations usually boil down to, but I never got to talk to her, never got to talk to anyone or give my side of the story but my cousin Rex King, David’s older brother. He saw me on a motorcycle in Pasadena, near Houston, and gave me that big smile of his I knew him for, as he’s a gentle soul, and he invited me to come with his family to a pizza parlor he was going to. After sitting with he and his wife and kids a moment, I asked him to go to the bathroom with me, and there among the urinals and stalls, one occupied by someone quiet as a mouse listening to a secret, I asked him if he could somehow help me let people know I didn’t do it. Though his actions were extraordinary under the circumstances, he didn’t want to help.
I did ask in that phone call to my uncle what David was saying about it, and Uncle Jerry said he wasn’t saying anything, and that’s big of him in light of the story David told me, in graphic detail some years before this incident, when he was about 17, about how he’d been spending the night at Uncle Jerry’s house with Jerry Lloyd, my best cousin and David’s, and he raped Karryn, Jerry Lloyd’s little sister, then 11. He did have problems controlling his impulses, especially sexual ones, though he wasn’t attracted to children (Karen had just bloomed). He said he wasn’t violent and didn’t hold her down or anything, though she did make it clear she didn’t want him to do it. She was probably scared and didn’t know what to do. He told me the next morning all she’d said was not to put his thing in her again, but I’ve known Karryn since she was born, was a kid with her when she was a kid, and if she said that, she was dead serious because she had had a little trouble saying no to people and standing up for herself, but she never was a pushover that I saw. Knowing these things, maybe you can see why she immediately asked David Wayne if I’d touched his stuff, and so I don’t blame her for fielding that situation wrongly. He also said later Uncle Jerry gave a snide remark as he passed by about people that screwed little girls, indicating that he knew about it, but other than that no one said anything to him, much less throw him out of the family. It’s a story I only heard from David, not from anyone else, and back then David was mentally ill. That story happened on Rock Hill, the only hill on the whole property, the title of this story, where Uncle Jerry had built his house.
The family had Uncle Jerry field that phone call because I usually visited his family when I came, was closest to them, since birth, and they had always invited me back. In fact, he’d told me as I left the last time, the weekend before, that I was welcome at his house and with him no matter what. I learned then that when someone tells you something like that they really mean the opposite, and so you have to beware, though with him there was sincerity there too. It was just hard for him because everyone was blaming him for what happened, as if he were responsible. It probably didn’t even cross his mind I didn’t do it. Everyone was suspicious of me because, some years earlier, my dad had gone to my uncle and cried on his shoulder because he had a pedophile for a son, saying that I’d done such and such to his younger son, my half-brother, and my uncle told this person, and they told that person, and so on, and so that’s why the first thing they asked David Wayne was did I ‘touch’ him, why they said they were all watching me.
I see now my uncle was torn over me, whether to care for me like an uncle should his nephew or reject me because of my sexuality, because I ‘played nasty’ a lot with Jerry Lloyd and Eddie when we were little, with Jerry Lloyd because we were 5 weeks apart in age, and he was my first friend and closest playmate during my infancy and toddler years, when my mom was sexually abusing me, Eddie because he followed us everywhere, into that too. My muse told me a long time ago that “what goes into a family starts to manifest.” Although it was speaking of religious intolerance, it holds true for sexual activity too, for most things you put in families. I simply did with him what my mom was doing with me, mainly falacio. My uncle really had an aversion to homosexuality, and he didn’t differentiate between boys doing it and men. He hated gay sex so much he threw up after a gay man left his house that had visited his wife, my Aunt Sherry, her brother I think. My Aunt Sherry, it bears mentioning, was the was the only adult that actually witnessed my step-mother Ruth’s abuse of me.
I’ll never forget that. I was out in front of the trailer playing with toy cars in the sand, happy that I didn’t have to spend the day in the woods alone because my Aunt Sherry was there, and Ruth started in on me, knowing I was out front playing. Whenever she knew I was in earshot, whatever she was doing in the trailer, she’d bad mouth me from one end of the trailer to another something fierce, a continual stream of cuss words and insults. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. I sat up happy because I knew now people would believe me, but to my utter horror she joined in, and my little boy world came crashing down inside my heart, and I told myself I was a good boy, trying not to think about how I liked to play nasty, and I just sat in that dirt and tried not to cry, but I’m crying now.
