Category: Poetry

A Suicide Bomber’s Broken Arrow is Broken

On By Donny Lee DukeIn applied nonduality, Inner Voice and Vision, Islamic terrorism, overhead poetry, Poetry, spoken word poetry, sri aurobindo2 Comments
Genie in a Bottle by Frederico Bebber, used with permission

The world let me come to your room.
Here only:
a poet’s met greater listening.
Now what did he fish?
I’m not in your reach before.
What is the moon?
Symbol for where I am,
a light
To help you cross the night.

Silence,
death takes a terrible moment to calm down.
Now I touch you with the real.
I am a dead speaker.
The suicide bomber changes its space,
and everything right now
A story about how long it is.
Give rise to future presentations.

I cry to your hand.
Look at me.
My water, oh no,
blood red.
I’m sorry to act.
Disappointment knows no greater sum.
Give me the light
of your understanding,
and I’ll give you changed view.

The service there to act the middle road to stars,
the courage there to act.
Each man has a fear, love, dread, and pull to the extreme.
We feel ourselves so different from one another.
The problem’s building the people to be a church
so I can blow people up.
Man is a kicking gale a dozen kicking gales like him.
Can you understand why?

The small raft that conceals us all in bodily harm,
what I was to become in search of myself,
a big wall of religious separation between us,
and the grizzly bodies of adolescents to 13 men to find,
it’s not a secret the whole flesh can discover.

Death was not in my hands.
I exploded immediately.
Kill someone,
their voice right there.
We had a pay together.
It wasn’t bright and sunny.
Can we show you nonexistence?
I think I touched her.
You’ve got to fear.
Oh my God,
every finger accusingly sat at me.
This was no paradise.

There are realms in death you understand.
More order came.
I guess all went off to their private lesson.
I winked into hell.
All my mountain said no.
We lingered there.
It was my own order I made myself.
Please arrive me out of terror.

There lessons learned,
deep dark secrets you who understands.
A light found me thinking.
I grasped my neck to myself
and began to see.
I vanished hell.
On my journey I rose to you.
I’ve come up to my Faith.

As it doesn’t have one of the goals reconciliation
this is where Mohammad messed up.
The others I must also treat with light.
To grow oneself in mercy good idea.
Treat them with kid gloves even bad people.

The nature of the Prophet cannot be seen by your calculations.
It is hidden,
in a sense,
light bulb.
This sometimes assailed him,
his human.

Have to take apart anger.
I was just mad at you.
Through so much deception and web
the heartbreak was crouched around a day of killing,
terror hush, terror deep.

Tearin’ a hole in the fabric
of what death open
I am the author of a little child of the Furies,
a fierce cartoon within the page of my own age.
Every word easing the spear.
Not a secret a baby can tell.
Muslim doesn’t even talk about Muslim.
God is the veil at which he lowers his eyes.

Adam used to tell his name
unto his soul.
Let me release an air of sin
this cell from within,
right where they told me to explode.
It’s time for them to know:
all the way they cut truly in to a child’s deep identity.
Behind me the spear gave lesson.
I was sleeping –
families’ dinosaur.

There are some things that result in our hatred.
These things are ugly on us.
If you can tell the victim in the victimizer
stop the hatred.
That’s the first thing the very first.
No one else can listen.
No one else has ears.
The best place the time would be now,
to bring us into the 21st century.
The future writes this very slowly.
It’s now on the city conscience of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the United States.

In my last post, “To View the Hunting Design of Mourning”, I examined dreams of the suicide bomber of the Brussels Metro that seemed to show a contact with the heaven of Islam that gave him a divine sanction to carry out his mission. Over the course of years, I’ve had a contact with that heaven that’s of a very different nature, one not from Allah or angels but from a dead suicide bomber. It’s in the form of a poem in which he’s the speaker, and so it’s his words filtered through my creative reflex, put in my language and style of poetry, one which continued to develop over the course of time it took to complete the poem. I haven’t received it out of the blue, just because I had an inner opening that could receive it, nor because I was some good person chosen to show his bad. Whatever we hear or see in vision in regards to other people has a bearing on our own lives, is something we need to see and hear so to become better people ourselves, that someone else a mirror we’re looking into to help us change. This is true for both (inspired) poets and prophets, something neither they nor the people that quote them seem to understand.

