Tag: the Mother and Sri Aurobindo

Beauty’s Reign

On By Donny Lee DukeIn black and white photography, ego activism, Inner Voice and Vision, supermind, the integral yoga, the psychic being, video artLeave a comment


Beauty’s Reign

Verse 1

d               a         g
It’s been a long time,
a
long, long, long time,
g                              a                    d     g
everything that’s sung and in one line.
d                            a               g
Work up slowly your way to it.
d                                   g                   a
And the folk song’s driftin’ on a better day.
d                          a                  g
The folk song’s liftin’ on a inner ray:
d                g        a           g              d
the many splendors of beauty’s reign.
g                a        d              g
Here the heart wants to share
g                        a                       d
snow covered music for my kind,
g                                        a                                      d
on the wings of the time, on the wings of a dove, on the wings of love.
a                           g
So many changes for my kind,
a                    d
everything to do with the divine,
a                              g
everything that’s true,
d                      a                       g
beauty’s ray, beauty’s role, beauty’s reign,
d              a                      g                       d
beauty’s ray, beauty’s role, beauty’s reign.

Verse 2

d a  g
Let go,
a
let, let, let go.
g a      d       g
Land wide release.
d             a                   g
You are llamada up above. (Spanish, pronounced ‘yamada’)
d                                   g                   a
And the folk song’s driftin’ on a better day.
d                          a                  g
The folk song’s liftin’ on a inner ray:
d                g        a           g              d
the many splendors of beauty’s reign.
g                a        d              g
Here the heart wants to share
g                        a                       d
snow covered music for my kind,
g                                        a                                      d
on the wings of the time, on the wings of a dove, on the wings of love.
a                           g
So many changes for my kind,
a                    d
everything to do with the divine,
a                              g
everything that’s true,
d                      a                       g
beauty’s ray, beauty’s role, beauty’s reign,
d              a                      g                       d
beauty’s ray, beauty’s role, beauty’s reign.

Verse 3

d            a  g
A time of change,
a
change, change, change, change,
g                a                               d              g
when the world pipe knows only one thing.
d                    a                      g
You have to know it very well.
d                                   g                         a
And the folk song is tempted by an adverse fate.
d                            a                                     g
The folk song is driftin’ wrong on the Titan’s urge.
d                   g  a   g                  d
He saw my sun, moon, and stars.
g      a   d            g
Put all change back.
g                          a                             d
But in the play there’s a process aware of,
d                g        a                           d
Look out of the psychic being’s urge.
a                         g
And that weakness was no longer,
a                             d
and that weakness was no longer.
a                     g
It shattered not
d                      a                       g
beauty’s ray, beauty’s role, beauty’s reign,
d              a                      g                       d
beauty’s ray, beauty’s role, beauty’s reign.

Ending

D          A              G
This is from the sun (3xs):
g              a                      d                       g
beauty’s ray, beauty’s role, beauty’s reign,
d              a                      g                       d
beauty’s ray, beauty’s role, beauty’s reign.

The Settling Stone a Carve

On By Donny Lee DukeIn black and white photography, film photography, Inner Voice and Vision, spoken word poetry, the Mother and Sri AurobindoLeave a comment

The Settling Stone a Carve

Made images out of light.
Feed them to this world.
Beat me.
I’m a meeting of soul wings.
It doesn’t bother me.
Use your head.
Reflected on the walls of the mirror.
In any event,
where I sit and represent God.
That’s the power lines.
What compassionate consideration.
It’s like he loves himself.
He’s the photographer you see,
the photograph,
all these images,
the poem,
pure,
not an ounce of color.
Do you see the address?
It’s in the face of everything.

Image Pondicherry

On By Donny Lee DukeIn black and white photography, Inner Voice and Vision, overhead poetry, the integral yoga, the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, the soul, video poetryLeave a comment

 

Image Pondicherry

Poetry
I need you.
He fell into the bricks.
Thank God let him through.
He’s an image in a photograph.
What visibility.
All citywide wears one face.
It gathers in the gloom.
Was to fight
till the front soul noon.
Let’s give soft yoga shoes
a copy of The Letters
and give those bored little crazies the cubbyholes.
Came out peaceful Pondicherry.

Original Sin

On By Donny Lee DukeIn black and white photography, Inner Voice and Vision, overhead poetry, Poetry, spirituality, supermind, the integral yoga, the Mother and Sri AurobindoLeave a comment
My must suggested the subject, and I made the shot and developed it

Original Sin

In a sunny corner of remote earth
the bite of it all
challenged orthodoxy.
This was in Nature’s plan.
Green-gold it moved.
This conducted harmony
operating on discords –
not a packaged plan,
neither from the stars.
It brought in cities beyond the universe.

We bask in its revelry –
a riot of God
on lone isles of trust.
Wonderful it wore shoes.
Naked impulse did not light its lamp.
A renegade,
it brought all to bear on noontide.
Light held its room.

Yes, we sing in darkness’ lair.
We deliver anthems
without knowing on which we rest.
It came to us unclothed,
and we saw naught but sin.
What distance orthodoxy
from all that abounds in this place.

 

This poem came complete via the inner voice while I was sitting and waiting for a room darshan on Mother’s birthday at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 2015. It was originally posted in the old blog of Douglas and I, The Chipmunk Press. It bears mentioning that I went to the Samadhi the next day after writing the poem and inwardly asked where I should put the poem, and I heard my muse answer:

To the question in Sri Aurobindo's room:
are you there?"

Incense

On By Donny Lee DukeIn black and white photography, Inner Voice and Vision, overhead poetry, spirituality, the Mother and Sri AurobindoLeave a comment

Heard these lines via the inner voice while meditating at the Samadhi of Mother and Sri Aurobindo and smelling the incense burning there the other morning. The photo I took in our satsang room and developed in our darkroom.

The Killer Find

On By Donny Lee DukeIn Inner Voice and Vision, overhead poetry, Poetry, soul healing, spirituality, spoken word poetry, the integral yoga, the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, the psychic being, the soulLeave a comment

The Killer Find

In whatever comes our way.
After eighteen seasons it’s so funny though.
I bet you
I responded.
Leave the characters alone.
We’re windows,
pure margin.
We’ve a back part.
Halfway finished you want to throw me away.
Who me?
It was hard gave him a lawyer.
This is a transcendent poem.