I’d always known Aunt Sherry as nice, motherly even, and, briefly as a young man, as a close friend that liked, like me, to talk about God, only then I was an atheist, and she felt it her duty to bring me back into the fold. She was a religious Christian. I had and still have deep feelings for her because my mom and her were best friends when I and Jerry Lloyd, her oldest son, were toddlers, and they did shopping together, baby sat each other’s babies, and so this was out of character for her. I never have been able to figure it out, but it was one of the biggest betrayals of my childhood. The biggest was my mom and dad pulling me off my mother in front of that trailer house, me kicking and screaming holding onto her for dear life, when I was forced to stay in those woods with my dad and Ruth. I was 9. One reason my mom gave into that, the main reason in my little boy’s mind, was that my dad had told her I played nasty and had put another little boy’s penis in my mouth, and so I needed a man’s guidance. They didn’t know they were cementing my sexuality into place, because they didn’t know what a child’s understanding does with such guilt-implanting reasons. We are so ignorant when it comes to the important things.
We’re especially ignorant of our journey after death, or even that we have one. Through dream and muse I watching my mom on her journey, her travel through the vital plane letting go of this life. It’s not such a nice journey because she has a lot to let go of, a lot of baggage, especially right after she died when she was in danger of becoming a ghost,[i] but as she worked through things she would speak a line or two in my muse from time to time, but I was angry at her, not really about the abuse (I more or less understood that), but because she also wouldn’t have much to do with me either in her last years, would talk to me like I was disgusting, the word she used in our last conversation, over the phone (the phone fields so much of our stuff). When she finally arrived somewhere she could talk to me at length, I heard her voice begin what I thought would be her finally just coming out and admitting she really messed me up, but I just ignored her, rolled over and went to sleep. That was almost 4 years ago, and I still don’t know what she wanted to tell me, but it may not have been an expression of remorse. I don’ t know. Though she’d admitted to the abuse many years before she died, she had said, insisted, it wasn’t sexual, and she really believed that. If she still does maybe the other side is much different than we think, much more individually oriented, and it can take a very long time to work things out.
My Aunt Sherry’s excuse for not only not stopping Ruth from tearing into on me but also for tearing into me herself, what told me she remembered that and had given it some thought and didn’t like her actions, was what she’d told me a week before the incident this story’s about, not long before Uncle Jerry told me I was always welcome at his house. She said I was a mean little boy, said it in that way shared secrets are being brought up. It’s not a twinkle in the eye. It’s vulnerability visible, despite the person trying to hide their shame and pain. I just looked at her wanting for all the world to really bring up her joining Ruth in abusing me. I didn’t for the same reason I didn’t with my MeMaw, because I didn’t want to be selfish, Both her and my Uncle Jerry were really making an effort to make me feel welcome, trying to treat me like their own son, and in light of what everyone knew about me that was exceptional of them. She said that after just handing me gas money to get back to Houston. The very next weekend the incident happened that didn’t happen, and so I imagine both feel betrayed by me. If families can just talk about what can’t be mentioned because it’s so bad or painful, the very things families need to talk about, we would have a much better world.
It’s a dream that led to the writing of this story, and I hope you can see that, far from being random firings from the subconscious processing our outer life mainstream science says our dreams are, dreams heal us and guide us if we but let them. Upon awakening my muse took it up, gave the lines that begin this article, saying it was needed. Now, upon finishing it, though I had my doubts in the beginning, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt it’s needed, even if it might hurt some feelings. I’m not trying to get revenge, or even so much getting heard or spoken to, as much as I’m following the will of my soul and God and meeting a soul need, for everybody: telling this tragic tale.
I’m at a gas station with some friends, and it’s Christmas time. I’ve been invited to my friends’ house for Christmas dinner, they being Christians and me American (the dream takes place in India), and both in the dream and in waking life I hadn’t been invited to the last year’s Christmas dinner, and there was some doubt if I were really invited this year or not. We’re traveling to the dinner. My dad’s there too, speaking to me but only to remind me why Uncle Jerry won’t talk to me.