The first lines of the poem came among the first lines I received once my muse turned on like a flood, which was in South America in September 2001, and it took me awhile to see the bomber’s voice out of all the muse I was getting. By the time I got to Paris, several months later, I did recognize that distinct voice and organized the scattered lines into a poem, and more lines came, and this earlier form was submitted to and rejected by The Atlantic and Poetry. My muse edited it after, adding more verses and individual lines, and I continued to work on it slightly until I posted it on my personal blog in 2015, after submitting it a few more places. The majority of the poem, however, the core, came in those few months after 9/11, as did many lines about Islamic extremism, mixed in with lines about the world harm I have caused, all of which I included in a prose/poetry manuscript I wrote for The Atlantic (never submitted) on the island of Crete in 2002 called “Civilization and the Art of Terror” or “The Inspired Word”, which will remain unpublished, though it’s a source of organized muse I draw from from time to time.

Last week, as I was meditating at the Samadhi of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, I heard the lines “That’s got my name on it. / Perfect,” and then I saw a light blue curtain blowing slightly, and then I saw the face of Sri Aurobindo, the age he was in the last photos taken of him, the outline of his face highlighted, and he was right in front of me looking directly at me. I was then told to wait before boosting the poem, to do some purification first, told in lines of muse, the vision of his face having faded. At the time I interpreted that to say the poem would be seen as something he’s behind because I’m his disciple and because of what I’ve written about inner contact with both he and Mother in regards to my poetry and writing in general. Although the muse said “perfect”, it said it a little while after hearing the first line, enough time to make me realize I didn’t want to drag his name through the mud, since I’m considered the worst kind of person on the planet, a minor attracted person. I sat there afterwards and let that sink in. It took the ego out of it, and I’m sitting here now not wanting to be in the shoes I am, but I think I understand.

Do you? Maybe it’s the bad man that can truly show us human evil and how really to end harm, rather than who we normally think can, a good person’s that been burned by bad. To see what I’m saying you’d have to understand higher than good and evil and more integrally than there’s this bad person harming society, understanding that for us to climb out of our wrong we need the goodwill of a good number of people because it’s not something we can do all on our own, why, when it’s all said and done, this suicide bomber’s speaking and why I am. To speak in the terms of the spiritual path that I follow, you’d have to understand something of the great difference between the Supermind and Overmind, the very different ways from each other in which their processes work, to see why someone such as myself would be perfect to post what I’m posting as an outgrowth of my sadhana in the Integral Yoga.

Who this suicide bomber is and what bombing he’s talking about I don’t know, but there are vague references that would seem to indicate the attack happened in Israel and killed mostly young people. He describes an after death process that would take a long time by our reckoning, but heaven can open windows on time we cannot, and so this could be what to us would be a voice from the future. It’s important to understand this is a single bomber speaking, with all the things personal to him that would entail, and so each suicide bomber would have a different story of why they became one as much as their general fate in the afterlife would be along the same lines as the one speaking in the poem.

This poem needs to get into the right hands, and as of yet it’s not gotten into even a handful of hands, other than the editors who’ve rejected it and a few other people, and so I pick it up again and try its hand here. Does anyone out there have ears? If you do, please share this poem. Its license is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.

A Film Camera For Mugu

On By Douglas M.In Inner Voice and Vision, overhead poetry, PoetryLeave a comment

About nine months ago or so I was still living in the USA and corresponding via email with Donny about one of our young people at Harm’s End, Mugu, who is 17. The issue was Mugu had dropped out of the class he was taking to prepare him for what in India is known as the 10th Standard examination. It’s the equivalent of a high school diploma in the USA, and is a difficult exam requiring a long preparation, and Mugu didn’t have either the initiative or the discipline for it.