Wait a minute,
is my life short?
Barely here.
It seems you don’t want to think for the psychopath.
You tell me.
His therapists are his words:

I don’t come down easy.
I’m a middle man.
I like killing.
You can see it in their eyes when you shoot them:
life has meaning.
I’m instructed to go.
Good girl.

Limitation’s my ink.
I can’t express the dying word.
My favorite is the surprise face.
They look at me so dumbly.
Maybe it would sound better if you play with it.
Who?

I’m laughing in front of their house.
I will take whatever I want.
You give it to me.
I’m not drowning.
I’m a full on power.
Your life gives me whatever I need.
Your life is my answer to life’s boredom.

Man, I’ve had to please,
grovel up to the paycheck.
Man I’m big.
They don’t know what power has come their way.
The person I kill sees my importance.
That’s the way the Gods speak to you sister.
With me have some understanding.
No, I haven’t found Them.
But I will put on after.

It’s gonna be tough
To get him outta there.
There’s the joy of the free ride.
Oh I’m sorry,
The police found your tracks.
I come distinct from them.
You are their calling card.
Some of them,
your attitude they share,
though on a different path.
You kill to fulfill delight.
They do under the guise of duty.
It’s a humiliation law code.
They don’t actually need to kill.
Yeah you know it.

Released from crime,
whose letter’s not interesting or significant,
the psychopath sits in jail and thinks:
contact with other people,
is this the word Kim’s back?
You know all shades of restaurant, right?
I’m glad because you’re going to marry me.
Kim is his split personality.
Kim is slightly easier to get along with.
Kim has a plan in his head:
he can play the game
whilst he’s in prison.

The environment,
the basest emotions are given free reign.
He just erupts on Ginger Ale.
Meanwhile he has a little house
beyond the reason
unfolding in his soul story.
This house beauty knows the price of.
It is beauty’s tool.
Beauty can find this arm.
This is mastery’s circle.
Those in care of him
did we want there?

Let’s not open our mouth wide.
We can keep him right here.
We can do our level best to control him.
No one is pushing us otherwise.
Why isn’t the government doing something for him?
Oh my God I just had the weirdest look.
You batted my elbow.

Let’s call in the hotshots.
Go out searching homes I’m already home.
And what’s this crime carrier do?
He acts as a closing agent.
He solidifies the type.
It’s his mercy in prison.
I’m mean this guy has feelings.
They’re all sharpened up.
You wouldn’t believe how mercy he is.
Oh I know;
I can’t seem to find mine.
You kill that fish.

Gold is one of the most dangerous places.
My wife distributes many mountain climbers.
But you won’t let him see the mountain
nor marry my wife,
a river whose flow is words.
Come in,
No one wants to play babe I’m sorry,
no one wants to play.

That refused my song.
I couldn’t bend in the knees.
This is not to your bureaucrat.
This is to that reach in you
that answers prayer.
Anybody can bow to reach a God.
I’m calling on your special stuff.

What’s the time?
Nine thirty-two.
What’s this I want?
Process change.
You forgive me
the hands call
words you don’t like.
That would mean a different arrangement for his answer.

His body you’ve kept in buffalo tape.
The body is getting just to ten.
With the body move on ahead.
Alright time’s up.
Maybe it was too complicated.
I’m trying to tell you
that there’s a river in that man,
a natural born therapist,
that will take him outside the jail house
a lover of humanity.

It looks better with Me inside the point.
I am divinity in Man.
I am his first answer.
The soul is not a piece of plastic.
It has a divine outgrowth.
It calls My name in secret.
It is My pages heal your story.
I know the ways of the world,
am master of existence.
The universe I hold in the palm of my hand.
Its every movement My gaze understands.
The Sun measures My name,
is a symbol for its splendor.

I sit atop this man and await your law to give way.
He will not find Me on his own.
He cannot cargo that answer.
Necessity will not hold his hand.
Handsome him with love,
make beauty his living room,
surround him with those who know their land,
and from behind the heart My representative will sing to him
all the measures of his life
put into harmony’s window.

Hearing this high speech
the Gods will rainbow their messages.
He will be an open vessel for universal lore.
Healing streams of light will come to him from the stars.
The moon will glow in his notebook.
The darkness inside him will not know where to hide.
It will be vanquished with the coming dawn.
This I can do in him
if you let him see his own worth.

I enter the country late
because this man is a monster to you,
and you will not see him home.
Now use lovelier powers
to bend his knees,
ones that call from the house of love.
You have grappled him down in hate.
What a wooden start.

Kid, you murdered a family.
This is who we kill.
All wrapped up in mourning
the family lies slain.
Existence has been robbed of its joy.
That loved one’s face stole the sun.
Madness crawls on their hours threatening touch.

What’s the matter?
My temple is gone.
Here is life’s sweetheart.
We bridge reality with this,
a smile that passes by?

Our loved ones are borrowed customers.
They are characters in a plot.
They sooth our need awhile and move on.
We think them a reality’s ship.
One little curtain closed can undo our lives.

What management is this?
What fools we are prey to death.
The heart has deeper need
than its animal holdings.

We pause here on the brink of life’s meaning.
Wisdom,
it’s applicable;
it’s up to you.

Matter fills every corner.
We cannot surround its view with anything else.
God even is of this make made.
Our understanding of Him is material.
He is a material agent not a spiritual cause
in our view of God acting.
He acts; He moves; He speaks
a material outlook.
God can be otherwise,
but we would have to brush name aside,
see past its formula,
the useful path,
to something larger than name.

There’s a family in these woods.
We can bridge the gap to God.
God can wear their face.
Then we begin to be circled by love,
when God wears every face in the crowd.
The loved one is just a familiar particular,
an intimacy we can hold
clasping Him.
Death only rearranges His face.
But God is deeper still.

God has a beckoning plan.
Here, some side paragraphs you should know.
This is deep today.
What are we supposed to do?
Grief, you will have problems there.
Eyes trapped.
Let them know where to stand.
A senseless killing is a teacher still.
Deep it will hold you open to reality.
There is your existence swim:
you can see beyond time.

Life has more fields of study.
We receive again our loved one.
This face in death God wears.
God is a surrounding look.
God is our surrounding cause.
The meaning of life is a parable
these eyes unfold.