I might interrupt the dream to explain that in waking reality my dad stopped speaking to me 4 or 5 years ago soon after he snail mailed me here in India a book about Hell, and I emailed him back saying heretical things about how Jesus was a bastard child, and that he didn’t die for the sins of the word, how that was made up by his disciples because they couldn’t make sense out of his dying like a common criminal, and how he suffered so in life because of his mother’s sexual sin, having sex out of wedlock as a young teen, why he had so much compassion and understanding for sinners, and why he called himself the son of God even and wanted people to accept him, but he did birth the divine human in himself and is therefore an example, name, and conscious power for that selfsame. I wasn’t able to tell him all that before he stopped replying to my emails, but he got the gist of where I was going. That was the end of our outer relationship, as it stands now. My dad’s a fundamentalist Christian, but I’m sure his turning his back to me has more to do with being a minor attracted person, the worst sinner in the whole wide world if you want to swallow that. He thinks I came to India to have sex with children. No, whatever I might’ve done or not done, I came here to follow my soul, find God, and be near the samadhi (tomb) and epicenter of the influence of my teachers the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, to do yoga, and I think maybe by now you can see that. The dream continues:
In the dream Uncle Jerry’s with my dad, but he’s not even looking at me much less speaking. As I go to leave by myself on a motorcycle, it turns into a small train, the kind you find in parks and places, but this one has no walls or sides. I’m going very slowly past everyone sitting along a wall, and as I pass my uncle I tap him on the arm, saying, purposely not calling him uncle because he’s not being a good one, “I’ll see you in heaven Jerry. You’ll talk to me one day. You will.”
When you touch a person in dream that means something, a stronger kind of communication, one that’s likely to manifest in waking reality, as this dream has. It’s probable he’ll read this, as it’s an explosive story, like much of my material, hits nails on the head that need hitting, and so that dream might manifest before we meet in heaven, (heaven here symbolic for ‘the other side), meaning he’ll speak to me again. I hope so. I love the man, love all of them, but I had to realize the feeling’s not mutual, that each is wrapped up in the cares of concerns of their immediate family, and I’m more or less an outsider and have been since I left the property as a boy, although I didn’t see myself as one until I was outcast. I’ve had to try and close the heart wound, and so my reason tells me these things. Maybe inside their hearts it’s another matter, but I don’t know. All I know is the Dukes need this story, even if they don’t know it, as it’s affecting them from this distance, is still just as fresh as it was when it happened, since the past is all around us, touching us, moving us, not the dead and buried thing we think it is.
There’s something you need to know, all of you, the whole human race. I didn’t even try to be good with children for many years after that, and I know that must sound awful to you, but that’s what happened. We aren’t the creatures capable of complete control like we think we are, especially with sexual impulses, something so close to our identity. If we have a problem controlling them we need help to do so, and that help has more to do with being given love and support than being watched and having people afraid we’re going to something you can’t even talk about.
Any pedophile needs to be supervised around kids, to what degree depending on the pedophile, and in the context of an integral soul healing, there needs to be time for only the soul to be the supervisor, else integral healing doesn’t happen, only a limited healing based on being supervised. In some cases, with virtuous pedophiles, ones who don’t sexually abuse kids, supervision just means the people around you need to be heads up, not watching you every minute, but people around you do need to know, and I’ve learned that through bitter experience. But here’s the difficulty. Most anybody that knows will treat you like a depraved person not in control of themselves, since that’s the attitude regarding minor attracted people whether you abuse kids or not. You have to be in a supportive environment, and a family can provide that if they really do love you. People don’t understand the impossible position we’re in, one reason I’m showing that. What’s most important about any kind of supervision is that you’re not watched with any fear or ill will. That greatly intensifies desire to do the very thing people fear you will do and hate you for doing. I’m talking about even virtuous pedophiles like me that have worked through their disorder to the point we no longer desire to be around children.
