To know on the edge of your screaming that you’re gonna be alright, to see it plain as day in the darkness, you go on steam engine, you take your task with God.
I don’t know if it’s gonna rain mud puddles in my mind, firecrackers in my heart, but I’ll be okay. The world has caved in, and sunshine has found me lying in the sun.
Do you know sleep? Do you know how to sleep? It’s a ridin’ all night long the team fellows of the mind with what you need to know liberty while you’re still in bonds. It’s a conscious sleep. You hear it talk to me now.
You can’t spend me. I’m a waste of your time, but I will speak to you from the hours the training of the ways, deep soliloquies of love that hasn’t found its purpose yet but challenges the world with it anyway.
You will laugh at me, but I know time like you know your own hair, and I can stand up and sing when God is killing me. What is a poet for? Can I quote my little boy? It’s for blankets in the sea. I can only grasp his hand in verse. I can’t see him anymore.
Whales sing, and they bring in the ocean round to itself. It’s more than call letters. It’s an attempt to dare fate and expose ourselves to bright shiny blades, so we can give time its meaning, even if that’s just a language cloak. You sit there and read us those bright and shiny blades.
Fuck you I love you the poet says. Nithish did you hear that? It’s how we meet the world Planet Us and not die in the telling. We undress in front of the world and give it its mic, all the while singing our hearts out in front of I don’t care.
I am loud in a sea storm, Prometheus battles night on top of an angry world because he’d brought fire down of the Gods into the people of his sleep, and lit the poet’s tongue on daily cares, common battles, and everyday falls to know we are more than these.
Is that the dynamic? We choir now. He’s so little he expands your room. Settled in myself to eat, that’s the flavor of sadhana, and we enhance. It’s an inner journey. We go for it. It’s an inner cleaving. We humble ourselves and do it. It rebounds. It grabs yah. It’s an opening you do when you’re hungry. You’re hungry for God’s touch. [“Open to God’s touch” heard during darshan in the Mother’s room, and then the muse changed it as I walked down the stairs so it fit this poem that was coming as I waited for the room darshan and went through the line in and out of her room, the most of this verse, from the eat line, coming in that quiet activity on her death day] This is the lifeline. This is sustenance.
Try to prevent a fracture in sadhana, a more sustained doing might do so. I’m sure I belong there. You’re here. I don’t think we take the vital out of our room. The right vital comes out. The mystic of the flute lives on on ocean’s rainbow. [vision of an Indian-style key, the long variety, on the step of a concrete, light blue flight of stairs about two thirds up] A key, it’s hard to report their bouncing effect. You throw them away. You don’t know how to use them. You pour beer over them, vital indulgences. Now one comes. Open its window. Be there in the sky for it all active on time.
[four visions, two side by side then the other two the same, of strange, colorful scenes I could not make out they happened so fast] We interrupt your dream venture to put you in touch with yourself. You don’t know yourself. I think you use a sadhana watch, and they won’t fool you. They tell it like it is. You’re out to lunch, and that other one’s over there not climbing the street right. You need each other to focus, a small sum of human beings, no more than a handful. You fit. You share similar interests. You live in close proximity. You can’t digital do this as a group come together. Get real with one another, nice and kind and polite, not tryin’ to pass up one another, not tryin’ to be mean.
[vision of Lisa, my deceased Rottweiler, curled up against an urban wall in a dog ball but her head up and looking at me, sadly] Titties suck my dear. You don’t get out of them what you need. They’re not your bread and butter. They test and try you, as humans do. Romantic love is hard to motion here. I think you’re friends, deeply connected, why you come together, how you come together. You’ll recognize this in dreams. You move on one another in the friendship relationship of a dream. You’re bonded. It’s great to be together. This gets deeper. You family one another. Respect this group. Leaving it’s a soul’s choice. It’s not based on petty arguments. You will go to school together learnin’ sadhana.
All your dreams come together in the group. Everyday you share them, work out meaning, time. This grows. You do this all the time. The inner relationship’s happenin’. Now you go together to sadhana central. You want to do sadhana all the time. A minute don’t go by without it. It’s your mainstay. It’s your life’s blood. It’s what’s you’re doin’ in life. You keep at it. You keep goin’.
A small circle/handful of people [words spoken simultaneously] do nothing else. This is the basis of life. It’s everywhere apparent. It’s how you concentrate. It’s there all the time, always concentrating. It gathers you. It puts you in touch with yourself so you see what you’re doin’. No tellin’ where you are with yourself. It could be at the beach. It could be in metallurgy. You could be climbin’ buildins, playin’ in the street or in front of a crowd. You’re always concentratin’ whatever you do. The mind’s the game.
Now what does that what you see in your mind carry, a present moment swirl? You do there concentrate. Where do you put the bubble? On higher than yourself. You’re tryin’ to reach divine. It’s the major of your focus, connection, contact. You know the divine’s right there in front of you. Keep the world relatin’ in that key, and everything you do will be fine. That’s the secret of sadhana.
I’m just ruined today. Nobody knows me under. I deal out cards of bright shiny poems. It’s just a reader’s poem with no readers. Bad material I guess, or awful writing. My room is a way station and a promise. I’ll hit the right note one day. Sadhana science, how do I show this to you? Where do I go to show this to you? It’s a concentration in your head you stay clean for. If I told you about the troubles. I still go to college. I got spirits in my head and they won’t go. [heard sung by The Strumbellas, “Spirits”] You know I’m hearin’ muse. This is a dictated poem. You’re all fired up.
Wanna say somethin’. It’s about the city of concentration. I think I’m learnin’ to keep the mind quiet not on external things, and that time is optimized for sadhana. These are the thoughts think about, and you go from there, put your own larger list together. What is infinity? What’s the nature of the universe? Does God care? What will lift my room? Do I get larger than time? Can I feel the feelings of another through brands of consciousness? What is the thought that stops thought? Am I showin’ you how to think? You’re up there where thought meets the sky, your husband. Do you hear that? We treasure this present moment our thought taking us skyward, and we are passive to that reach. You put the perspective on that. To those lonesome memories, you’re naked to the eternal now. Feel them that way.