My foot’s out.
I can’t keep score.
This poet has found bankrupt as his last measure.
I cannot keep God’s vision in my sight.
These eyes are the toughest to hold.
The Unseen all around us,
the very issue of our existence,
and the world looms larger still.
Our daily bread becomes the story-line,
or a major left in sin.

I had come to speak a word of Silence.
Chaos has erupted in my song.
The killer knows these waters.
He can see no large eye of God.
The world presses in on him
its sideshow of the blind alley scene.
He cannot see out of its dim tale.
Nowhere has he found knowledge close.

All run to a savage dawn.
Man has no larger purpose than this:
there’s a world out there;
take it.
Do it now reads the signs
along the roadsides of his life’s little spurts.
All seek the same need,
a vague point lost in advertising.
War rumors his world.
The daily news is a glowing red
convincing you the world’s on fire,
convincing you of your need to fear.
He can read the papers:
every man for himself.

The good that men call society,
he’d seen its vision’s sweep.
Huddled in a little courtroom called monster
he was its prey.
It hung debasement around his neck.
This was where social disease
spread out into the land.
He banked on this loan.
He hoped no greater glory
than to be the system’s plague.
Society would find death in him.

We can vision out this story.
Its huge eyes cry sight.
Where in this is God’s encircling sun?
In the moment you laid eyes on Him.
Can you top this vision?
No measure knows its score.
Error cannot blind its sight.
Error defines it more.
I mean to put reality above God
it results I cry in my own mess.
God shines through his shiny overcoat.
He can wear a mistake too.
Here in harmony’s reach I can clean it up.
A killer’s no less a man.

One key feature is that sometimes you make a mistake life for.
You’ll have to turn yourself save me.
Another orgy from that.
Okay, alright?
You would threaten?
Up here, alone, encouraged, and again we encounter God.

Wildlife management,
I am a listening shelf.
The soul is not a sword.
It holds us together.
It is our flight suit.
We pull the answer
from behind,
all along our heart’s show.
This is our bank card:
the promise of a better land.

The heart is the particular keeper.
It waits on a pull from the outside
to respond to its purpose.
This is not its better arrangement.
When we close off life’s customers,
when we come together on our own land,
alone in life’s cell,
we can manage its whereabouts,
we can find divinity’s room.

This is our soul keeper,
what banks in us on divine gold.
It makes no commerce with life’s heart.
It cherishes only divine holdings.
Our divine outreach,
where we find divinity’s wings,
is a cavern deep and wide,
a long fall to the reach of it.
The flame that you find there
will be the wonder that you seek.

This is the divine representative in Man,
the soul-flame.
It evolves with our common start.
It waits for union with the soul above,
the divinity we are
high above ourselves.

It is this link,
this psychic fire
literary,
that is our spokesman for healing change.
It sings to us that endeavor.
We know no outer managing overview.
This is our directing circle
we write ourselves.

Help me organize this arrangement
happily furnish the need
a teacher
from divinity’s schoolbook,
a divine name to give you lesson.
It is the soul makes this choice.
Though they seem the Sun itself,
they are not the goal only its keepers.
In time your own Sun will shine through.

I’ve given you direction.
Here you go to process change.
Bring this soul round to the front.
Make the psychic leader of the life.

I don’t know if you understand me but
I’ve shown you where healing can be found.
No, you don’t have to do that,
be under the guidance of a supervising counselor,
attend meetings,
undergo any type of special training.
We receive this change alone.
Those on the outside awaiting results,
they do not deliver the baby.
They are support vehicles.
They help manage our affairs.

You will see the soul is particular.
It does not make the same wardrobe for all,
not exactly,
but it does use
a similar vocabulary of symbols
when it talks to us.
Someone who has passed this bridge
of word-wise
– thank you ma’am –
can give us meanings clear.
You don’t want them to stand around.
A little bit different
than a guide,
they keep their noses out of it.
Their sentence help we need with words and phrases.
The whole we do not give to them.

Now look,
okay I’ve spent
years listening
processing this change.
Keep going.

My sight here seemed to call over completely retractable ideas.
That camera,
comic that look?
Yeah, where is it?
A demon’s laugh is graphic.
Discernment
will be your growth rate.
A divine smile
has a heartbeat.

Listen,
you have a top priority,
a process change.
Lore has not this freshness.
Watch the road here.
It’s wide open.

Come to the river half dry
and you won’t be parched enough to hear it sing.
Dry off before you go in there.
Emotionally wet from the world,
we will hear desire’s holdings
if the ears can find the speech at all.

You know where I stand?
Behind your thought.
It is a trance vision
in the proximity of sleep.
You are awake to hear its call.
Inside the bell tolls.
There is no thought to the arrangement.
Thinking disrupts the process.

I’m sorry if listening stills.
We must accustom ourselves to its strain.
You come to it by degrees.
Your life must quiet to its measure.
The field of your difficulties is the better answer
than the retreat getaway.
You want to hear your problems.
This becomes the greater challenge
and the special key:
you quiet your life in the noise of life,
and you process your change in its tromp and strife.

Mastery has its brand here.
I’m a letter on healing nearing its sum.
The listening smile,
calm it brightens its world.

A summit answer,
we cannot process its plenitude.
There’s something wrong.
We can’t get over our outrage.
Debasement lies squealing.
Our basest reactions hold us here.
The psychopath is only a measure of his world.

Society knows no sitting station.
It has no examining review board.
The pack mentality governs its field book.
Disguised as law and due process,
they wreck havoc on human justice.
If it has become more sensitive,
it is because it is more aware of itself,
but revenge is still our answer to crime.
Our ethics have not evolved beyond this.

I sing to you its appointment,
the beginnings of a nobler race.
This has been a longing since the day we were born.
It has smiled upon us from afar
even when we’re at war.
We know this future ours,
however many disclaimers the times show.

I’m telling you it’s cold out there
in this waiting room of today.
Wait until you see society’s sharp teeth.
Then you understand.

Every once in awhile we’ll get a call from them,
the seekers after goodwill
as the governing agent of society.
They have each given formula –
medicine.
This medicine watch it,
it’s not applicable in time.
Its feet do not touch the hours.
It relies too heavily on outer stress.

We capitulate to the call
of that greater need within,
our hearts calling in stillness
to the reach above,
a medicine we long for.