The question is: do children need to be around us? The answer depends on the individual situation and can’t be ruled, what the rule of law just can’t account for: differences in individual circumstances, what integral healing can and does allow for, but that, I can’t say enough, is a totally different way of doing things, dependent on the finding of the soul, something generally unknown today even in the Integral Yoga I’m a student of, given its moral reaction to me, save for close disciples such as Nolini Gupta, who has left his body but is still, along with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, incredibly and magically active teaching the yoga the meaning and process of integrality, its application in the field especially, where people most fail to apply it, though they go on and on about it in theory and ideal.
With a little observation you can tell the difference between pedophiles, those that seek contact with children and/or sex and those that don’t. The ones that don’t do not arrange to be around kids (when the kids are immediate or close family obviously there will be arrangements made, but within the context of the care of the kids), don’t touch them other than the necessary physical contact needed to care for kids, aren’t nervous or antsy when around them, a state similar to a low degree of mania. In mania, as most any shrink can tell you, anti-social impulses can much more easily rise up from the subconscious and manifest as outer action. We’re still in the dark ages when it comes to this subject and don’t know much about it other than we hate and fear the pedophile. I’ve read it’s not being studied a lot because even many if not most therapists and scientists have an aversion to pedophiles.
We don’t know it yet because it’s still considered a religious or spiritual notion and not the very fabric of reality, but we are not only connected to one another in millions of ways on the outside but also on the inside too, share thoughts and feelings like waves moving among us, and that’s because, as I’ve said, we share identity, are indeed one, a unity. When you put fear and ill will into the equation of dealing with and supervising minor attracted people you put desire into them, because we pick hatred and ill will up as that, and oftentimes, when combined with the minor attracted person’s own desire coming from themselves, it tips the scales, and the pedophile can’t handle it, and they have sex with a child (this is true of all crime). When that’s cultural-wide you have the kind of problem with sexual child abuse that’s coming to light by the self-righteous and hyper-moral eye of the internet, the kind of eye that helps to cause the abuse in the first place.
Here’s another useful piece of information: fear and ill will are in their more dressed up clothes judging and self-righteousness, blaming and moral indignation. It’s out of control, and it’s not only the authorities making it so, but you too if you fear us and send us ill will, judge and look down upon us as one would a monster or sub-human, or even as an evil bad person. You have to love us, support us, or you’ll have millions of children sexually abused, and the numbers will grow and grow, and it won’t stop until you do. I need your help, and you need mine.
I understand we’re probably hundreds of years if not thousands of years away from realizing these things, given the current situation of a morality becoming intolerant of being human (though grace is among us speeding things up), and someone has to stand up and say these things now that we still have a somewhat free net. It most likely won’t be free too much longer, and so I’m standing up and saying what we all need to hear before it’s too late, and I’m not the only one, not by far, but remember, “wherever you see Duke, the heart there will it be.”
The stigmatized phenomenon of hearing voices and seeing things, what you’ve heard in this article and might not understand what I’m talking about, though in my case it’s on the inside, an inner seeing and not an outer, is considered a manifestation of mental illness by most western peoples, and maybe oftentimes it is, if your voices are telling you to do anti-social things. With me the voices and visions are healing me, leading me to the path of goodness.
Though I no longer desire to be around children, I still have that basic raw attraction as a sleeping complex in my subconscious, that can, you need to know, rise up like a cyclone without warning in the most squared away virtuous pedophiles until such time as, in this present life, I’m enlightened, what our yoga calls the spiritual transformation, where you no longer have desires or subconscious complexes. I live in semi-seclusion in a house of young adults, and seldom am in the company of children. Whether I’m around them or not I’m supervised 24 hours a day, am under supervision now, since even as I write this inner voice and vision speaks to me if I say something wrong, but not in every instance, gives me the right word if I’m stuck, or suggests words and phrases I haven’t even thought about. It’s semi-constant, and it’s there anytime I rest or lay back inside myself even a little, which takes some getting used to and a very different mind-set than the norm.
Right by the restroom
tells yah
not ready for relaxed supervision.
I’m comfortable
I got it all under control.
That should warn you they shouldn’t be alone with kids.
There’s no formula,
hello?
I’m sorry. I’m sorry indicates
Basically I can climb a tree.
Basically,
whoever wants to be alone with a child
isn’t ready.
Basically,
who’s ever ready
doesn’t like kids,
doesn’t
want to stay in their company
any longer than they have to.