Now we’ll repellant. Thought gets in the way. It’s not what you wanna do all the time. You want to be clear certain purpose. That’s a way of hold your mind no words or images. Smoking the cigarette of thought, chewing it out like a stick of gum, these are brands you wear. They spend and they disease. You don’t have to think. I’m learnin’ not to. It’s so much clearer in there. When I go to sleep I’m not a crybaby. Monster in those movies.
I handle sleep. I’m waking up on the hub of dreams. I try to retrieve them, or I’m writing a poem, and it continues. I spend my nights this way, in a wakeup mode going back to sleep. I get about six hours all told, seven on this night and that. My wakeup periods are long. Like I say I’m writing muse as the night bells ring, or I’m layin’ there where quiet meets my mind, pullin’ on the length of dream. That’s a sadhana sleep. It gets you in touch with the day. That’s been the content of the night, if you know how to read your dreams. Turn around and face tomorrow your dreams carry you too, and they show you yesterday to know what’s goin’ on. There’s just so much to dream, but it arms you for the day.
And now you’re ready to step out into the world a sadhana-go-round. Keep it simple, keep it clean, your honeydew in the world. Behaviors lead to sadhana, or they refuse it. You’re a sadhana keeper. Always remember that. It won’t go away. Like it can never reject you. I don’t care how reprobate you are, sadhana’s there for you. It will carry you through the storm. It will clean out your act. You’ll get better because of it. Just keep goin’. Let it fill your room. Don’t shy away from it because you think it’s judging you. It is always there to pick up. It understands your needs and will help you fill them properly. It’s the intention that counts, the attitude. Keeping your mind quiet on the divine, that’s your smelling salts. It’s how you save your life.
If you’re an ordinary sucker, you’ll have a harder time. You gotta get naked. You gotta take off all those clothes, get down to your primal need to fill your life with God. One episode of you are so filled, just one time and take this book with you for the rest of your life, and you will do sadhana, can’t help but to; it’s in your nature now.
Everybody wants to know the nature of progress. You love people, identify with everything. You’re not a grouch or a scrooge. You’re good to be with, not demanding or mean. You listen to people. It’s not all about you. I don’t think you make people feel uncomfortable, but you do challenge them by the obvious depth you live. You call to people, not with your eyes your shoes. That means you don’t mess with them. You tend to prefer quiet comin’ to the head, not hours and hours of music or all this environmental stimuli. You like nature, raw and clean. Walks accompany your day, walks through nature where you can find it. An animal can climb aboard. You’re a big bucket of love that knows how to pour itself.
This is what we know of love: rape and murder, and love’s right there with yah. No one took the sign off you need to be loved. All this spiritual growth sees that. You love everybody you come into contact with. You know what you love them for: love heals things, makes people better. I don’t think you can fake this very much. Spend some time with someone and see. Alright spiritual advanced person, let me count your love, not anything else. I wanna see yah love. I think the whole point of our spiritual shoes, we get to know love. A great big sadhana bring that out.
I’m a terrible husband— this is the spiritual call. I think sometimes it walks on your soul. I don’t know how to explain this to you. You’d think all would be right with the world. You’re torn asunder. You’re made to do things you don’t like. They gravity of the situation just eats you alive. You obey the call, like I’m doin’ now. You picked the wrong time to blast a hole in my shoes. I’m a servitor of divine will. I’m servin’ everybody not sinnin’, and here I am expose myself to your wrath. You’re not a noble person. I’ve seen what you do to people. You don’t love them atall. So my head’s on the chopping block the reality poem, and here I am giving you my bread for the umpteenth time. You’d think I’d had enough by now. Anyway here it is, a poem where you can do yourself and make the world ring, even if no one hears it, and they just think the worst of you.
They’re not snow that’s obvious. He seems to have a sadhana that doesn’t get any kickback in return. He doesn’t get validated except by his team. He is treated like everybody’s pariah. His sadhana circle listens to him, and others are few and far between. He’s a real human being. He got okay on the wheels/wings of his sadhana. [words spoken simultaneously] You have it now. Reader this is not brag or boast about. This is the path to divine consciousness and younger, and you’re gonna need a little younger. Open it.
A lot depends on the soul change. When you’re young, and you soul mother in hospital, we’re goin’ in some shockin’ of yours. Well he quoted us all trying to see her. You look like you losing what did you lose? The ability to stay awake in dream. You can’t do that, let’s tend silly here. It’s not your job to fight the Minotaur. That your job, trigger lucidity captain this ship. God dog does that look handsome! Some fancy’s got you hooked. You’re standing on the ability to move on dreams. Just get out of here. Take your consciousness and try it out. You can go up and in from there, up to the higher consciousness, in to the soul. Try it out. See how far you get. Obstacles determine pathway, and you see what’s limiting you. You really can get there from here.
Dream is a doorway where you get started to open the inner consciousness, and there your sadhana rides in its most visible form. You need this to survive. Burn out early if this is just all in your head. The inner consciousness will take you there to all the meanings you have missed, to your direction of travel, and you’ll see the divines involved with you and get into soul things. It’s your guidebook. It’s your lamp. Your teachers talk to you through there. It’s a daily dose of miracle, and it moves your sadhana along a fresh start everyday. This is the major element most sadhanas miss, and we’re callin’ on yours in league with the world. I’m sure you got questions. Begin.
Alright Donny there’s a truth to tell. You’re bein’ spying on inside. The thoughts get yah. Oh she’s memorable wearin’ them thoughts. All these thoughts on God culminate in that one. When the bough breaks, [heard sung, nursery rhyme] and you enter Silent Mind. These are the memories to feel now, the character of enlightenment, regardless of your pain inside, of the happenstance of chance, the resistance futile. Go for it baby.
Keep the light goin’. Don’t go to sleep. Don’t her give up on that sadhana. You have a world to change. Say the same here. We’ve got our heads out for miracles. That’s a world line. Can you show this to us sweetheart? I’ll be back in about five minutes.