So we were wondering what to do with Mugu, and I brought up as I had in the past that Mugu seemed to have a thing for photography. Rather than putting him in some kind of class, Donny put forth the idea of getting him a film camera and teaching him film photography. My response was that nobody uses film cameras anymore, and that they’re a major expense compared to a digital camera, which, after the initial investment in the equipment itself, can take thousands and thousands of pictures. So I basically vetoed the idea, and as I would find out later Donny was actually okay with that. He thought a nice digital camera would be fine as well.

Then nothing happened for a while after that. I didn’t bring it up again because even though I was okay with a digital camera, I’m a cheapskate, and it would be a big chunk of change for a good digital camera with multiple lenses. I also know how irresponsible Mugu is, and was worried about the camera being lost or stolen. Then Donny brought up the film camera again, and again I argued against it. So he sent me a formation he had gotten from his muse on that matter, one that he felt had come from our teacher, the Mother, which said:

A digital camera
not the appliance he needs.
A professional camera
with lenses
develops his creativity.

Don’t mix tobacco in it.
A digital camera,
there’s a
camera
ain’t a camera
his art would say,
his art,
not mine, yours
or ours —
his camera.

 A boy and his needs.
He needs a camera
just to help him
become a good man.
Become a good man,
that’s our field.
Creativity lost his show
there’s no camera.
Digital not included.1

Now as clear as that was I still wasn’t ready to give up my position on the matter, mainly I think at this point because I didn’t want to be wrong, nor to be overruled by someone’s else’s guidance. My vital also has some problems with jealousy over the fact that I can’t get a formation like that from my muse, can only get some lines here and there or small groups of lines, and that also made the whole thing hard to swallow. So I continued to argue, pointing out that what might be spent on film alone over the course of a year would buy a very nice digital camera with multiple lenses. So Donny sent me another formation that had come a while before but that he hadn’t shared with me. This one said:

Professionality
a camera,
a camera
professionality.
Digital camera
is the wrong lens.
Now get it
Like you’re supposed to
a lens camera.
Douglas don’t want to buy the camera,
Don’t want to
Because it doesn’t make sense
to his practical
intelligence.

 Creativity deserves a chance.
You’re not thinking how involved he’ll be
with a professional camera.
A great occupation
color
photography.
Develop sway talent.

Would you listen?
Douglas has his own opinion.
How are we doing today?
Develop his own opinion.
That’s roll call,
Orange wares. 

Grand market
shopping
must be in town.
Oh it is.
Professional camera
with lens,
telephoto one,
wide angle,
and the one you use mostly. 

A lot of creativity
has room to play.
Amsterdam
doesn’t take him home.
Creativity rules.
What do we do for money?
Trust sweetheart,
just trust
and work.
There’s sadhana.2

Well after reading that I gave in, though the vital didn’t like it at all. By that point I was planning to come to India, but I wasn’t sure when, so Donny and I started looking online for a used film camera in India rather than waiting for me to buy one in the USA and bring it when I came. The search proved much more difficult than either of us were expecting and when we finally ordered a camera we didn’t read the fine print in the listing on ebay.in, and got one that was sold “as is”, and was basically broken. At this point I thought I could ask my mom if I could have my grandfather’s Canon AE-1, which had been sitting in my dad’s closet unused for years, to give to Mugu, and she said I could. So when I came to India back in December I brought that camera with me.

Then we ran into more obstacles. Both Donny and I had assumed that in a country as large as India there would be websites where you could easily buy the chemicals and darkroom equipment, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. You could find things scattered around on amazon.in and ebay.in but a lot of it seemed to be coming from the USA. So we went to a website in the USA, and could find everything we needed, but the shipping was almost as much as the cost of the chemicals and equipment. We had decided to just eat the cost, but then it occurred to me to call Auroville and try to find out if anyone there had a dark room, and knew how to order the supplies in India. From Auroville I got the name of an American man, John, who has lived in Pondicherry for many years, and was formerly an inmate of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. I gave John a call and he invited Donny and I over to his house where we had a long talk, and he also gave us the name of man in Mumbai who could supply us with everything we needed. The way it all wonderfully worked out was just more confirmation for us that we were indeed doing the right thing with the film photography.