That’s the field test.
It’s pretty simple.
See what I mean Vern?
My soul is no stranger to being the outcast, and, in a story I relate in an article about lucid dreaming on the blog I share with Douglas, “And I had Two Lightning Bolts”, in my last life I was a black man in the old South that could really pick the guitar, and my family and I were killed by the KKK because I’d been warned not to play in white establishments, and I ignored that warning. The dream ended as a little short that often ends powerful and meaningful dreams, a little dream shift at that end that captures the whole dream in a concise symbol story. It ended with his story getting out, in the form of his guitar becoming electrified by him hooking into a lay line along a ridge, and his music resounding through the whole valley. Being a soul that carries such process, one of the scapegoat, the ‘other’, I’m confident I won’t be killed this time, though some anxiety is there, especially as I so boldly post these stories, taking little regard to my safety.
Look at Jesus. Maybe he didn’t think it would happen to him either. One of the most powerful dreams of my life, a lucid dream, one I’ve yet to relate anywhere in writing, is of Jesus on the cross giving me just a tiny little sliver of it, and when it hit my hand it weighed a ton, and I heard a great dream crack and fell deep down into a dark abyss that had yawned under me, and then I awoke. The dream tells me that I’m carrying just a little of what he carried, a process of sexual sin, though with me it’s a cross of pedophilia, and with him it was being an illegitimate male child at a time and in a culture that didn’t tolerate that. That loud ‘dream crack’ is so characteristic of dream when it wants to really emphasis something. Falling into that abyss, well, I would hope that represents falling into my disorder as much and as deeply as I did and not having to suffer cruelty at the hands of the authorities, but you just never know.
It’s a great risk I’m taking speaking with such candor, and I come to you not only with my heart in my hands but have put my own head on the chopping block and exposed my neck, about the most stupid thing someone in my shoes can do, because any instance of sexual child abuse is sniffed out, and the person’s hounded into prison like a Nazi war criminal (and who’s to say they deserve such vengeance upon them?).[ii] We do this because we don’t quite fully grasp that morality isn’t a fixed formula running through time but one that changes, evolves, and what might’ve been against the law 20 or 30 years ago before the advent of the internet, something you didn’t take as incredibly seriously as you do today with that net (in the context of the culture and its time, not to say that’s right today or the right thing to do under any circumstances), where even a 14-year-old getting their privates touched is considered almost as bad as murder, the fondling of a small child worse, should be looked at through that time lens. In other words it should be understood that the wrongdoers were operating from within their cultural context, and it’s neither fair nor right to hold them to the moral standards of today, which, as I’ve suggested, are so out of control with the advent of the net and all the bringing to light of our garbage that that entails, being human itself is becoming wrong, and the true road of becoming right with your society is illegal, since the rule of law and its broad generalizations can’t allow for and follow integral healing, healing by the power and direction of the soul. There doesn’t seem to be any understanding that the internet is significantly changing human morality, and not, at this finger-pointing initial stage, for the better but for the worse, to the detriment of human society, however much it betters us in other ways.
If the universe, and hence the world, isn’t really based on morality, what we base human society on, and it’s indeed all about oneness, then the way we heal wouldn’t have morality, whether or not we do wrong, as it’s main criterion for judging its failure or success. When the muse first started I was asked if I wanted “a partial spiritual healing or a complete spiritual healing”, and I chose the complete, which is an integral healing: soul healing. It comes from the soul and can’t be regulated with rules and laws, and your soul is your doctor, have no outer therapist, but you have to be where you’ve found your soul, brought your conscious all the way down into the well of soul establishing that hard link to it, what I’ll explain in an article now in the works, something not known about yet in this day and time. When you have that link, you can readily hear and see the guidance your soul gives, inner voice and vision. The process, though managed and overseen by the soul, allows for soul and nature to come together for the healing to happen, and it’s movements follow the natural movement of things, and because of that right and wrong are not the most important or even all that important in certain stages of its process, though in others the would be, since the goal is not to harm, do no wrong. That’s why soul healing is unheard of in our explosively hyper-moral society. But’s not just a string of falls leading to victory either. I’ve said elsewhere that language can’t cut it here, and we can’t think about two things at the same time, and so the integral idea avoids definition. I might approach it by saying we don’t allow for mistakes, expect people to stop wrong on a dime, and if you want a complete healing that’s just not the way it works; by your mistakes you learn the ropes of stopping. It will take so very much exposure to the wisdom of this way for society to even begin to listen to this. William Blake, a poet who wrote by the muse, captures it like this: “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.”