I’ve got tools for you. I’m gonna use them first, grow up Nithish. It’s the army in the game, and I’m a former Green Beret sergeant to show them to yah. Not so hard on the kid, but he’s gonna lesson. There’s just too much soft flesh there video game mode. Cheerio.
This blog is not just to put my stuff on. My blog is clear your highway. Stop defending yourself. What? Skin spots are really easy to spot. You have to come over here so I can help you. One by one they ran away from my house. Can’t figure out. I had given you really good soul stuff. Her whole house was zoom zoom zoom, and you’ve got a literature there tomorrow to bring to temple. Come in.
A revolution is coming, and it has nothing to do with technology, politics, or economics, although undoubtedly those things will be affected by it, profoundly, inevitably. It’s an inner revolution, and it is that, the inside of us, we need to change to change the world. No outer revolution, of any kind, changes the fundamental ground of us. And because it’s a revolution of the fundamentals of us, it’s going to take a lot longer than, say, the revolution in communication and information brought about by the technology of the computer and Internet, centuries I’d imagine to get to the definitive stage. Though it’s hardly noticeable now, we’re in the very beginning of the revolution, have entered the first stage, as evidenced by all the interest and public discussion of its entrance subject. The stage will get more pronounced as it advances. In this first stage we really get into our dreams, remember them, record them, play with them, and finally, learn how to interpret them.
That will lead naturally to an astonishing discovery, and that will begin the second stage of the revolution, which is the personal application of the discovery that our dreams are a map of the yesterday, today, and tomorrow of our lives. The intelligence will just blow us away. Once we see many of our dreams describe what will happen the next day, showing us the inner view of the outer occurrence, with particular emphasis on our inner state, what makes it so hard to interpret prevision dreams, we will put matter aside as the organizing principle of reality, and science will have a lot of explaining to do. I mean, what who in us or about us can see this, not only the future, but the direction travel of our lives, what obstacles get in the way, and the best direction to get around or through them? Kind of makes you put media down, of any type, as the principle direction giver, you know?
The third stage of the revolution will reorganize, from the ground up, our social reality. Were you in my dream last night? No, but I messaged you. That’s your family and friends saying that, the plants and pets in your house, your enemies, memes floating in human mind, your whole darn world just to put it nicely, but, and you must pardon me, I’d have to include E.T.s from the cosmos at large, the good, the bad, and the ugly. We will begin to get a picture of our shared field of consciousness, what we haven’t been able to see so wake-centric we’ve been, and pointing fingers and individual islands, not to mention tick-tock the game is locked told to social outcasts, will just melt, and we’ll have to put new meanings in the social field, shared meaning primarily.
Those meanings will have a lot to do with growing suspicions. Do we also share identity? Does human life have an actual purpose other than just to live long and prosper? Is ego identity the final say in human identity? Is a change in consciousness necessary to fulfill human purpose? Are beings not clothed in matter messing with us, helping us? Below the hidden lie the original questions. So we have a soul? Is there a God, and if that answer is plural, what the heck dude? And if that answer’s also singular, is that all the way to the nameless One? How deep does this rabbit hole go? Are we unconscious actors for a larger beyond? It’s in this fourth and final stage of the revolution, answering those questions, we put on our soul and spiritual wings, and that’s when humanity, as a whole, takes off and flies. Now, individuals can.
Start with your dreams and go from there, unless there is already happening. Then just keep going. If you start to become lucid in dream and/or have out of body experiences, try to see how deep, wide, and high you go inside. Try to leave the dream field and go beyond. You can also start with meditation, if you can get into conscious trance to explore, which is not to find more land inner or otherwise but deeper and higher fields of consciousness. The links I’m leaving show the journey I’ve taken.
The Evidence of Man Lucid dreaming, near death experience, and inner body time travel.
Introduction to Soul Power The soul and reincarnation, who I was in recent history, not anyone you ever heard of.
Help You From the Rear View Mirror Silent Mind, the experience of emptiness characteristic of it, and overhead experience, including supramental, all looked at in a review of the movie Who’s Driving the Dreambus?, which sees existence as oneness but meaningless. Go figure. And I do.
I’m Not Picking Up Stump Posts An example of our shared field of consciousness manifesting in dream, using a personal dream that shows the inner reality of a Facebook post and its viewing by other people.
Under the Graffiti Learning to extend déjà vu so to see the immediate future. Scroll down the page to the story entitled: “Under the Graffiti” and then see past the vulgarity, if you’ll excuse me please.
An Order of Chakra Shakes Discovering my 7 chakras on the Continental Divide in the mountains of Colorado, a don’t try this at home folks story.
Winged Information, A Peer into the Mountaintop Silent Mind, the kosher and abbreviated telling, and too much talk about the spiritual path. It was a published shot, and I just fumbled it.
Bigelow Aerospace President Robert Bigelow talks during a press conference shortly after he and NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver toured the Bigelow Aerospace facilities on Friday, Feb. 4, 2011, in Las Vegas. NASA has been discussing potential partnership opportunities with Bigelow for its inflatable habitat technologies as part of NASA’s goal to develop innovative technologies to ensure that the U.S. remains competitive in future space endeavors. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
Mr. Bigelow,
I’m writing in regards to your essay contest, advertised in the New York Times and other headline media outlets, where you hope to find someone that can prove by an evidenced based argument that there is life after death. If I understand it correctly, it’s not exactly to prove, at least not in terms of the scientific method, but present the case in such a way that, at the end of the essay, the thesis will be proved ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, meaning most sane and reasonable people would be swayed by the presentation, assuming the person isn’t lying or exaggerating, why, I’d imagine, you require those submitting to be approved beforehand and want them to have some years affiliated with a credible research organization or institution, preferably scientists, according to the NY Times article. You’re vetting your submitters. Someone from the general public without such affiliation, someone coming from the grassroots I might say, need not apply.
