God as the ultimate existence that stands up creation, I would not see this as the Mother’s fancy. It was not her might. It wasn’t even what she was doin’. She was an Integral on Earth, a divine mother in human form. She was perfect and cast away all cares? What does a Mother mistake look like? It doesn’t look strong. We can pick apart her works, accept what we want, throw away the rest. No, we would not find the Mother there, but we need to know she’s strong, who made mistakes.
Who couldn’t see her mistakes, would that be a bridge too far? It’s the point of contention. It’s where we start. Now an integral arrangement sees everything in light of integrality. I will melt this understanding if I say it too quickly.
The Yoga of Integral Perfection calls for perfection before you start. Is that the gardener of the house? What does it mean be perfect in everything you do, always be perfect, never falter, never let your guard down once, and be austere always and ban pleasure from the room, all forms of pleasure, and wait for the bliss divine? I’ve paraphrased what the Mother said.
I’ve told you the truth. You can read it yourself. Do we take this and run with it? We die. It’s not possible in a human life. This is what we avoid, rigidity, a non-integral arrangement. What happened here?
The Mother spoke from her gun. She didn’t lift her voice and sing. She got carried away with the force of her words. She wanted divine perfection now. She couldn’t possibly tell us to get there that way: no flesh in the pan; put it on immediately. And yet this is what the Mother told us. It gives us scars. It makes us chew nails. It can’t be right.
We are left wonderin’ what to do, and we go to another place and she said balance your way there; don’t be moral-minded; don’t be a puritan; take it one step at a time; come to integrality slowly as fast as you can; give yourself room to breathe; it’s okay darlin’ I love you.
Can the Yoga see this, the Mother made mistakes? We would have to look at her death, months of moanin’ agony, and Pranab said she never mentioned the Work. We have to look at this. I’m sorry we have to. Was this a baseball card? No, it was her death. It happened to the Mother, and she spoke so bravely of death on so many occasions.
What happened there? All her austerities came to bear. She couldn’t lift them no more. They caught up to her, and in the end they ruled her. Do you know what she did? She kept death at bay. She actually, physically, kept death at bay, and it was her time to go. That’s what we must see, the strength of a God was in that will, but it was misplaced, misapplied, because she was there to conquer death you see.
Oh wait a minute I’m backin’ up. She was there to override death, make the physical a plaything of matter. My gun has misfired, I’m sorry. Make the physical obey the will of the Mother. In all her austerities involving matter, that was her aim.
She didn’t get that far. She came upon her consciousness and wanted done with it, and here’s where I do you business. She wanted done with the spiritual transformation before it was complete. How do I climb that mountain? Have patience with yourself my dear. How did I come to that conclusion? Evidence of the ego in Mother’s Agenda, her outbursts of anger on the floor, her impatience with herself, her still working it out in dream, her pride at being who she was. The Gods wanted her darshan she told a child once, who had angered the Mother for not waiting on her. Watch her hide her toothless grin. What do you say Donny? Mother I love you.
In his haste to put things right, make her where the Yoga stands, Sri Aurobindo overlooked these things in her, and no one could challenge him otherwise. Do you watch the Agenda? Early on is it? She tells Satprem she has gone beyond Sri Aurobindo. The exact nature of her words mean that. I think it’s the next session or shortly thereafter, she reports Sri Aurobindo with a stomachache. It’s all over his face. Now this is vision of course. What was he trying to tell her? She missed it completely. Do you see it? She hadn’t gone beyond Sri Aurobindo.
These are ugly things to look at, and we don’t want to. The Yoga of Integral Perfection bids us do. In her mistakes we are made right. We let them do what they need to do, give us some indication of the hardness of our endeavor, know that it’s not worked out yet the Yoga, and help us do it ourselves, avoiding those mistakes.
My God I’m sorry I’m showin’ this to yah. I’ve dealt with it for years. Maybe you have too? There was the Mother in books, and there was the Mother holding my hand, now my kid’s hand, sometimes very different Mothers. Can you hear this? You’d have to get concrete inner contact to see it.
I’m not down on her. She is the one I follow to make this yoga work for me. It’s her hand I hold. It’s her eyes that direct me where I’m to go. To write this poem I tried to tell her no. I don’t want to make you mad at me. Maybe we’re newfound friends? I obey the Mother, not always, not every time, but in my life she eventually gets her way. I concede.
In you’re hearin’ this poem I do. Please don’t shoot me for it. I love the Mother. I am her disciple, and I take her to heart, an integral, loving, mother that is the divine power behind this yoga, our protection, and our abide by Sri Aurobindo. Do I give you all my knowledge at once? They are one you know.