Though it might appear just another conspiracy theory, I have it on good authority (my muse) that there’s an agenda with the pedophile,[iii] and to understand it we need to begin to understand the role of the scapegoat in human society, in its families and all its institutions. It’s a need of the human ego, though one we need to learn to live without, and governments exploit that need, especially the great technological and financially powerful nations that make up what’s called the world order, who impose the rule of law, taking advantage of their power advantage in its implementation I might add. And they do so because they have the means to exploit it and need so much to control their populations, or think they do.
Read or watch 1984 with the understanding that it’s not talking about the future as much as it’s showing the present, in an exaggerated form so we can see it, the same way dream shows us something, making it stand out by amplifying it. (The creative process that makes books and films comes, though much more indirectly, from the same creative reflex that makes dream. ) If you do you’ll see why a nation needs a scapegoat[iv], but if you want a better view of ‘modern’ society, one set far into the future so as not to even appear as the present, read the science fiction of Cordwainer Smith,[v] who heard the divine muse, wrote his poetry by it and used it as a guide for his stories like I do, getting ideas, words, phrases, and corrections. You might also be amazed you probably haven’t heard of him.
Last night and early this morning, my muse corrected this story, making sure I’m careful with everyone’s feelings, am not mean, am not trying to get revenge, telling me to be especially careful with Karryn and my Uncle Jerry, as they are honest people and only did what they could not but help to do, something I know all too well about harming other people, their bodies, their hearts. I hope, by my muse and story, that you begin to get the picture that we are loved by the divine, like little children, theirs, and the planet’s not spiraling out of control as it so pressingly appears to be doing. “But there is a guardian power, there are Hands that save, Calm eyes divine regard the human scene.”[vi]
[iv] Read the poem “The Freedom” that shows how the press shapes public opinion as it reports the news, especially in the case of minor attracted people.
Every since mainstream science has admitted the existence of lucid dreaming (as if it needed to say that for it to exist), interest in it has sky rocketed, and there are forums and groups talking about it around the net. Out of body experiences, however, science studies but doesn’t allow into its cannon. It’s considered a sort of a hallucination/dream, not an OBE, because if it were, it would cross the material line that science has drawn and would give consciousness independence from the body.
Any chat or forum about lucid dreaming will show, not only it’s closely related to OBE, but also that line, and the science-minded and the spiritual-minded are arguing over it. I’ve gone out of groups because I just don’t want to argue with the mind that uses science as its sole authority for an investigation of reality, often denying or explaining away their own personal experience so as not to be heretical to their beliefs. The spiritual-minded seems to have a tendency to the opposite, too easily accepting its personal experiences as this and that without rigorously testing the field, and so I stopped commenting in groups.
This present article on OBE, while it doesn’t give proof that I would accept as clear and certain evidence the consciousness is actually leaving the body, it’s one of the most powerful I’ve had, because of the dream experience that ends it, but it’s one of only 3 or 4 OBEs in my life where I’m out of body in outer reality without little or no dream or inner elements present, what I’d call being an independent invisible spirit in the material world.
An article I’ve posted on my personal blog, “The Epic of Man”, is one that I do take as proof I’m going out of the body and not just having a ‘strange dream’, and you would too if you have confidence I’m not lying or exaggerating, but only there time travel is involved, and it’s inner body travel, not a journey in the outer world, though it more substantially shows that the consciousness can leave the body and travel than in a regular OBE. If you chalk it up to ‘coincidence’, then you’re not only grasping at straws to keep your faith in the materialism of science intact, you’ve crossed that line where you put your beliefs over reason itself. Read it.