I am someone from the latter category, a grassroots person, but I have an essay that would not only prove beyond a reasonable doubt that death is, at the very least, a journey to somewhere, but also that time travel is possible, only here not in a machine, in consciousness. The essay ends with an example of inner body time travel, where, in a journey out of the body, I found myself inside my grandfather’s body as he died two weeks before he did, and the cause of death and location of death, everything he was doing when he died, matched what I’d experienced inside him two weeks before, and I’d told no one of it until after I’d heard he died.
The essay details the inner experiences with lucid dream that led up to the inner body time travel, years of conscious inner exploration, including a near-death experience, what opened me to the possibility of experiencing someone else’s death: I had died myself. I’d experienced what’s called being twice born in the ancient literature that concerns itself with initiation into the Mysteries, that is, I was born from my mother’s womb and born again after dying and returning to the land of the living, a death induced by an event in the inner consciousness and not by outer means, but a death nonetheless. It’s a characteristic of NDE: you return full of life and knowing death is not the end, know there is a hereafter, not believing, knowing. I should mention, though, in regards to the ancient Mysteries, that is only the initiation, the very beginning of your long journey to know the hidden and unseen, the behind, below, and above. As it was for initiates, so it is for the dead. You would imagine that such knowledge helps enable the dead to begin their quest after death, now that they know there is more.
If you haven’t experienced a NDE, then you’d be skeptical if you don’t believe in life after death to begin with, understandably. What you’re looking for you won’t find, someone to give that knowing and not just provide credible evidence to base belief on, which few today would weave into their worldview and accept as fact. It’s like people who’d been to America before Columbus, or before enough people had been there to establish beyond a doubt it was there (to the known world at the time from and a European perspective). Only a few would’ve believed them. We are in the time before Columbus in regards to not only the existence of life after death, but of the whole field of consciousness beyond the present person that we are, of a great deal of things consciousness-wise.
Will be spotted as wizards in the evolution, a few climate changers. You’re a pariah? I don’t think you’ve done the business ends, cross-examined your own consciousness. Pay someone else to do your business, and consciousness runs on the business model in your end. You hit the jackpot you did not.
Where are we going with this? All the dead ask this. It’s death not revelation. Are you sure you know where you’re going? It isn’t to the supermarket. Bigelow Industries, can we consciousness the skies? I’m not a kingpin. I’m a ramrod.
Are you sure you know what’s at stake? Will you evolve or not? Bigwell Industries, can we say he’s climbin’? He’s got a business model, so dead system made it. I’m not barkin’ at your guitar. I have direction to travel. An evolutionary curve calls us all in from the cold. Open the inner consciousness Mr. Bigweld. What brought him here? Robots your own inner crowd, and fought cold all evening.
A play protected by a play yard, I’m a playwright. Can I startle you with truth? Mirror all the mind of God, no dust, no mirror; mirror all the mind of God, nothing in-between— the 5th Patriarch seeing beyond himself. Now I give you “The Epic of Man”.
For a number of years now I’ve been living with chronic pain in my lower back and my knees. There’s not a whole lot I can say about it other than it was a major life change that came on suddenly, and one that took a long time to even begin to adjust to. As you might imagine I’ve been searching for answers via my dreams as to what’s actually caused these disorders and preventing healing, since I suspect it’s something deeper than just physical injury or wear and tear. I hope one day to be able to know and be able to share insight into the deeper causes of my physical state, be they emotional, mental etc., but I can’t do that now with any kind of certainty. One thing though that I’ve suspected for years is that a hostile force (and by that I mean a force of conscious darkness) may be a factor involved in aggravating the pain, and maybe also in preventing its resolution, and I recently had a dream that for me verifies this.
Before I share the dream let me say that I had an actual injury to my lower back from a fall almost eighteen years ago that healed after a few weeks, and which I believe was a manifestation of the same causes that have brought about the chronic pain.1 The chronic pain itself didn’t begin until about eight years ago. The knee pain is more mysterious, and began suddenly about a year and a half after the back pain started, and was so intense for a while I didn’t feel the back pain very much. Some other pertinent details to know is the back pain started while I was staying at Nilambe Meditation Center in Sri Lanka, and that there was an Israeli man, Adi, who was giving me massage to help and actually succeeded in eliminating the pain for a couple of days before it came back.
So having given a little background here is the dream:
I’m at Nilambe. I’m in my room there, and it has amenities like a small refrigerator and microwave as well as a coffee maker. There is also a TV and DVD player. Outside my room I can see some people having a drum circle, and I’m thinking about how much this place has changed and become like a Rainbow Community2. I leave my room and go into the new library but am shocked to see only something like 25% of the books are there, and I’m wondering what happened to all the others. I figure they must be in a room somewhere else. I talk to Upul (the leader at Nilambe) a little bit, and at one point I’m outside by the dining area. I’ve got a motorbike I’m going to use to drive back to my room. I start driving, but then I’m walking, and I become lucid and don’t remember exactly what happened after that, but at one point I find myself lucid again and am laying in a bed lying on my side in the dark. Behind me I sense a disquieting presence and can sort of sense its form without actually seeing it. It’s humanoid, but very strange with some appendages on it a normal human body doesn’t have that come from the front of its trunk and are of different lengths. The appendages are stiff and wood-like but flexible at the same time and have blunt ends. I turn and start to struggle with the creature calling on the Mother as I do so. One of the appendages is attached to my lower back and I knock it off. Now the light is on in the room and I’m on top of the creature, which has changed into a blond woman. I’ve got her by the throat with both hands and am trying to choke her to death. I can’t seem to kill it, but I leave it on the bed in a seemingly incapacitated state. Now though it’s a brunette woman. Then I’m talking to Adi about what happened.
I can’t report the back pain being resolved or even greatly relieved on that day, but the dream did finally offer some proof to my suspicion that a hostile being or force is involved in the pain. The Mother speaks about this in her Questions and Answers, pointing out that sometimes behind an illness there’s also “an attack, a pressure from adverse forces who really want to harm you…encouraging the illness to become as bad as it can be.”3 I imagine her statement is also applicable to disorders like chronic pain syndromes, and she goes on to say that the right spiritual force can remove or destroy the adverse force “if you have this Force at your disposal or if you can ask for it and get it.”4
It was this passage in Questions and Answers that planted this idea in me some time ago, leading me to suspect that this was the case with me. So even before having this dream I’ve been asking for this Force to act and remove the hostile influence and also asking to be shown and to get help to change whatever mental, or emotional elements there might be that have given rise to this. I believe there might also be some kind of blockage or resistance in the body consciousness itself, and so I ask for help with that, help with making the body plastic and receptive. I also try to exercise regularly and stay as active as I can.