Being a moment on change,
wonderful that outlook.
Human divinity,
it’s applicable.
Each holds this in store.
The time will bring it home to all of us.
Here, it is within reach.

How can you cry without salt?
What a grim life thou hast gotten a hold of.
They left building a city aside.
They arranged for killing room.
They can’t habit this gown.
Prison has them standing still,
a monster without a head to eat.

We review your killing.
It got menopause.
You deny our circle of trust.
I am the divine buoy in your harbor.
You are rich with sea salt,
carry the load of your number of kills.

There in the sudden door you find him.
It was in a back alley wasn’t it?
He had barbecued his drink.
Death stained his blood.
He said such stupid things.
He was black water.
You burned his ease.
It was a hollow kill.
He wasn’t straight on.
That laughed in your notebook.
We wasted your hour.
You cannot feel what you have done.
Pity you should remember him.
This felt not your power.
Pity you understand.
Well I…

Let’s leftover this man.
He was not in harmony’s circle.
He thought that you had won.
Death took him by the hand.
He understood at once the reason for beers.
The light brought him out of it.
He’d paid his green card.
There he lay still.
It was a meditative dawn.
His glory is your surprise.
Can you see past dawn?
You thought you’d murdered hope.

We journey to rivers.
This man will see his private hell.
Burdened with this autopsy
hope could lay its hands on him.
Such is the river’s run.
And there we pass out his trust.
On the inside we work a slow outer change.
The epiphany will one day see the Sun.

Put their sleep to school.
I listen.
Only after they come up with
the only answer to life:
grow.

Who am I going to come back to?
Not oven.
Meditative answers are coming.
I give you a lot to think about.
What are we looking for?
You’re in the bigger place.
You want to learn how to study bottom answers,
have a heart in the darkest part,
in feeling catch on.
I take a photo album with me,
those I operated upon.

Find the big change.
It’s in your river bed.
I leave it in your notebook.
You can fieldwork this change,
make it come out.
Guidance your river brings.

This is a crawl hole,
your insistent hostility.
Understand it as other then you.
Understand it as an attitude.
You can pencil it out.
This you have to hold at bay.
It will lessen by degrees.
When we indulge it,
operation,
the killing room,
or you just wait for the next victim.

This has us all bottled up inside.
A river can wash it down.
Hey look, come here.
I’m not going to get you for this.
If I ask you
throw it out,
can you do that?
A river answers why
hostility you answer.

Shrimps are eating politics.
That was your father years ago.
Hey children is disturbing.
Can’t live in the greenhouse.
I’ve got a lower angle.
I get physical.
Grab you by the neck I can.
Murder I wrote in the air around you.
You seemed to slip by love.
You had no comforting arm.
Life was a bare blade
to your infant heart.

We meet selfishness from even mother’s hands.
Can you hit the ball?
Some many things to watch.
What so many things?
Your environmental scorecard and your world review,
the inside does what in their presence?
The meaning lay behind the words.
Jump to its scaffold.
How many visions see red?
I can climb down in importance.
Place the notebook in sky hands.
Climb it to the top of the equation.

Believe me,
that’s what it’s coming to,
that high place.
And remember,
You are a spirit.
God is the value of it.

You almost put me to sleep.
I must be bigger than that.
To the thing that owns me
I do,
I throw it out.
A sharp division here.
This man makes a path.
He has risen above his danger issue,
but he is in need of trust.
He could slide back.
If you was justice you would hold my hand.
There his answer waits.

It’s just hard to tell the difference.
If it doesn’t tell deep
it has not understand.
I opened his house on change.
There’s an understanding castle
near sleep he builds.
We come together all along world lines.
We would not want to harm its view.

What’s left to do here?
How finish we gotta go?
You haven’t filled out the map yet.
Where is your food bar?
Cooking for the meat last time.
Now you’ve changed to a diet of soft sand,
what’s this the world’s about.
That has your hat in oil.
It doesn’t leave you peace clean.
You need to be clean.
Of all the knowledge
I gave you
you haven’t come out of the pool yet.
Everything like a boy,
everywhere.

An interchange,
I went ahead and added it.
Get that space off your face.
A remote control
it’s pretty obvious.
You just succumb to influences.

We move towards a deeper circle.
Spirituality issues its day.
Have a plan to remember.
Drink this all day long
crash point to zero.
I would’ve held you all night.
He ran off before I was sleeping.
You should take this point home:
have a hand on desire
no reach there for Me.

To settle fell, interesting of a company member.
Some things are just powerful
and can even overshadow the divine rally.
You want to learn to hold your bread.
Move in the daytime as if I’m beside you.
Sleep as if I’m in your arms.
You choose a way
To put Me in your driving car
so that your thought lights up your process
in terms I am laid down
magnetism.

You have to believe.
My floor not has you sleeping.
Matter is your waking tool.
In this prison you see My consistency.
In My reach you are.

I would certainly want it so.
I’d like to be here.
I’d like to have.
You’ve heard it.
Now you must bring what you hear into your living room.
Focus on the heart.
We bring the soul around to the front.
As a soul you meet the higher stations.
I have given you in peace.
Now it is your work to bona fie its real.

Why didn’t he answer?
He went into the shop.
So I won’t hear what’s up there?
A heart sound
shinning through.
You want to know you’re sorry.
You have a map.
You want to find anything you just
begin to look for it.
Your need will determine here.

Like I said,
The more concentrated,
the more you are put together,
the more you are given room.

Don’t worry,
I know voice.
I will teach you how to find it.
Now give to Me
your managing equation,
what you snap to in your night of light,
your own accord.
The divine embodied in human everywhere
has given Me a name,
the divine in Man,
a good news.

Have a singing mixture.
Use a strategy.
You get the Overframe:
the knowledge
a divine beauty
sitting in his own
divine station
will give you.
Your soul chooses this answer.

A foul use here,
demons.
You need to study
and know the difference between a wake song
and a diabolical need.
One smells funny.
It has not the genuine concern.
A quiet demeanor
will be your living tool.

Normally I get off this tape,
this chariot wheel,
and become to you a living frame of deity
your day revolves around.
I am not your frame of worship.
There are two frames here.
God can be your encompassing reality,
your special program of worship.
Name has an order here.
He will grow larger,
eventually,
as understanding beckons.