So we got all the chemicals and equipment to start Mugu with black and white photography. All that remained was a dark room, which is almost completed. Once it is John has offered to come over and give us some pointers from his long experience with film photography. There’s every reason to hope this will be a very positive thing for Mugu, and give him a much needed focus and creative outlet, one that will help him, if Donny’s muse is correct, to be a better man.

Notes

  1. Copyright Donny Duke
  2. Ibid.

I Want Struggles To Be Light

On By Douglas M.In Inner Voice and Vision, PoetryLeave a comment

A few days ago this line from the muse came to me in the morning.

I want struggles to be light.

You can definitely play around with multiple interpretations of a line like this because of the different meanings for the word ‘light’. One interpretation jumps out right away if you take ‘light’ in the sense of something being not heavy or not dark in color. Read this way the line is saying that I want a lighter load of struggles.  There’s no doubt I feel that way often, and I’m sure most people reading this can relate to that sentiment. Another idea though along these lines has to do with my belief that what really makes struggles and pain so dark and heavy is this consciousness we live in which is a state of identification with this mind and body. But as many spiritual teachers have said throughout the ages, if you can enter into a consciousness where you’re identified with the divine, or oneness or whatever you want to call it then you realize that this mind and body isn’t you, is more like a shirt you’ve put on, and you don’t take what happens to them so seriously anymore. Then, even though life’s challenges are still there, they’ve lost their heaviness, and you no longer suffer from them. You deal with them from a state of Light or Knowledge and not a state of Ignorance.  Hand in hand with that idea is a complementary take on the line where ‘light’ means spiritual illumination. This gives the sense to me of struggles being spiritually illumined and transmuted.

Another interpretation that occurred to me takes ‘light’ in the sense of a ‘means of igniting something’ as in “Hey buddy, you got a light?”. It’s a less obvious reading of the line and one that probably wouldn’t have occurred to me if I hadn’t been thinking a lot about something I’d read in the Mother’s Questions and Answers a few days before. I’ll share the quote first before I get into the interpretation.

Quite naturally we ask ourselves what this secret is, towards which pain leads us. For a superficial and imperfect understanding, one could believe that it is pain which the soul is seeking. Nothing of the kind. The very nature of the soul is divine Delight, constant, unvarying, unconditioned, ecstatic; but it is true that if one can face suffering with courage, endurance, an unshakable faith in the divine Grace, if one can, instead of shunning suffering when it comes, enter into it with this will, this aspiration to go through it and find the luminous truth, the unvarying delight which is at the core of all things, the door of pain is often more direct, more immediate than that of satisfaction or contentment.1

So like the Mother says here I think the line could be interpreted in the sense of changing my attitude so that struggles and pain become more a means of advancing on the spiritual path, more a means of igniting my aspiration to go through them in order to reach that ‘unvarying delight’ than something that holds me back when I have  resistance to the pain or depression about the pain. Backing up this idea, I feel, is an experience I had with Medhanada’s Eternity Game two nights before I received this line and a few hours after I’d read the above quote from the Mother. That quote is part of a longer passage where she says a number of things one of which is “When pain comes, it comes to teach us something.”2 As I’ve mentioned in other blog posts, probably my biggest difficulty is contending with the constant chronic pain in my back and knees. So that night after reading the Mother’s words I asked the Eternity Game, “What’s the purpose of this pain?” The card I drew was ‘Dwarf’.

Europe 1997.3 25

In the Eternity Game this card represents the mental being, and as you can see its aspects are ‘Quest’, ‘Next Step’ and ‘Intelligence’. Medhananda gives detailed commentary on all the cards in the game, but he also gives short one sentence descriptions.  The short one he gives for the ‘Dwarf’ card is ‘advance, take the next step.’3 I took this as confirmation that I have to try and take the mental attitude the Mother recommends towards the pain so it becomes more a means of progress. I should point out that for me the fact that my reading of the  Mother’s words was followed by synchronicities with both the Eternity Game and my own inner guidance in just a matter of a few days stresses the need for this change in attitude. It’s not easy to do, and to truly surrender this pain is something I’ve been aspiring for for a while. Hopefully this will help me to take the ‘next step’ with that.

So that’s my take on things. Please feel free to share other ideas in the comments!