Ultimately what’s hard for me is letting go of getting any results, to ask and aspire for healing, but to put whether or not that happens in the end in divine hands and to try to keep my focus on doing the sadhana, on the goal of surrendering completely to the Divine in order to gain release from ego consciousness. But I’ve come to believe you even have to let go of whether or not your sadhana bears any kind of fruit as well, but yet still make the effort and aspire. It’s a level of sincerity I’ve yet to reach. A few days ago I read another passage of the Mother’s in a later volume of Questions and Answers that I’ve been trying to take to heart and would like to share since it spells out what the right attitude needs to be. It’s a rather long quote, but one that I think ought to be read in its entirety:
As with everything in yoga, the effort for progress must be made for the love of the effort for progress. The joy of effort, the aspiration for progress must be enough in themselves, quite independent of the result. Everything one does in yoga must be done for the joy of doing it, and not in view of the result one wants to obtain…. Indeed, in life, always, in all things, the result does not belong to us. And if we want to keep the right attitude, we must act, feel, think, strive spontaneously, for that is what we must do, and not in view of the result to be obtained.
As soon as we think of the result we begin to bargain and that takes away all sincerity from the effort. You make an effort to progress because you feel within you the need, the imperative need to make an effort and progress; and this effort is the gift you offer to the Divine Consciousness in you, the Divine Consciousness in the Universe, it is your way of expressing your gratitude, offering yourself; and whether this results in progress or not is of no importance. You will progress when it is decided that the time has come to progress and not because you desire it.5
Now THAT’S sincerity.
***
When I originally started writing this article I considered leaving the first part at Nilambe out, but decided to keep it in for two reasons. One, it seems significant because that’s where the chronic problems started and two, because of something that happened at Nilambe a couple of days before the chronic pain commenced. Let me explain.
Since Nilambe is a mediation center, I was obviously doing a lot of daily meditation as well as yoga classes in the morning and afternoon. One day after the afternoon meditation I found that I was very peaceful and relaxed and also had a very pleasant feeling throughout my body. I found it was a physical joy just to move as long as I moved slowly, and a walk up the hill to the lookout which normally took less than five minutes, took more like fifteen as I enjoyed the experience. After that I seem to remember the experience faded. Then like I said a couple of days later during the afternoon yoga class the pain started up. Given this I’ve had to wonder if there’s a connection between the two things. I’m unsure what that connection would be if indeed one exists, but one possibility that occurred to me is that the positive experience in the body may have been brought on prematurely by all the meditation and asana, and the result was that a resistance in the body which could have been worked out more slowly and less traumatically by the progression of the sadhana was brought up in a very abrupt way. There isn’t this kind of correlation of a nice bodily experience with the commencement of the knee pain, but following my neurologist’s recommendation, I was doing a lot of physical exercise at the time including two weekly one-hour power yoga classes when that pain started up. Maybe overdoing it with exercise, especially asana, brought up more resistance in the body. It’s hard to say, but it seems possible.
Now I’m not sure as to what symbolic meaning the part of the dream with Nilambe may have had. The dream did prompt me though to look up their website and see what was going on with them. When I was at Nilambe it was a fairly open place and you could show up and stay just one night if you wanted to and long term stays were also possible, though most people were backpackers who would stay for a few days or a week or so. At some point though since the last time I was there in 2010 they have changed things considerably and are only running seven day retreats that you are required to attend for the whole seven days. My dream showed an even more bohemian and unstructured arrangement than when I was there and not a more structured one, so this dream doesn’t seem to reflect those changes. This leads me to believe it perhaps had more to do with where I was at in my life at the time of the dream. Our house here is pretty bohemian as far as things go with the young people that live or visit here, none of whom have any interest in the spiritual life and just want to get as much vital pleasure out of existence as they can. There’s a freedom here in our house for young people that probably doesn’t exist anywhere else in Pondicherry, though nearby Auroville has a more western and free atmosphere throughout the whole community. I can see how the dream might represent the state of our house which for Donny and I at least is our ashram in the midst of life, but overlaid with the vital atmosphere of our young people.
I will say however, if I can get up on my soapbox for a moment, something that Donny suggested, and that is that my dream might more truly represent the spirit of Nilambe, which is actually stunted by all this added structure. There of course was a daily schedule when I was at Nilambe, and people were expected to participate as well as maintain the Noble Silence, but if you slept in and missed the 5am meditation one day no one gave you a hard time about it. I missed that particular mediation often during my stays there. People would also do things like go into the woods to get high or even for romantic/sexual liaisons, and even though that was against the rules, the staff didn’t try to crack down on it much. I would guess there is a lot less tolerance for that sort of thing there now. I do think that Nilambe is a retreat center, and you can’t just let it be a free for all, the same way Donny and I can’t let the unregenerate vital just run riot here and completely rule the house. I imagine the purpose of these changes at Nilambe is mainly to change the clientele, so that even if backpackers show up, they’re serious about doing a seven day retreat. It also probably makes things easier on the staff there since the retreats are done one week on, one week off. I have to say that I do understand why Nilambe has made these changes, to do things dynamically requires more work, and it’s easier to just lay down hard and fast rules. I have to wonder though if the center’s lost something of the magic it had by being ramrodded into something like a vipassana.6 Nuff said.