Bona fide results of the first ticket:
you find God.
The second no one knows.
The One is this storybook,
a code no idea can crack.
We hear Him a personality in the hours,
that which sustains us,
a half-light nonetheless.

A mystery bigger than creation,
it is God’s tabernacle,
his field of worship.
Even consciousness cannot account for its sum.
There is no greater field of play.
The One is your absolving window.
Your wrong can find reason there.
In its totality quarter
it is the basis of all deed.

Don’t condemn your process to their hands:
we’ll make you pay for this.
They have nothing original to say.
Solution does not open its schoolbook to them.
The payment for your crime
you will dole out in your effort for change.
Such is the master code.
Your will to change is your effective tool and special look.
Regard the world with its purpose.
Come to the garden without this
and you will not enter the gate.

A circumstance is just an opportunity for its progress.
We manage defeat this way.
Understand the need for change
and it comes in your courtyard.
Walk it into your house.
I am its gardening arrangement,
the divine in your own smile.
Look to Me your divine rose.

You wondered a long time without an aim.
You got lost.
Society,
I went up to comfort her,
make her feel better.
This is the Principal speaking.

We don’t have the play station;
He has the play station.
You let the killer run lose among us.
I do not arrange his deed.
He is your order run amuck.
This is My witness.
Give change.

Go to talk with your grandmother,
a divine field book.
Don’t bend your knees before a wooden god.
Life is not your throne.
Let’s keep it
this is no ordinary game.
You are founded on ambush
to show you God in the impersonal hours.

Don’t walk again you’re going to fly.
Don’t worry about it.
There’s proof inside
where the heart of the question lay.
You need to come out of your canteen,
your desire’s arrangement.

I had a holding plug missing.
I couldn’t see for the pollution.
They’re calling you for fifty-nine.
That will be fifty-nine up there.
Wake up that number on you.
We arrive on healing number.
Your field of play is material wealth.
You fail your hours
you’ll have your hydrogen peroxide back.

Buddy this is it,
how to put your foot in the door.
You wanna fly folks
– come on –
through a divine opportunity.
This is exactly
the basis of all our arguments.
We don’t wanna promote any specific religion.
Problems result for everybody.

Yes but if you can process change
you can find you can be diversified.
There’s a unified answer.
You have something to read to us.
You tell us what it is you report on.
This is healing.

A healing outcast
is your ticket on change.
You took it,
the things he held dear:
family,
his country,
a place in society,
his hope.
Was to the point that They came,
divine beings,
and showed him how the rivers run.

He processed hope
that We gave him.
It’s like that.
A society,
from its outcast,
social change
will be brought into living picture.
You have a cornerstone here.

So much misunderstanding
when these things hit the streets.
A poem can be disruptive.
I tell them what’s wrong.
This is where I give back.
This is a pedophile’s field book.

I wonder,
all the lights and stuff,
will help the ignorant to see,
or you’ll hate me even more?
Duke,
all American,
I bring home the change,
strands of the common way.

 

A Hidden Resource Guide

On By Donny Lee DukeIn Dream Interpretation, Dreams, hynopompic state, hypnagogic state, lucid dreaming, Out of Body Experience, the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, the soul6 Comments
http://rebrn.com/re/minimalist-falling-into-blue-1714149/

by Donny Duke

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 the 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.

 

[i] https://acollaborationwiththeunknown.wordpress.com/the-epic-of-man/

[ii] https://harms-end.com/2016/07/31/youre-like-wow-that-really-was-enchanted-with-a-rock/

[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.

[v] http://www.shift.is/2015/03/whats-bigger-than-the-universe-hang-on-whats-bigger-than-everything/http://www.shift.is/2015/03/whats-bigger-than-the-universe-hang-on-whats-bigger-than-everything/

Postscript January 26, 2026: a few years back, one of my only students, Mithun, and I have only two, made this same journey, although it took him months, but he arrived at the same place I did. He too was tricked and fooled before he arrived. I venture forth that this, the well of soul, is a universal destination open to all of us if we have the conscious opening in sleep and dream to make it. Although we’d have to modify the scientific method to include non-material process, because we can’t reproduce dreams and inner experiences that other people have, I mean have them yourself or induce them in someone else, this journey, in its character, stages, and destination, can be reproduced in any dream laboratory on the Earth.

Mahakali On The Wall

On By Douglas M.In spirituality, sri aurobindoLeave a comment

Recently here at Harm’s End we were able to finally do something we’ve wanted to do for a while which is upgrade our satsung room with some dark blue carpet and a fresh coat of white paint on the walls. We also got some nice meditation cushions, and the final touch was some nice pictures of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo to hang on the walls.

To get the pictures Donny and I went to a place in town called Harpagon Workshop, which is a department of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and which has a very large photo gallery with thousands of pictures of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother of all different sizes. In addition to shopping for the satsung room, I was also on the lookout for one more picture for my room, one that would be directly across from me as I’m sitting in my chair. Shortly after we arrived at the gallery one picture really popped out at me of the Mother standing at the top of a staircase. I was drawn strongly to the picture, and thought it would be good one for my room.

Later on, as Donny and I were admiring the picture newly hung on my wall, he told me that this particular photo was the first image he ever saw of the Mother. It had been on the cover of a book called The Sunlit Path, which is a compilation of the Mother’s writings. I was also already familiar with the photo as well as that book, but Donny told me something I didn’t know about it, and that was that it was taken on the Kali Puja day when the Mother came down the stairs, and then gave blessings to all the ashramites. I found that very interesting since I had drawn the card that represents Mahakali1 that day from The Eternity Game, and I took it as confirmation that this indeed was the photo that was needed for my room. I also thought this could herald more involvement from that particular aspect of the Divine Shakti in my sadhana which is good news since the name of that card in The Eternity Game is ‘Power’ and its aspects are ‘Transformation’, ‘Rapidity’ and ‘Height.’ In the description of the card Medhananda states that:

Her way is a rapid transformation by the sudden and immediately effective removal of all obstacles opposing her divine will.2

For that to happen though:

she insists that we take our seat on the highest heights of our consciousness; only then can she shatter our limitations and smallness. Only when our aspiration mounts like a flame will she remove the enemies from our path.3

So getting Mahakali’s help isn’t easy, but maybe I’m nearing the point where that sort of decisive and irrevocable help is possible. I hope so. I did have one experience of Mahakali’s help a year or so ago on a day when I was caught up in a strong movement of anxiety. I had drawn the Mahakali card for that day and remembering that prompted me to call on her for help. It wasn’t instantaneous, but shortly after that the anxiety quickly lifted leaving me feeling peaceful. That wasn’t the end of my trouble with anxiety, but it showed me the possibility of Mahakali’s intervention.

