I am down on Main Street just by bein’ there. I’m everybody’s special mission. Ah, I’m studying the ways of the world, the field of mankind. I have the Earth in view. I see what I’m sayin’. Do you see it?
My poetry put you in barns. No, it’s not clipped prose. It’s symbol wrought. I speak from vision’s lair. You see the symbol on it and the all-managing meaning. What does a barn mean? You got animals in there, and it’s where you were raised if you can’t polite society, or if you don’t know what it means to be human. Am I calling you names?
Well let’s get there, to where I wanna take you, and it’s not the hatred bunch. I sit in your smile and sing. It’s got symbol on it. I sit in your animal and sing. We are all rough wars. We’ve got some things to learn about each other. Can you see the writing on the wall? We would celebrate that Hebrew saying. It shows us so much.
We are not kind to each other. World Kindness Day has an explosion test. This guy went off on me, and my kid just stepped on a red carpet. He was livid with hatred. I didn’t understand it. I thought I’d done something wrong. You know how kids are, they play. He stepped on a standing iron that meant nothing.
It didn’t make any harm. He was dancin’ into the ashram on his feet. No he wasn’t making swirls. He just got in there in kid shoes. A little pole he stepped on its base. You know the kind with tape between them to guide people in? I’m describin’ the action so you can see the picture: nothing happened.
The thing didn’t get injured, and it didn’t make any noise. The man jumped up, sittin’ there right past the gate, and started tellin’ somebody they were out of line. There was no line of people there. He was just talking to my kid, ignoring me, purposefully. Now who is he talking to I thought at first. The man showed me what my kid had done, like he’d entered Auschwitz a Nazi protector, like my kid had really done something wrong.
He demonstrated the action, stepped on the thing. I couldn’t believe it. I was surprised. Without saying anything, wanting to get to that Samadhi so me and my kid could learn the school of the Samadhi that day, its lesson, I half-turned and gestured a mock surprise, then bellowed my arms and changed my face a mine of that boy being guilty of grave concerns, but I was laughin’ about it in my eyes and face it was so trivial in nature the boy’s infraction. It was such a good performance.
The man did not appreciate the performance. He got mad as hell. I think I said first “He’s a child.” He made the Shh! gesture to his lips like he was shooting me. It hurt. That really isn’t the quiet area. The way he thrust his face forward and danced on his feet, I saw the problem, racial hatred. They don’t like foreigners in that ashram, though they’ll pretend to if they like your name, and my kid’s Tamil. That Indian was not. Wow, the can of worms we can open here. The Sri Aurobindo Ashram hates Tamils. No, but they look down their nose at them.
I tried to give him my name but he refused it, trying to be kind and not answer the reaction that was bubblin’ in me. He didn’t give me a chance to do the yoga. That man called another man, a passer by, Tamil if I’m figurin’ right, to enforce this prejudice against Tamils, but all he knew he hated foreigners too. You get that in India a lot.
There was a dance, as the rude individual safeguarding Nazi ways showed the other what the boy had done by doin’ it himself. If it was really wrong then why’d he keep doin’ it? Well the Tamil man hated me too. Why you’d ask, because the boy had done something wrong? I asked both if they were concentrating on the yoga. Those fingers to their lips stabbed me in my heart. I called out their hatred. I felt as though if I said another word they’d call the police. I just had to say it: the Mother is watching you know, and there I joined my boy on the steps. They gave off a noise with their postures and facial expressions that showed I had really messed up.
I walked away. Nithish was almost in tears. I could see the pain in his eyes. He was hurt. He wanted to go immediately, leave the ashram. No, we do our Samdhi today, and I glowed with him as our foreheads came to that special place, where we meet our masters and put their energy in our papers.
On the way out I stopped, right there in the gate, turned and faced the man and said good morning. I wanted him to see me. I had wanted to take his picture, but convinced myself no, cameras aren’t allowed. So I stood there, my camera’s eyes. He looked at me and put his hand on his heart, like he was the most gentil human being, and said good morning too.
I wondered over the proximities of human behavior. What mules we are. I could’ve done better, but how about you, do you see the writing on this poem? This is typical ashram behavior with guests. What can we do about it? We can write poems and show the world.