By Jujutacular (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia CommonsReturning to the story of this OBE, I’d gone with some friends to a state natural area in Texas called Enchanted Rock, a dome-shaped “425 foot pink granite batholith”[i] that just juts up out of the landscape almost like something from another world. Local Indians, the Tonkawa, had named it that because of a legend that a Spanish conquistador had cast a spell on it, making ghost fires glow at the top, and because they believed spirits roamed the place, and if you hear the haunting winds whistling around it, you might yourself feel that to be true. Whatever’s the case with why they named it, or the story we have today why they did, I believe the Native Americans knew the place to be a portal, a power spot on the earth where the fence of matter has a hole in it, making it possible to travel ‘elsewhere’.
I’d gone with the intention of inducing an OBE and going to the moon. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I’d had many OBEs in my life and had done some experimenting with it, and it’s only natural to want to try and leave the earth eventually, and the moon is the most obvious and natural first target to attempt to reach. I’ve heard others who have honed these skills try the same. I was sleeping with three other people in a tent in the campground of the park, near the foot of the mountain, and I awoke in cataleptic trance, or sleep paralysis as it’s known now that the state is talked about on the net, usually as something to fear and get out of as quickly as possible, because of the ominous presences often felt or seen in that state.[ii] I’ve found it to be a state, where, among other things, it’s easy to leave the body. I’ve only once been able to lay down with the intention of going into cataleptic trance so to leave the body, though many times if I awoke in the night anywhere near the state I could relax and bring on the full McCoy. What killed my mastery over inducing the state was a metaphysical accident I had a few months after this present story I’m telling; I conjured a demon and had to deal with that and learned there really were fearful things lurking in our bed sheets.[iii]
Studying ancient literature about the exploration of consciousness, what I did to get a handle on what I’d experienced with that demon and other inner experiences I was having, I found those presences that present themselves in cataleptic trance and lucid dream to be called guardians of the threshold, what you have to overcome in order to go further in your exploration, like a test you have to pass, whatever they themselves think they’re doing there, but I never have been able to get back to such mastery as to be able to lay down and induce the state. Now I’m doing sadhana, spiritual practice, and I don’t focus on ‘powers’, as they are called in yoga, and so both my experience of cataleptic trance and OBE have waned, but when it’s called for by my practice, and it seldom is, I leave my body, usually for a specific purpose.
Getting back to that enchanted rock, I had no trouble going out of my body, something you learn if you have enough practice doing it. I simply use my will and rise up out of it. I was just above my body and had a thought about seeing the tent from the outside, and suddenly I found myself well away from the tent up closer to the mountain about 20 meters above the ground. In inner exploration (though here it’s more like being on the inside in outer reality) where you put your will, which might just be thinking about something or someone, is where you will go or attempt to reach, why it takes such focus and concentration to explore consciousness. You really have to have a handle on it.
The moon was nearly full, waxing or waning I don’t remember, and I became excited when I saw that I’d done it, was a free spirit floating in the material world, what I figured I had to be in order to leave the earth. I’d tried to go just into space free of the earth in a lucid dream a couple of years before, and I realized I’d have to do it in an complete OBE. I didn’t make it then. As I got to the outer atmosphere everything disintegrated, and I awoke in my bed.
What I hadn’t yet fully grasped, though, was the threshold matter. There are thresholds other than the hostile powers, and one quite significant one is leaving the room or enclosed space you’re in. If you don’t have enough focus, grasp on your consciousness, you simply go out of there and into a lucid dream. Obviously leaving the earth is a much larger and more difficult threshold to master, and though I’ve had dreams of being in space or on the moon or Mars, I’ve yet to cross that threshold and actually leave the earth intending consciously to do so. I don’t know the difference between dreaming of that and doing that in waking reality while in the dream or inner state, such as an OBE, but I do feel there is a large or small distinction between the two, but I can’t discount the possibility of finding myself off the earth in dream and really being off it. I suspect our view of the matter is too rigid, and that there aren’t clear cut lines between the planes as we believe. Nature, whether inner or outer, doesn’t draw distinct lines between things like we do. Things often sort of blend into something else, though there are definite boundaries too.