It bears mentioning as an endnote to this post that after these events occurred I saw they would make a good article showing synchronicity, and had been planning to write it over the coming weekend. On Saturday I also drew the Mahakali card, which prompted me to follow through on writing the article, and I also took it as a sign that writing it was timely and fit with my process.

Notes and References

  1. Mahakali is one of the four aspects of the Divine Mother referred to by both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in their writings and talks.
  2. Medhananda, The Eternity Game, pg 53
  3. Ibid

 

An Arising Of Desire

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams, Inner Voice and Vision, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Recently I attended a conference called ‘Pain: Its Cause and Cure’ at the Sri Aurobindo Center For Advanced Research (SACAR) in Pondicherry India. I had arranged to stay at the SACAR guest house and arrived the evening before the conference began. While eating dinner I got to know a lady from Texas named Debbie who was attending the conference as well. I also took note of a pretty young Indian woman who came into the dining area briefly, but I didn’t actually meet her.

That night I had this dream:

I’m attending a lecture at the pain conference. I’m next to Debbie, though she looks much younger, and we just end up holding hands. I’m feeling desire and thinking we might hook up later. I end up resting my head on our clasped hands, but this puts my head behind a tall guy so I can’t see the PowerPoint presentation on the projector screen.

The dream was a little puzzling for me because, although Debbie was admittedly cute for her age (60), I didn’t really feel attracted to her sexually, though I liked her personality-wise. Anyway, at 9 a.m. we all went into the lecture hall and sat ourselves at two person desks. A very tall Indian woman sat down in the seat directly in front of me, effectively blocking my view of the screen, so that I had to lean to the side and peer around her in order to see it. I was struck by the exactness of the outer event matching what had happened in the dream, and I figured there was some meaning there, but I wasn’t sure what it might be.  Arriving a little late was the pretty young Indian woman from the night before, and as is often the case when such beauty is around, my vital wants to eat it through my eyes, sexual staring I call it. It’s an urge that still just comes, like a reflex even though there’s part of me that would gladly be rid of it. As I sat there listening to the speakers, the desire would come in waves, and I would repeatedly have to use my will to keep pulling myself away from it. Later that afternoon I found myself sitting at the same table as her at lunch and found out her name, I’ll call her N. in this article, but I didn’t talk much to her. Then that evening at dinner she arrived late, and she sat down at the table with me and another American man, Don. The three of us conversed for a little while, and I found her quite charming and sweet as well as pretty. There was something too about her vital that my vital really found appealing, and I could feel that vital thrill you experience when you’re interacting with someone you’re really attracted to. It’s a kind of feeding, one you can keep at bay, but I didn’t do such a good job of it here. This thing in her vital though wasn’t anything flirtatious or overtly sexual, but quite the opposite really. She was actually very much a lady, and if you give my vital the choice between the tart and the lady it will take the lady the majority of the time though perhaps not every time.

At some point I excused myself to go up to my room, and that’s when my vital problems really began. What happened was the vital latched onto the idea of inviting N. to my house so she could see the work I’m doing here with some young tamil adults that live in a multi apartment complex with me and my partner in the endeavor Donny. It’s a work that’s been going on for a number of years, and Donny I both feel that what our house needs now, beyond some changes and structure within it, is for people in the community here to come and see what we’re doing. Since I knew I was going to this pain conference at SACAR and would be mixing with a large group of people, I was on the lookout for potential prospects to invite.

So with N. my vital took that ball and ran with it with, producing waves of thoughts and fantasies about bringing her to the house. Most of the scenarios the vital was cooking up we’re just about being around and her taking in her vital energy the same way I had at dinner the night before, but there were to a lesser degree outright romantic and sexual thoughts and feelings. The morning of that second day at the conference it was hard to stay focused because of the vital tumult. I kept trying to reject it, and also to turn my attention away from it by focusing on the lecturers and what they were saying.  I’d succeed for a while and there’d be a space of clarity, but then another wave of it would come and it became quite apparent that my dream from two nights before, and the way my view of the screen was actually physically blocked the day before were foreshadowing this vital movement which was ‘blocking’ my view of the conference. And though the love interest in the dream was a young Debbie, it was N. it was referring to.

One thing that really helped though as these waves of desire would come was something Donny and I had been talking about just days before that had come from his muse which said:

What is a victory,
getting over a temptation?
Getting over a limitation1

These lines may not look like much at first glance, but the idea here is quite powerful. Looking at something as a temptation automatically gives it the association of badness, and creates a resistance or aversion to it that just makes it harder to throw out. Looking it as a limitation though takes that charge away from it. You can still see it for what it is, which is something getting in the way of one’s sadhana and not make excuses for it, but you can deal with it in a more calm and detached manner. Which is what I was able to do.

Now in addition to taking that attitude of a limitation towards the vital desire, I also tried to reason with the vital, pointing out things like the fact that having N. visit the house would mean wrestling with this desire, and the fact that even if she was game and I was willing to put a halt to twelve years of celibacy, my lower back problems would make it impossible to really enjoy intimacy with her or anyone else for that matter. I don’t remember exactly at what point in the day it happened, but there was a decisive moment where my vital basically said “Yeah, you’re right” and let go of the idea of bringing her over to the house. At that moment I felt something lift within me and instantly felt lighter and more clear to the point that when Donny came to visit me at the SACAR guest house late that evening he remarked that I seemed to be quite clear and focused. The thoughts and imaginings of bringing N. to the house still came a little bit, but the vital push and urgency that had been behind them was just a fraction of what it had been before.