So to sum things up I haven’t been able to provide any answers regarding my physical problems in this article. I do feel though some kind of victory is possible in this situation, whether that would be healing for the body, or reaching a state of consciousness where I’m free inwardly from what’s going on with the body, or some combination of the two remains to be seen. I do think though if the influence of the hostile being could be removed or negated I wouldn’t have as difficult a time, but to do that seems to be something beyond my personal power and would require grace. In the end, it seems what I need to do is carry on persistently with the sadhana as sincerely as I can. There’s one particular quote of the Mother I call to mind frequently to help during trying times and will share to end this article. Very simply she says:
To the most stubborn goes the victory.7
Notes and References
At the time of the accident I was experiencing a very joyous state brought on by an acid trip and was wondering why I couldn’t remain in that state. I guess the accident or what it represented was my answer. For those who are interested, I have incorporated a more detailed description of that joyous state in my short story Slumdog Epilogue which is posted here on our old blog The Chipmunk Press. Scroll down a little to read.
Here I’m referring to the Rainbow Family that puts on the Rainbow Gatherings not the LGBT community.
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.
In Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri there’s a series of cantos where the heroine, Savitri, journeys inside of herself to reach her soul. This, however, is more than just a story, but Aurobindo’s presentation of a significant step in the process of the integral yoga. A few years ago I started aspiring to try and remember to use my instances of lucidity in dreams to try and reach my soul. Though I have not yet succeeded in doing so, along the way I have had dreams where I think I have made some progress toward that goal. I want to share my most recent example of a dream like this, but I need to physically describe where the dream started which was in the driveway of the house I lived in during high school.
I was able to find this picture of that driveway on the internet. What you don’t see that’s important is a descending terraced path that runs along the left side of the driveway down to the back yard. The path was gravel and each terraced step was about five to ten feet long or so and ended in a railroad tie turned sideways to hold the gravel and that particular step in place. There are also railroad ties running along the side of the driveway all the way to where it meets the house. Where the latticework fence is there’s about a 12 foot drop to the back yard. That fence was not there when I was living in this house. There was also a basketball hoop over the middle garage door, and we often played basketball in the driveway.
So having set the scene let me share the dream:
I’m in the driveway of my old house in Richmond, and I am looking at some improvements the new owners have made. The rail ties that run along the edge of the driveway are covered with something smooth and white like the cement in a skateboard park and decorated with rows of something like painted stones or pottery. The pieces are circular and of all different colors. The path that goes down to the yard is also paved and decorated like this. The whole thing is very beautiful to look at. Right at the curve of the driveway a piece of the rail tie has been removed, and it’s possible to go down a step and reach the path here rather than where the path starts. In the dream though it was only a foot or so down to the path at this spot, whereas in waking reality it’s almost the full 12 foot drop. I walk back up the driveway toward the street, and I’m with a couple of other guys. Then I realize I’m dreaming. I jump up into the air and start being taken up by a force. I ask the Mother to take me, and I’m going up fast as things fade to black. I move through the blackness for a long time and see some different vague images and patterns. I remember some five pointed stars and also a sun either setting or rising. There’s one part where the space I’m in seems constricted like I’m moving through a tube or something. Then I notice I’ve come to a stop, and I open my eyes and I’m lying in a bed. The bedspread has been pushed back and is rumpled at the end of the bed. It’s a light blue color if I remember right. Lilo, our yellow Labrador, is at the end of the bed, but it’s strange, like she’s melded with the bedspread. I’m still lucid, but I start losing the dream and have a false awakening.
So what I believe happened here is, as in other dreams I’ve had, I was journeying toward the soul and reached a waypoint, a deeper level of dreaming. Some of these deeper levels of dreaming can be kind of weird like this one with the dog strangely melded with the bedspread. I’m not sure what that might mean, but on one level maybe it’s showing something about my relationship with the dog who sleeps in my room frequently, though I don’t allow her on the bed. The light blue color of the bedspread, if I’m remembering the color correctly, would probably have some spiritual significance since blue, according to Sri Aurobindo, can represent the spiritual consciousness that lies above the normal human level of consciousness. It’s possible I was actually in my bed in the cataleptic state, but I don’t think so, as the usual sensations I have of a sort of numbness in the body and difficulty moving were not present.
Regarding the events of the dream before I went into the blackness, I would guess that the beautifully decorated descending path to the backyard represents the journey towards the soul since that’s where I went as soon as I became lucid. Donny suggested though that the path might also show the light getting down into the lower levels of my being as part of the process of sadhana. I think it may have that meaning as well for reasons I’ll explain later. The gap in the rail tie with the step down at the curve of the driveway (basically a shortcut) is maybe showing a way is open to some of these deeper levels of dreaming, showing that if you reach there once, the way is clear to get there again, though you may not find yourself there frequently. So maybe in this dream I reached a level I’d already been to before and didn’t actually go any further. It’s hard to say because I’m quite far from being any kind of expert on how to differentiate between these different dreaming levels.
Now in the first part of the dream I only observed the beautiful downward path but didn’t actually go down it. Everything I did took place in the driveway, and before this dream I’d never given any thought to what a driveway might mean as a symbol. Though I think there’s much of dubious value in dream dictionaries, I do consult them online frequently because I’ve found they can be quite insightful at times. So when I looked this time I found a couple of sites saying a driveway represents the end of a journey. That interpretation would make sense and fit in this case I think, even though I didn’t reach the end of the journey and actually arrive at the soul. And a driveway of course leads to a garage or in this case a three-car garage. Donny has come to believe that a garage1 represents your dream life and if that’s right that would fit into things too, even though I never went in the garage, nor were the garage doors up. All of this would be enough to explain why my dream builder chose this particular location to represent where I am in the process of completing the journey to the soul, but I think there may be another reason why this particular driveway was chosen, and it relates to something that happened there in waking life, something that was a manifestation of a major character flaw of mine. Let me explain.