The scene before me with that looming moon was fantastic. As a ‘spirit’, the moonlight seemed to be what the scene was about, not what was creating it but its focus. I looked around me and, to my slight disappointment, saw that there was one difference with waking reality. Though my friends in the tent were all sleeping as though the tent was there, curled around its walls, my body too, there was no tent. Other than that I was the free spirit I wanted to be. I looked up at the moon and willed myself up, going up very quickly, faster and faster, and just as had happened in that aforementioned lucid dream, as I got to the threshold of space the scene before me disintegrated, but I don’t think it was a lucid dream I found myself in but a dream experience, what in the integral yoga means you actually go somewhere in the inner fields and don’t just dream you do, intending to or not.
I found myself looking at a clearing in an old growth ancient forest, the full moon shining upon the scene illuminating it with moonlight’s coolness. I didn’t have a physical presence. Sitting in the middle of the clearing was a beautiful middle aged woman. Her hair style was quite distinctive, very intricate braiding that’s too complicated to describe, and she wore simple but adorned natural clothing. She was sitting on some sort of chair or stool I couldn’t see because all around her and on her were the animals of the forest, birds, butterflies, squirrels and things on her body like living decorations, larger animals as near to her as they could get, as it was evident they loved her and she them. The clearing was full of animals, predator and prey alike, but there was no strife. They just wanted close to her, and so did I.
She was smiling the sweetest and wisest smile I’ve ever seen, smiling at me, and with mirth sparkling in her eyes she said simply, and I remember her exact words, “You’re on the right path. Don’t turn to the right or left, and take baby steps.” Then the scene faded suddenly, and I awoke in my body inside the tent.
The path I was on, and still am, though I’m a sadhak of the Integral Yoga of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, was what I called at the time the personal growth process towards wholeness and healing, and my focus was inner exploration. It would bear mentioning that for me I didn’t take up the spiritual path for realization but for healing with an impossible disorder I relate in poems, stories, and articles on my personal blog.
In order to prepare for the moon shot, I just stopped all vital indulgences, rigidly, the vital in our yoga the life-body of the impulses, desires, emotions, and preferences, what usually in a sadhana gives the trouble, more than the mind and body, the two other instruments of the lower being. My main indulgence at that time was grass, and I’d stopped smoking it for the duration of my attempt to reach the moon.
Grass for me has been an indulgence, accelerator, and a medicine. The powerful spiritual experiences I had at the beginning of my sadhana were partly triggered by it, except the finding of the soul, where I wasn’t stoned because I was deep inside a night’s trance. I don’t call it a sleep because, though it’s the same state, there I was conscious. Lucid would neither be what I was because I was no longer in dream but had gone all the way through it via a dark ‘tunnel’ and was no longer in this universe or this type of existence but in spirit, the well of soul, a journey I took some months after this OBE. The story is in the works and will be posted on this blog upon its completion if I do actually complete it.
Lately, pot has only been an indulgence and a medicine, the latter since it stops nausea and vomiting and eases stomach pain, and I’ve have a serious mysterious stomach condition. It also helps accelerate having spiritual experiences, if you know how to use it that way, but not for a permanent realization, though anything is possible in the wide conditions we find ourselves in. I see it now more as an immaturity than as an aid. My muse said, when it first started some 15 years ago, when I was a daily pot smoker, that “pot can take over any nature there is,” and I’ve found that to be true. I guess I just have to say smoker beware; pot’s a double-edged sword.
The earth mother, whom I feel that woman was, wasn’t telling me to give up pot at that time, or anything else. She was saying something in very simple language that I can’t explain no matter how many words I use: neither denying your desires nor simply indulging them. My latest story on my personal blog, “Clambers on the Mountaintop,” about posting poems on Mt. Sinai in Egypt, goes into that idea in great detail, but, as much detail as I give, I still can’t put that idea into concrete language, but the attempt, I feel at least, is worth the read. That story takes place some years after this one, and it was the earth mother that planted the seed that had me planting poems in Jerusalem, Mt. Sinai, and the pyramids at Giza. Now those seeds and poems are flowering, and I understand what she told me, but I can’t give you that understanding. I can only tell you the story, taking my time to do that, 25 years, because the last thing she said is as important as the other two, what I needed to hear because I wanted the moon, and wanted it now. You see I didn’t get it. I may try again at some point, but when and if I do it’ll be the right time.