Now let’s get this beer can away from my lips. The Mother wants it so. Now every once in awhile is fine. Now here’s the deal: how do you break the rules by followin’ them? There has to be a plan, and the Mother laid this one out for me. I like beer, just a beer in the evening one or two times a week, but that would be every evening and two beers before long, and the Mother knows that. I could become an alcoholic so easily. The Mother’s told me that. Okay here it is: an austerity of every once in awhile has to be followed to the letter, and I will know what that letter is when it comes time for another beer inner contact with the Mother and sincere.
Can I get you a train? She’s here for all of us, and she’s right there with the plan for your sadhana. The divine mother she is. Expanded so after death, became that omniscient being as far as we’re concerned sadhaks of the Integral Yoga. She’s our Shakti. She’s our boss. She’s such a loving mother, incredibly above cars, and you and me are a car takin’ our yoga down the street. My job these days get that yoga goin’, by principlin’ it in myself every time I turn around, using myself as the chopping block. I try everybody. It’s not like I always succeed, but I’m the Yoga speaking about itself. Will you give me the time of day? Thank you.
The Mother waits for integral understanding, move this yoga down the road. Am I just a blight on y’all’s ears? Correction. I have the integral word. Will you hear it? You mean practice? If you could do it. Okay this is the church process. No, it’s everything that touches you throughout the day. It gets bigger you understand, a divine process. That’s an integral arrangement.
Gonna application in the very spots that give you problems, and you’ll get better at it every day, with many drawbacks, even goin’ backwards. It’s piecemeal with sudden starts into a brand new day. Ever the horizon waits for you to arrive, and another horizon comes into view, day after day after day. You just integral see you’re comin’ together on the plan, and it’s all comin’ home to yah now you get better at it.
Enjoy yourself some, yeah sure. Vital letting the hair down puts this yoga in perspective, and sometimes it’s not even wrong. I can’t rulebook. This is as plastic as infinity, and all your nature’s on the line, learnin’ how to control itself, learnin’ how to be made right, learnin’ the way to go. It doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a blind see in the very beginning, a hope and promise in the middle, a really coming unto yourself a divine keeper as you arrive. Awesome the world looks, and it’s not your master anymore.
Can I glide here? This is where every minute counts. This is where you have to do it or die. This is what you’ve all built up to, and you really pull it together here, with the Mother’s help, and it is always there, the Mother’s see.
All I know is that cat, she gets and spites you, that muse of creation, but I didn’t close this poem off to the public. This better be good. Because I struggled with the Mother in writing for years, her presentation on paper, the discrepancy between that and the Mother that was guiding me, and I’m not the only one. She’s soft and warm, but she’s fierce in her picture. She can sound so ego in the things that she said. She can sound ridiculous a time or two, like she wasn’t grounded in reality, especially near the end. Her obsession with truth for example, would if you’re hiding Jews?
Somethin’ happened to her later in life. She became obsessed with questions that body of hers could not answer. She wanted immortality that the body wrote, and she left Sri Aurobindo’s teachings, here and there, in the yelp of her cells, a sadhana so perilous, she almost lost her mind. She gave Satprem a golden key to screw up the Yoga after she died, with the transformation of the cells what the Yoga now means to so many in Auroville and around the world.
She set him up for failure, and we could not ignore him, she put so much attention into him, and we need to ignore him. He was an egoistic maniac. And what of Pranab, did you ever meet ‘im? A hateful man. The Mother chose him to be her guardian, and we’re left with his legacy today. What a hateful ashram we have. I’m dealin’ with that now. My little boy makes ‘em mad, bein' with a White man, and they’ve been mean to him. I can’t write poems there now.
Do you know what the Mother said about music? Narad was gonna bring down the new music, and he tried and tried. There was no understandin’ what the new music was, but it’s basically music played or sung to you on the inside, and you’re open to supramental life. Narad didn’t get that. He was not a vehicle to get there. Ananda Reddy was given a mandate to spread Sri Aurobindo’s gospel, make it understandable to men. He’s tried and tried. Thinks he’s done it from what I understand. He’s gotten the Yoga off track and is not open to the Mother. He hates me, and Narad won’t speak to me, ever. What do you do with that? You call it ill will.
We’re left with the Mother speaks, and that was not always correct. Can we find our way around that? I have. I’ve confronted it head on. I’ve seen behind the veil, and I understand the Mother in time. They said if you saw her you would understand. She was more than human. I’ve questioned so many people about that. Her presence caused people to wonder if not God had filled the room. Did you know she slapped a little girl across the face? I heard it from her brother himself. He witnessed it, was a kid too. She got mad at the child and hit her, and no one said a word. It was at a function and the child misbehaved, nothing major.
Was that the first time? Why did I hear about it? I would imagine you haven’t. That about wraps it up, the last image I want you to see, to understand the Mother was wrong sometimes in her earthly embodiment. A Yoga of Self-Perfection she wore she didn’t live up to, never mind the Goddess behind the frame. She told us to be perfect, and we can’t, not at least from day one. I’m finished, a poem so real on itself fulfills the time on the Earth.