As a child and a teenager I was basically skinny and a wimp as well as fairly unathletic, though not to the point where I had the unenviable distinction of being last kid picked for kickball. But I more or less always found myself on the losing end of any individual contests in sports, video games as well as the wrestling matches that boys often engage in. You could imagine that was very frustrating in a culture that places so much value not just on athletic prowess, but also being strong and tough. What made matters worse though were some things that had to do with my brother who was fourteen months younger than I. Despite the age difference Rick, who was very strong and a star athlete, could basically whup me from the time we were small children, and that was a bitter and humiliating pill to swallow, since the big brother is supposed to be able to whup the little brother. In addition to that, since he was my brother there was sibling rivalry, and the fact that he was so much better than me at sports was very frustrating for a couple of reasons. One was just competitiveness. I wanted to be as good as him at everything and got very angry about the fact that I wasn’t. The other was the fact that his athleticism won him the approval of my father, who wasn’t so interested in the things I was good at like theater. Another thing about me I should mention is that I didn’t like losing in general, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to do something like flip a board game over in frustration if things weren’t going my way.
So with that as the psychological backstory let me tell you what happened in that driveway in Richmond, Indiana. It was a winter day, but it wasn’t too cold, and there was no snow on the driveway. I was sixteen or seventeen. I was playing one on one basketball with my friend Jeff. As usual I was on the losing end of things, and there was some roughhousing on both our ends, though nothing unusual for boys playing sports. As Jeff continued to best me, I got more and more angry and frustrated. At one point on the crest of it Jeff and I were both going for the ball near the edge of the driveway, but near the top of the downward path where the drop was only a few of feet. As we went for the ball I didn’t outright shove him, but leaned hard into him knowing that that would be enough to send him over the edge. And it was. I’ll never forget the utter horror I felt as I saw Jeff fall back flailing over the edge as the more reasonable part of me kicked back in. Fortunately as I said, the drop was only a few feet, and Jeff landed flat on his back on snow-covered gravel, his fall further cushioned by the winter jacket he was wearing. So he jumped up unhurt to my great relief, and we continued playing. The way I had done things had been quite sneaky, and just appeared like normal roughhousing. If Jeff had noticed or sensed that I had purposely tried to hurt him he didn’t give any indication.
Now while I had had plenty of tantrums and outbursts over losing, I had never done anything quite like this. And unlike a lot of descriptions of people’s reason being unseated by the vital, I didn’t have the sense that I was watching myself do it or that it was like I was another person. It was more subtle and insidious than that, but it was still an act that went beyond my normal ethical boundaries. Fortunately it didn’t end in a way that would have haunted me for the rest of my life, because even though it was a short drop, Jeff still could have been seriously hurt or killed if he had landed on his head or hit one of the railroad ties. I think there may be more people out there than we realize who could relate an instance like this and who through luck or grace were spared a lifetime of regret or even imprisonment. And then there’s the cases where things didn’t turn out so well, people who, even if they’re not sitting in a prison cell over what they did in the heat of a moment, are sitting in an inner prison of guilt and regret wondering how in the world they could have acted that way and wishing very much that they hadn’t.
One thing it seems obvious we’ll have to do in order to evolve as a species is we’re going to have to start bringing these sticky and unsightly things into the light of day and start talking about them. If enough otherwise ‘good’ people came forward and admitted they’d been temporarily taken over in the way I’ve described here, we could perhaps start to realize that we aren’t the masters of ourselves that we think we are, and that in the right conditions many of us are open to what for a lack of a better word you could call temporary insanity. And it’s not just on the level of the individual, but also in groups, as the examples of angry mobs and Nazi Germany will attest. Understanding this would be one of the things that would get us on the way to a right way of dealing with harm and wrongdoing, forgiving others for the hurt done to us, and forgiving ourselves for the hurt we do to others. Punishment would eventually be taken out of the equation, but that wouldn’t mean you still wouldn’t have to try and take responsibility for harm done even if it was done in a genuine moment of temporary insanity. There couldn’t be any fixed formula though for how you would take responsibility, since for whatever reason it might not be possible or appropriate to help the person you wronged. If you were open to it though the universe would present you with opportunities and situations to balance the harm done by helping or being involved with other people that had nothing to do with the original harm, or even just having to endure a difficult trial or situation as a way of balancing things out. It would take a very plastic society with spiritual growth as its aim to implement this sort of thing, and it would be hand in hand with many other changes. The time where we’re doing this as a global society seems to still be a ways off, but a beginning could be made now on a small scale in small organizations or communities. This was a bit of a digression here, but one that I think was worth taking the time to make.
Getting back to me though, how does this event from my teenage years relate to the dream. Well as I said earlier Donny suggested the dream was showing the light getting down into the lower parts of my being. That interpretation makes sense since this competitiveness in me is a major stumbling block. Perhaps this particular locale was chosen to show not only that this character flaw is something blocking me from finding my soul, but also that I’ve made progress with it. Some aspects of this weakness I let go of many years ago. I no longer get really bent out of shape about losing for example. The only area it really comes up is with the only thing I really value or have a strong interest in anymore and that’s spirituality. And it’s mainly something that comes up in my relationship with other seekers I’m around which most of the time is just Donny. With all the spiritual experiences he’s had and the mountains of muse he’s had come down on him, it’s hard not to feel that I don’t measure up, since I’ve no ‘big’ spiritual experiences I can talk about, and what I get from the muse is hardly a trickle, which I often can’t interpret. And while my mind can see that all Donny’s grace is one level a sort of compensation for a difficult issue in his vital, my vital, like everyone’s, is an irrational creature and has more difficulty grasping that. Nor could my vital grasp when I was a boy that I had talents and abilities that were more developed than Rick and be content with that. Ultimately I think feelings in the vital of inadequacy or lack or not measuring up are what usually underlie most movements of competitiveness or jealousy, and it’s also a lower movement, though perhaps it’s more legitimate because it’s emotional pain. It’s still egoism though and has to be dealt with. One thing too about competitiveness I’ve found, is it breeds on proximity, and if I didn’t know Donny and wasn’t close to him, and just read about his experiences online or in a book, and never saw him or had anything to do with him, it might still hit that painful inadequate spot and produce jealousy, but it would be much less significant. But because he’s close to me I compare myself to him, and also since our work is side by side online I don’t like feeling like I look like a second fiddle.