References

  1. Questions and Answers 1957-1958  by the Mother pg 41
  2. Ibid pg 42
  3. The Eternity Game by Medhananda pg 133

 

 

A Buddhist Couplet 2

On By Douglas M.In Inspirational Quotes, Poetry, spiritualityLeave a comment

Right now you are identifying.

Switch the master appearance.

A Buddhist Couplet

On By Douglas M.In Inspirational Quotes, PoetryLeave a comment

Strangeness to be nothing

Is to be all that is.

 

For Janet

On By Douglas M.In Inspirational Quotes, Poetry2 Comments

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This morning my friend Janet’s long ordeal with cancer finally came to an end.  The last time I saw her a few days ago in hospice I read her a passage from Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri about the soul.  I share it here as a tribute to her but also for the benefit of the reader.  It’s long but well worth the time to read.

A being stood immortal in transience,

Deathless dallying with momentary things,

In whose wide eyes of tranquil happiness

Which pity and sorrow could not abrogate

Infinity turned its gaze on finite shapes:

Observer of the silent steps of the hours,

Eternity upheld the minute’s acts

And the passing scenes of the Everlasting’s play.

In the mystery of its selecting will,

In the Divine Comedy a participant,

The Spirit’s conscious representative,

God’s delegate in our humanity,

Comrade of the universe, the Transcendent’s ray,

She had come into the mortal body’s room

To play at ball with Time and Circumstance.

A joy in the world her master movement here,

The passion of the game lighted her eyes:

A smile on her lips welcomed earth’s bliss and grief,

A laugh was her return to pleasure and pain.

All things she saw as a masquerade of Truth

Disguised in the costumes of Ignorance,

Crossing the years to immortality;

All she could front with the strong spirit’s peace.

But since she knows the toil of mind and life

As a mother feels and shares her children’s lives,

She puts forth a small portion of herself,

A being no bigger than the thumb of man

Into a hidden region of the heart

To face the pang and to forget the bliss,

To share the suffering and endure earth’s wounds

And labour mid the labour of the stars.

This in us laughs and weeps, suffers the stroke,

Exults in victory, struggles for the crown;

Identified with the mind and body and life,

It takes on itself their anguish and defeat,

Bleeds with Fate’s whips and hangs upon the cross,

Yet is the unwounded and immortal self

Supporting the actor in the human scene.

Through this she sends us her glory and her powers,

Pushes to wisdom’s heights, through misery’s gulfs;

She gives us strength to do our daily task

And sympathy that partakes of others’ grief

And the little strength we have to help our race,

We who must fill the role of the universe

Acting itself out in a slight human shape

And on our shoulders carry the struggling world.

This is in us the godhead small and marred;

In this human portion of divinity

She seats the greatness of the Soul in Time

To uplift from light to light, from power to power,

Till on a heavenly peak it stands, a king.

In body weak, in its heart an invincible might,

It climbs stumbling, held up by an unseen hand,

A toiling spirit in a mortal shape.

Here in this chamber of flame and light they met;

They looked upon each other, knew themselves,

The secret deity and its human part,

The calm immortal and the struggling soul.

Then with a magic transformation’s speed

They rushed into each other and grew one.

From Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri pgs 526-527

 

And I Suppose a Rose

On By Donny Lee DukeIn hypnagogic state, Inner Voice and Vision, Poetry, spirituality, yogic tranceLeave a comment 
Full Moon Meditation by H. Kopp-Delaney (CC BY-ND 2.0)Full Moon Meditation by H. Kopp-Delaney (CC BY-ND 2.0)

As a young teen, I would often hear, right at the stage of falling asleep, what I called ‘reading the book’, someone speaking spiritual philosophy deep inside my head. I never could remember a word the next morning.

After getting a rather poetic education, majoring in English and learning to translate Classical Greek verse into English verse, and a period of travel after college, mostly as a vagabond, in one instance posting my poems on holy sites in the old city of Jerusalem and other places East, a woman who had a writer’s cabin in the hills around Ashland, Oregon gave me the cabin for a whole winter, 5 months, so I’d have a place to live because I was homeless (normally it was a 6 week stay, given as a fellowship).