Our dreams are scattered not only with the present and past, but also the future. That’s usually hard to see until the thing predicted happens, and even then you have to be able to interpret the symbols of the future in dream to see it when it does manifest. I’ve done dream work on four continents, in many different cultures and religions, and I’ve seen it over and over. In my nonfiction story “Behind the Mask Jerusalem, the Journey of a Thousand Tongues”, posted on my personal blog, I give a very clear example of a dream of the future that is cloaked in symbols, since dream is from our creative reflex and doesn’t usually say anything outright but tells a story of the story that will manifest at some point in waking reality, usually quite soon, but not always. About three weeks ago, however, I had a precognitive dream that wasn’t hidden in symbols, and though it wasn’t an exact rendition of the waking reality event, it was close enough to have no doubt it was precognitive dreaming, and even before the event occurred, I was waiting for it to happen. It did last week.
I dreamed I was in my room, and a person came in and told me someone very special to me was at the door, that they’d brought them, some close relative I hadn’t seen in a long time. I went into the living room of my apartment, which was a little different than the one in waking reality, and at the door was Midhun, my one and only yoga student, who had moved to another city about a year ago. When I saw him there was a dream shift, and the scene changed, as though the piece of ‘dream ground’ he was standing on wasn’t dream but waking reality, although there was a glow to it, and that glow was his presence, like it was actually him standing there. I was surprised to see him, and we hugged, and when we did I started to become lucid but woke up before I did.
About 2 weeks after the dream I was in my room, and someone came in and said someone had come to see me, was at the locked gate downstairs waiting to be let in, and it was Midhun, the person telling me that knowing it would be a surprise, and I’d be happy about it. I sent someone down with the key, but it took some time, and so I went out to open it myself, but there he was at my front door exactly like he’d been in the dream, and we hugged and had a short but fruitful three hour visit.
Now, I’d sent him a Facebook message a few days after my dream telling him about it. He’s in school and a teenager, and his parents don’t want him traveling here alone, why I haven’t seen him for so long. You could say my telling him the dream made him come, but he came on family business, something that happened on the spur of the moment, though he probably took the opportunity given him to come when it finally presented itself. In any event, the conscious power behind dream knew that opportunity would come, and the events of the dream itself were an obvious rendition of waking reality, making it such a clear example of the future in dream.
A dream connection like that we don’t just have with anyone. I’ve been in his dreams for the past three years, and he in mine, my muse too, and it was dream that brought him to me to begin with. For reasons I relate elsewhere, my function on the spiritual path is not to do the usual and become a teacher, and so I don’t accept students. When he showed up at my door the first time he wanted to talk to me about superpowers. He was 14. I laughed and talked to him a bit and sent him on his way. Then he returned a few days later and told me of a dream he’d had where I was his teacher. I explained again I didn’t accept students. Then he came again telling of another dream where I was his teacher, and I refused again, though I told him a couple of stories I tell the young people here, what had brought him to me to begin with since he’d heard about it. But he was persistent, and the next time he came I’d had a lucid dream about teaching him, and it’d come up in my muse, and so I agreed, but I told him I wouldn’t be his teacher, just his coach, and that the teachers would be The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, who my teachers are.
He advanced rapidly, too fast, and in a short time he was having lucid dreams and inner contact with deity, vibration in the heart and head, a little of the inner voice, and by the time he left he was having out of body experiences, but I didn’t focus him on those things. I was giving him the tools to find his soul and God. By that time he was being pulled into trance in the late mornings in school, and he was experiencing changes in his consciousness, and it scared him a little bit, and just when he learned not to be afraid, his family moved unexpectedly to another city. Obviously he needed time to assimilate all that he’d learned, and so the conscious power behind reality arranged for that to happen.
Even though I told him I would only be his coach, in practice I became his teacher, and that’s a relationship on the level of soul when it comes from within like it did with both of us, and so the connection between us in dream in very strong, as evidenced by the precognitive dream being so close to what happened in waking reality and the realness of his presence in the dream. We don’t hear about these kinds of precognitive dreams very much because the dream connection has to be quite strong, and they happen more in private I imagine, like between spiritual teachers and their students.
I will close by saying that, although for all practical purposes I’m his spiritual teacher, I’m still ‘coaching’ him to the real teachers, the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, and as for the future, I think I’ve shown that, not only the future of our relationship (that there’ll be more inner connection and outer meeting), but also that the future is here among us already if we can but see it. Dreams are the most readily available portal for that, and you’re actually seeing it often and just don’t realize it. When, however, you have a dream like I describe here, and it comes true, you begin to.
Harm's End 