Some people might be shocked at what I’ve divulged here or wonder why I’d be willing to admit to such a thing. As I said though we need to start talking about these things so I’m talking about them. What it boils down to is that all of us still living in ego consciousness are dysfunctional to one degree or another, and that’s a key truth to see: that ego consciousness itself is intrinsically flawed. The other key and complimentary truth is that there’s the possibility of getting out of ego consciousness2. Understanding these two truths can provide a framework in which, as I’ve suggested, small groups and communities and eventually all of society can safely talk about and work on integrating our darkness. This is what Donny and I are trying to do on a very small scale here at Harm’s End, with basically just the two of us at the moment, though other people live here. We hope though that in the future more like-minded people will join us here and take part in the endeavor, and that eventually we’ll have a little model here that other people can use as starting point for similar undertakings. Anybody interested?
Notes
Dream symbols often have a simple logic to them, so I asked Donny what he thought might be the logic behind a garage representing your dream life. He said that a garage is where you store things, and also where you work. He also said it’s not where you live. You don’t spend as much time there as you do in the rest of the house.
I don’t know this from personal experience, but I’ve read a lot of accounts of people who’ve made this leap, and in a few cases even spoken to people who had had glimpses or permanent realizations beyond ego consciousness. So I’m convinced enough that I feel comfortable saying the potential to go beyond ego consciousness is a truth.
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 Evidence 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.
Panorama of Enchanted Rock, a granite pluton rock formation near Fredericksburg, Texas. Photo Wikipedia Commons, user Jujutacular
Returning 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.
In a recent post, I pointed out how people in dreams often represent the presence in us of what we would consider their defining characteristic. I had a lucid dream recently, which is a good example of this:
I’m in a bright, well-lit house, and I realize I’m dreaming. I’m walking down a corridor and there’s a big mirror ahead of me. In the mirror I can see that there is a picture of the Mother (Mirra Alfassa) down the hall behind me. So I turn around intending to head toward the picture, but now there’s a painting, a portrait, of Janet there instead. The entire background of the portrait is black and Janet, clothes hair and all, is kind of a smoky white or light grey color. She has an odd look on her face, which is hard to describe, but it was most certainly not positive. I go up to the painting and, assuming something’s wrong, I tell her I’ll call or email her. Then I go around the left side of the portrait and enter a room hoping to still find the picture of the Mother. I don’t see it, but then a force picks me up, and I just ask the Mother to take me. It carries me up through the wall and roof of the room to the outside of the house. Then the dream starts to go black so I just close my eyes and move through the blackness for awhile before I wake up.
First of all let me point out that the Mother along with her partner Sri Aurobindo are my teachers, and the ones who are in charge of my spiritual welfare. They therefore appear in my dreams from time to time, and the Mother’s presence in this one let’s me know that there’s something here I need to pay attention to.
Now regarding the symbol of Janet, Janet is a former coworker and friend who’s been in the midst of a long battle with cancer. I haven’t been very attentive to her situation as of late, and I feel on one level the dream was showing me things are not good with her at the moment. After contacting Janet, I found out that things indeed aren’t good, and I made arrangements for my mom and I to take Janet out to lunch next weekend.
On another level though I feel the Mother was trying to draw attention to something in me represented by Janet, something I need to work on. Now while Janet has many positive qualities, on the negative side anyone who has ever worked with her knows she is very much a grumbler and complainer, to the point that people have referred to her as a ‘negative’ person. She is also very inflexible and very resistant to change. Having this dream prompted me to have a closer look at how I act like Janet.
I find my ‘Janetness’ is more of an issue at work, and in general it’s more of an inner grumbling than an outer one. Lots of things come up that I don’t want to do or think is the wrong thing to do or think is eating up time that could better be spent doing something else. Despite what I’m feeling on the inside though, I do what I’m asked even if I have issues with it and don’t usually outwardly show my feelings by complaining or protesting. I do also at times express things negatively or pessimistically in speech, but not to the point where anyone would refer to me as a negative person. On the contrary, most people would probably say I’m a positive person, though I’m not as positive as I might seem on the surface. I’ve just developed a certain amount of self-control, and I suspect that’s the way most ‘positive’ people are. This sort of self-control though is very important and we certainly shouldn’t knock it, but it’s necessary to go further.
So what’s the cure? I think ultimately the only complete cure is to transition to a higher consciousness to which these movements are completely foreign. What, however, can you do in the meantime? Well one thing I pointed out in another post is to try and remember that ultimately everything comes from the One1, and if a task falls to you in a situation like your job where you can’t really refuse, you can try and accept the fact that the Divine himself has thrust this work upon you, and then do it as best you can for that reason. That requires a mental effort though and isn’t always so easy at least for me.
Then there’s also the element of active rejection. I recently read a wonderful passage by the Mother about this, and it seems like a fitting end to this post. She tells us:
This is the dark side. And so, the moment one sees it, if one looks at it and doesn’t say, “It is I”, if one says, “No, it is my shadow, it is the being I must throw out of myself”, one puts on it the light of the other part, one tries to bring them face to face; and with the knowledge and light of the other, one doesn’t try so much to convince—because that is very difficult—but one compels it to remain quiet… first to stand farther away, then one flings it very far away so that it can no longer return—putting a great light on it. There are instances in which it is possible to change, but this is very rare. There are instances in which one can put upon this being—or this shadow—put upon it such an intense light that it transforms it, and it changes into what is the truth of your being.
But this is a rare thing…. It can be done, but it is rare. Usually, the best thing is to say, “No, this is not I! I don’t want it! I have nothing to do with this movement, it doesn’t exist for me, it is something contrary to my nature!” And so, by dint of insisting and driving it away, finally one separates oneself from it.2
Notes and References
To avoid confusion I think I should point out two things. The first is that the concept of everything coming from the One is still just a belief for me, though it’s a belief I feel for which I have enough evidence that I can do my best to try and take my stand on it. The second thing is that, even if I’m correct that it’s all ultimately coming from the One, that doesn’t mean everything that comes is good or appropriate. Until you’re in that higher consciousness that knows spontaneously what to accept or not accept, you can’t take leave of your discrimination and common sense.
Collected Works of the Mother Vol 6 “Questions and Answers 1954”, pg 263.
Harm's End 