The next day however it became apparent that while the vital had let go of the desire to invite N. to the house, it still hadn’t totally let go of the desire to be around her and to interact with her while the conference was still going on. During lunch an Austrian man and I spoke a little Spanish to each other, and N., who was also at our table, showed some interest by mentioning she really likes a Netflix series called Narcos which is full of Spanish. So I took that opportunity to teach her a few words in Spanish as a way to interact with her. That in itself may not have been inappropriate. You can do something like that in the right way and for the right reason, and when I woke up on the morning of the fourth and last day of the retreat I made a strong resolution not to follow the vital’s desire to interact with N. and to try and handle whatever interaction came up in the right way, i.e. without vitally eating.

What was amazing though was that after having made that resolution it seemed like every time I turned around, there she was. So I taught her a number of Spanish words that day as well as explained some concepts in Spanish such as gender and different words for the verb ‘to be’. I also talked about places I’d traveled in Latin America and she told me she had a sister that was living in Mexico. I tried not to vitally eat, but I don’t think I was completely successful. The truth is I still have things to learn regarding the subtleties of when I’m vitally eating or not eating when having these more casual interactions with someone I’m sexually attracted to. Overall though, I felt pretty good about things at the end of the day, felt like I’d been the friend she needed me to be and it seemed that her interest had been perked further not just in Spanish, but also in the possibility of traveling in Latin America. I wondered if maybe that’s something that will be important in her process. That’s just speculation though.

Be that as it may, when I got home from the conference and was reflecting on everything that had happened, I was initially a little disheartened since I hadn’t had the romantic/sexual thing come up that strongly in many years, didn’t think it actually could come up that strongly anymore. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised though. Even though I’ve put a lot of effort into breaking the habit of following the romantic/sexual impulse in all its forms in waking life, it’s still there. It’s also in dreams too, though outright sexual dreams and nocturnal emissions aren’t nearly as common as they used to be. When the romantic/sexual impulse does come up in dreams it’s usually just on the level of feeling and flirting where often there’s the potential for sex later if I can find myself alone with this person. Even these types of dreams aren’t so common anymore, but even if I were able to free my waking and dream life completely from these movements, they could still rise up from the subconscient according to Sri Aurobindo2. What I think it basically boils down to is that until you reach a certain turning point in the yoga these things will always have the potential to rise when given the right stimulus. And with N. I had a very strong stimulus both physically and vitally that was hitting on all cylinders as far as what gets me going sexually and romantically. I will say however that it didn’t get its hooks into me as badly as it has in the past, and I think that’s because of the effort I’ve put into breaking the habit of following that impulse over the course of many years, and also because mentally I understand I’m not going to get any lasting satisfaction from a romantic/sexual relationship.

Now of course it’s good that I didn’t get as carried away with the vital movement as I have in the past, but it seems like the process of getting free of these things is interminable, like the curve of a hyperbola which gets closer and closer to its asymptotes as it extends into infinity but doesn’t ever actually touch them. So what is the turning point? It seems to me it could be different things for different people. For some people it might be something really major like the vital being becoming fully converted and giving itself wholly to the divine instead of the pursuit of its desires, or the psychic being suddenly and irrevocably coming to the front. A letter I recently reread of Sri Aurobindo’s gives me reason to believe though that it can happen in a more subtle way. He tells us:

By constant effort and aspiration one can arrive at a turning point when the psychic asserts itself and what seems a very slight psychological change or reversal alters the whole balance of the nature.3

Now other people might read this differently than I do, but it doesn’t appear to me that he’s describing the psychic being coming completely forward in this quotation. I think what he’s talking about here is a turning point where the psychic being wouldn’t be fully out in front, but its influence would become more powerful than the resistance of the outer nature. Then it would only be a matter of time for things like the complete conversion of the vital, or the psychic being coming irrevocably forward to happen.

However that turning point happens though, you have to carry on with your effort and aspiration until you reach it, and that’s hard. I’m finding in my own case that the vital has become fairly neutral, and while it’s not opposing the sadhana much, it’s not putting its enthusiasm into it much either. It also gets discouraged and I’m finding the only way is to will myself forward despite movements of discouragement and loss of faith. It’s kind of like walking in the desert, and while you come across the occasional oasis, you wonder if you’re ever going to find your way out of it. I hope one day to be able to tell people what’s it like on the other side of that desert.

References

  1. Copyright Donny Duke
  2. ‘When the waking consciousness has renounced the indulgence of the sexual desires and impulses, these take refuge in the subconscient as impressions, memories, suppressed desires and come up in sleep as dreams and involuntary sleep emissions. If the waking consciousness is not itself clear, if, that is to say, though there is no physical indulgence, yet there are imaginations in the mind or desires in the vital or the body, then these dreams and emissions can be frequent. Even if the waking consciousness is clear, the subconscient emergences can still come for a time, but in time they diminish.’ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA Volume 31 – Letters on Yoga Volume 4, pg 526
  3. Sri Aurobindo, CWSA Volume 28 – Letters on Yoga Volume 1, pg 121

Bed Hopping With The Hostiles

On By Douglas M.In Dream Interpretation, Dreams1 Comment

About a week ago I had a dream where I was taking in a very beautiful mountain setting. When I awoke the next morning I felt a strong desire to get myself together and focused on the sadhana, which for me largely revolves around rejecting the unwanted thoughts and trying to keep the mind quiet.  I was able to build up a little momentum over the course of two days, and on the late evening of the second day I felt a little bit of calm and clearness open up inside me. It was nice because I haven’t had anything happen like that in a while, and it may have been what that mountain scene in my dream represented. A beautiful scene in nature can also have that effect of clearing you out on the inside.

Anyway I sat with the feeling  for a while, and then something odd happened before I went to bed.  Over the course of say 10 minutes there were around seven quick flickers of the power going out, but so fast it didn’t reset any of the clocks in the house. At first I wondered if was just my lamp, but on the third time or so I noticed my lava lamp was going out too. Now I know this isn’t some odd paranormal event I’m describing, but there was something queer about it, something that ‘tingled my spider sense’ so to speak.

So I went to bed and probably fell asleep around 11pm. I awoke a little after midnight to the sound of the smoke detector in my room chirping about every 30 seconds.  It does that when the battery gets low, and though it isn’t loud, it’s enough to keep you from falling asleep. I knew the detector would keep it up until the battery got changed, but rather than going to the garage and getting the ladder so I could change the battery, I decided to move to the guest bedroom for the night.  Once I got in there I  could still hear the chirping of the detector a little bit, but I figured if I put a pillow over my head that would muffle it enough that I could go back to sleep. Then strangely enough the chirping suddenly stopped. I decided though to stay in the guest bedroom in case it started doing it again and was able to fall asleep.