After 3 months of relative isolation, snowed in some, in twilight, that place of falling asleep, only here I think it was waking up, I heard these lines:

And I suppose a rose knows well
All the glory a man might.

I took those beginning lines and made a poem out of them, thinking that’s what many poets do and just don’t say anything. I had no idea your muse, what I call it, not hearing things, could give you a whole poem and edit it while you’re ‘listening’ it and after. It took another few years before I heard more lines, which was in Cuzco, Peru, about 15 years ago, but the flood started in Brazil a few months later, and it’s continued to this day.

There’ll come a day when floods.

Almost anytime I sit or lie back inside myself, if it’s long enough to get behind the waking mind and into ‘twilight’, I just automatically start hearing and seeing muse, and only sometimes it’s a poem; most of the time it’s a host of things: personal guidance, remote viewing, subconscious stuff, the imitation vision, the outright hostile vision, and I can continue some, only with me whatever I hear is always in poetic form, though only rarely is that at or near poetic quality.

Another time I might show the visual aspect of the muse. Now I’ll end this post introducing my voices with a recent short poem completely from the muse (it’s on one of our blogs at: The Chipmunk Press Vol. 3 Issue 5

Original Sin

In a sunny corner of remote earth
The bite of it all
Challenged orthodoxy.
This was in Nature’s plan.
Green-gold it moved.
This conducted harmony
Operating on discords –
Not a packaged plan,
Neither from the stars.
It brought in cities beyond the universe.
We bask in its revelry –
A riot of God
On lone isles of trust.
Wonderful it wore shoes.
Naked impulse did not light its lamp.
A renegade
It brought all to bear on noontide.
Light held its room.
“Yes,” we sing in darkness’ lair.
“We deliver anthems
Without knowing on which we rest.
It came to us unclothed,
And we saw nought but sin.”
What distance orthodoxy
From all that abounds in this place.

Lucid Quest for the Light, a video

On By Donny Lee DukeIn Dreams, Inner Voice and Vision, Poetry, Reviews, Synchronicity, video artLeave a comment

I saw this on a Lucid Dreaming closed group page I follow, and over 12,000 people are in it, and so it’s a fast feed. Coming at me are ideas, images, and videos that run the gambit if something’s worth my time or not, and so I have to be very choosy or I waste my time, which I have to add isn’t so bad because it’s good to see all the degrees of quality, from bad to worse. While there is a lot of ‘good stuff’, and things I just need to see, else I wouldn’t follow the group, much of the material and media coming down the page is either ads (disguised as a person; I do it too) or rough drafts to say it kindly.

A difficulty in detecting things of quality is that things are coming down the pike very quickly, and you only have a second or so to recognize quality work, and that kind of work by its very nature takes more than a second or two to appraise. In fact a lot of the time it’s even jarring and disjointed, or too obtuse, the first couple of three times you see it.

You have to give it more than a chance, and so, it’s not possible to always or even often actually spend you time on what’s worth your time, since something worth it also taxes you at the same time, taxes you with your focused attention, and you don’t give that freely. It’s the dilemma of art in a digital medium, a dilemma of us all.

This video by Paul W. Coca is art, maybe not Michael Angelo or immortal, but it crosses that indefinable line that makes a work art. I didn’t see it the first time, only saw a good video, but after living with it some, and especially after Douglas liked it (I admit it I’m herd sour), I see what I’d like to share with others because it will enrich them.

Donny

Have You Seen the World?

On By Donny Lee DukeIn Poetry, video artLeave a comment

This is a video poem, a poem whose lines are set to clips from other videos and from film. It’s about seeing ourselves more as a world than a nation or people, an idea that is right on the horizon of humanity, close enough to be what we talk about. Here, it’s spoken if I might call it that, meaning it’s put in poetry, not the kind you grew up with I’m sure, but the kind that something as multidimensional as the web makes possible, and you just have to see the poem to hear it.

I should mention this is an abridged form of the much longer poem, and you can read and listen to it at:

Have You Seen the World? (The Chipmunk Press) Our other blog.

Donny