Two nights ago I had this dream about my guitar teacher Tom:
I’m at Tom’s guitar studio and outside in the parking lot there’s a KKK rally happening. Tom is putting on a KKK robe because he wants them to think he’s one of them in order to avoid any trouble. Then Tom and I go and sit outside to practice guitar, and a black man comes up and asks Tom if he can go in the studio to use the bathroom. Tom tells the guy no and points out the klanners and says “Can’t you see who’s here?” Tom’s worried the klanners will give him problems if he lets the guy use the bathroom. The black man just walks in anyway though, uses the bathroom and leaves without incident.
When I told Tom about the dream he laughed and said that was really funny because just the other day he’d told a friend of his he was going to get a Bass Pro1 sticker and put it on his car to give people the message “Hey everyone! I’m a white working class Republican!” He then proceeded to tell me that in the past when he was going to a lot of concerts and music festivals and the like he put an american flag in his car and saw that he avoided a lot of trouble with police and security that way.
Now I think Tom may have been half kidding with his friend, but we can see via the dream that I picked up Tom’s apprehension and how he was thinking about how he could avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention in what he feels will become a more openly divided and intolerant America after Trump takes office. As Donny pointed out though the dream is probably also picking up on fears of coming intolerance on the level of the nation itself, fear in people that if they don’t go along with the hating herd they’ll suffer because of it. I can also see something of myself in this dream, how I also can put on a false appearance in order to avoid trouble. As an example of this I actually voted for a third party candidate in the election to avoid having to tell my parents (who I live with and are quite conservative) that I voted for Hillary should they ask who I voted for. I now regret that because I live in Florida where Trump edged Hillary out by a small margin and to be honest in hindsight I feel like I basically cast a vote for Trump by going that route. Now it’s true that I was in fact put off by both candidates and also that I expected Hillary to win the election handily, but I took the easy way out to avoid any possible discomfort at home and didn’t cast my vote for the person who I felt was clearly the lesser of two evils. Now to be fair I think I should point out here that my parents aren’t neo nazis or the sort of people who would show up at KKK rally. As I’ve pointed out before, dreams often show things in an exaggerated manner to get their point across.
Now the black man at the end of the dream would seem to represent things that myself, Tom and others feeling this collective fear wouldn’t want the intolerant or rigidly moral to see. Donny suggested the idea that the fact that the black man uses the bathroom anyway without incident shows that the future may not play out as badly as people are fearing. Let’s hope that turns out to be the case.
Now it’s already implied in what I’ve written but I wanted to explicitly state how this dream shows how we can dream not only about a collective process, but also about what’s going on with people we’re closely involved with such as friends, family, co-workers etc. I’ve been taking lessons from Tom for over two years and we’re of a like mind regarding many things, so we’ve delved a little deeper in conversation than who won the football game last night. Our relationship is to some extent a friendship, and since there’s a connection there I can receive inner communication from him. To see this inner communication is useful if for no other reason than showing our inner connectedness, which Donny discussed at length in a recent blog.
This type of dream or vision can also enable you to see what’s going on with someone in order to try and take some helpful action. That happened recently with me in regards to a friend who’s a recovering alcoholic. I had a vision of her making some objects like large coins out of clay and there was a muse line with the vision that said: Mine was destroyed. At the time I had the vision I was wondering if this person had had a stumble and I was looking online for advice on how to approach someone if you think that’s happened. In my research I came to know of something Alcoholics Anonymous uses called sobriety coins which are tokens showing the amount of time someone has remained sober. After learning that I figured my friend’s sobriety coin had been destroyed figuratively speaking, but the fact that she was making new ones in the vision probably indicated that she was trying to get back on her feet. Having the vision helped me to bring the subject up with my friend and to encourage her not to get down on herself about the stumble, but to just pick herself up and carry on.
This is a pretty vast subject and I’ll probably write more about it in future on this blog, but I think this is a good stopping point. It would be great though to hear other people’s experiences in the comments.
Notes and References
For those who don’t know Bass Pro is a Hunting/Fishing/Camping superstore chain here in the USA.
Harm's End 