About an hour later I woke up from a rather obscure dream where I think I had been in bed in cataleptic trance (sleep paralysis), but not lucidly aware of that.  In the dream I could hear my parents outside the room fixing the smoke detector.  I was feeling a sense of unease and fear as I lay there, but without any specific cause.   At the end of the dream my mother came in and stood by the bed, and, still feeling the fear, I reached out and grabbed her arm for comfort.  I think it was right after that that I woke up.

Upon awakening I was still feeling the fear and didn’t want to open my eyes.  I figured a hostile force was trying to rattle me, and since the smoke detector was still keeping quiet, I went back to my room.  I really wanted to be back in my bed and next to the altar I have on my nightstand.  As I was getting back in bed I was thinking about my second altar on my computer desk as well as my collection of spiritual books, and how all three of those things added to the spiritual and protective atmosphere of the room.  I also thought about how in the guest room I’d been sleeping on top of the 3,000 plus comic books I’d collected as a teenager that are stored under the bed.  I realized those densely packed comic books we’re giving off a pretty low vital vibration.  Not as low perhaps as 3,000 porno magazines, but low enough that they degraded the atmosphere of the room and probably made things more conducive to a hostile influence.  That may sound far-fetched to some people, but allow me to share a quote that forever changed the way I look at books.  It’s from the book Nirvana: An Occult Experience by the Theosophist George Arundale.  He tells us:

I went the other day into one of our largest bookshops, and I found myself amidst a weird babel of sounds.  Every volume was vocal.  In each book was its author speaking his message – in some cases powerfully, clearly, upliftingly; in other cases, at the other extreme, vaguely, purposelessly, vulgarly, perhaps, often sordidly, or sometime with a well-chiseled form distressingly empty of purpose.  Each work was a sound-scheme, often a jarring sound-scheme, but sometimes a beautiful symphony.  Each book too, was a light-scheme, a dull light-scheme, a lurid light-scheme, a bright, clear light-scheme, now and then a gorgeous light-scheme.  I was not able to follow up this discovery, but I knew that books are alive, that some are in the savage state, and thence there is graded ascent in evolution to God-books, as the Scriptures, and others less than these, yet great.  I cannot pursue further this fascinating theme, but it will be realized that books are no longer mere tomes, they are living beings, for which their creators have serious responsibility, which speak and shed their influence around them.  A book in a room is a factor with which we have to reckon; a library is a potent force.1

Sri Aurobindo has pointed out in his letters that there are hostile forces standing ready to try and spoil any positive movement in the sadhana as well as the existence of mischievous vital physical entities that can do things like cause accidents to happen. In light of that, there does seem to be something to this idea of a gremlin which can cause mechanical or electronic problems, and I imagine a lot of people could relate a strange or bizarre occurrence with a mechanical or electronic device.  In fact, I just read a column the other day in one of our local papers where the writer talked about how her washing machine had been acting up but then went back to functioning normally after she prayed for it to start working again.  And the strangeness continued at our house too the following day with another smoke detector chirping for a few minutes before suddenly stopping.

Now to some people my theories about what happened here will just look like paranoid hogwash, but if you’re the type of person that is open to these ideas, and if I’ve communicated all this effectively, I think you’ll be able to see the possibility that something got into the atmosphere of the house and then set things up so I would retreat to the guest bedroom.  Whether it was something mischievous or hostile, or some combination of the two, I can’t say for sure, but the element of fear in my dream suggests something hostile to me. Why that hostile being or force didn’t try to attack me in my own room I don’t know, since I’ve had my share of brushes with the hostiles while sleeping in my own bed.  Maybe for some reason that night I wasn’t as vulnerable in my room.

Regardless I guess I got out of the guest bedroom before too much damage was done, since the next day I still had the strong urge to press on with the sadhana. Nothing really noteworthy happened on that day, but then on the fourth day after the mountain scene dream something else nice happened, and I found myself quite easily and spontaneously making the movement inwardly of remembering the divine and offering my work to the divine throughout the day.  It was so simple though; there were no bells and whistles about it, just a quiet and uncomplicated movement of devotion. It was a small opening of the heart chakra I believe and fit perfectly with the card I had drawn that day from Medhananda’s Eternity Game,2 which was ‘Heart’. That card represents the heart chakra, and like each card in the game it has four aspects. I usually pay attention to the aspect that is upright, and that day that aspect was ‘Simplicity.’  

The Heart Card
The Heart Card

Getting back to our main topic here I think I should point out the fact that most of the time nothing bad or scary happens to me when I find myself in cataleptic trance. While it’s true that hostile forces can come along and try to scare us or trick us in that state, the state itself is nothing to dread or be afraid of.  These hostile forces want us to be afraid of this state because you can have an out of body experience from there or, as I’ve found, very easily enter into a lucid dream. Now I can only speculate, but I think what happened in this case was hostile forces could see what was going on with me that day I experienced the calmness and clearness, perhaps saw that I was ripe to enter cataleptic trance or maybe even have a lucid dream, and they wanted to spoil any nice or uplifting dream experience I might have had. Or maybe the goal was to get me in the guest bedroom on top of those comic books and give me some bad dream experiences in an attempt to stifle the opening that was happening sadhana-wise. Or maybe they had both objectives.  How much they might have succeeded is impossible for me to say.  All I know is after my day of simplicity my four day sadhana rally came to an end, but that may not have been primarily due to hostile influences.  I feel these surges in the sadhana come from within, are cyclical and peter out or withdraw due to inner causes.  It’s natural part of the process, but at the same time not an excuse to be lax and just wait for the next sadhana rally to come.

So in closing I think the main lesson of this article is the hostiles are craftily standing by to throw a wrench in the works when they see any glimmer of light.  I don’t want to encourage anyone to obsess about this, but to just be aware of it and on one’s guard.  And if it comes to pass that they do knock you down, just get up, try to learn whatever lesson is there, and carry on.

Notes and References

  1. Nirvana An Occult Experience by G.S. Arundale pgs 174-175
  2. The Eternity Game is an oracle I use frequently that was created by Medhananda for the Integral Yoga.