I took this at the theater of Alliance Française in Pondicherry and developed it in our darkroom
An Audience Song
Poetry enhances
our little corner of life’s room.
It’s what we splash on our faces
to get the stories out.
You would contradict this song.
That’s the mystery.
And we look at an iceberg,
it roses from the ground.
Underneath it stalls in light.
A brief ocean
has rounded in our ears
the equity
of a larger see than ours.
Alimony this payment
to that stuff in us
at noontide’s sing.
I’ve rounded poetry.
You hear the contradiction?
It’s a blistery see
with what ails yah,
the exuberance
of a state of being
laughing at the stars.
It’s a transaction
between you and sight
that calls all what you don’t see
into play.
I measure my life by it
one poem at a time,
a poet in my room
attended by verse itself.
You are my audience
lines of poetry.
What people there
the contradictory note,
the flowers of which I speak.
Heard these lines via the inner voice while meditating at the Samadhi of Mother and Sri Aurobindo and smelling the incense burning there the other morning. The photo I took in our satsang room and developed in our darkroom.
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 CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.
Recently I had a line followed by a vision from my muse that I think is an example of prevision. Though as prevision usually goes, I didn’t know what it meant until after the fact. The line and vision were:
Tomorrow morning. (Vision of a group of teenage or 20 something boys throwing rocks at a building.)
A lot of times I wouldn’t have given much thought to that line and vision, but for some reason I had this feeling something was going to happen, and whatever it was, it was represented by the vision of the boys throwing the rocks at the building. What I was thinking it might mean though would be some kind of attack on our house from the outside. If you’ve read this blog you know that Donny has put some ideas out there that a lot of people would find hard to accept, and so we live with the possibility of some kind of backlash coming from that sooner or later. As it turns out the vision portended an assault on the house, but of a different kind then I was envisioning.
So the morning after the line and vision something good happened at first, and that was that our friend Midhun, who is on break from University, showed up to stay with us for a while. What’s good about this is that while Midhun is still a teenager he’s made sadhana the aim of his life. So despite his age, Donny and I regard him as a fellow sadhak and were pleased by his surprise arrival. Later on though two other boys, Asa and Sudhan, who we’ve known since we started our kids program twelve years ago, showed up unannounced as well wanting to hang out for a couple of days and play video games and otherwise indulge their vitals. I won’t go into details, but that made things a bit of a circus, one that really disturbed the house for a good part of the day. Since my return to India, Donny and I try to limit the presence of extra kids in the house since it shifts the balance of the energy in favor of the vital. Or I should say more in its favor because the vital always has the upper hand to some extent, since Donny and I are outnumbered here by people with no interest in the spiritual life.
When I told Donny the line and the vision he agreed with me that it was prevision and symbolic in the sense that, while no one literally threw stones at the house, we still had a ‘teenage boy assault’ on the house. I wasn’t able to interpret the vision or make use of it before ‘the assault’, so I’ve offered this example as another illustration of how things are arising from the inner and forecast symbolically in inner phenomenon such as dreams, visions and muse before manifesting in the outer. Though I don’t have much experience to speak of in the matter, Donny can attest to how the muse can be very specific and correct about things like who will be showing up at our house, but it’s also often the way I describe here, symbolic and the context not apparent. And sometimes, like in this case, I got the ‘what’ right (a disruption to the house), but was wrong about the ‘how’. I think though these are just points to be aware of and not get flustered about as one carries on with the yoga and learns about the workings of these things. I think what’s more important is your motivation, so what I do is try to remember to continually offer my muse and my dreams to the Mother, and ask her to use them to provide guidance and help me progress toward a change in consciousness.
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.
I’m sorry, but you’ll have to sign into Internet Archive to see this video.
This video was taken down from YouTube after 7 years up, which happened on October 31, 2022, and I’ve updated the post accordingly. I contested it, and they reviewed the video and removed the strike against me for violating their terms and policy, saying the violation wasn’t as severe as they thought. Their policy, along with that of all the major social media companies, keeps getting narrower in terms of what you can post. When I posted it the terms were more favorable to art depicting violence, if its intentions were to stop it.
Luckily, I posted this at that same time at Internet Archive, and they immediately made it so you have to sign in to view the video, and they later put it in their deemphasized collections, but it’s still up.
In a few years, the visible net will be controlled like television, and even private websites will be censored, but first it will be the big social media companies that will do it, are doing that now, and it will take longer to take down or control the the content on privately owned websites, and so we at Harm’s End are in the process of making our own website to put up our stuff, as many of our posts call for social change, and anything that truly does that is radical and would offend somebody.
Harm's End 