A poem by Donny Lee Duke

One of the ones that let me in,
that touched my soul,
profound mailbox.
I came homeless
year after year after year.

We’re good.
We don’t understand your concept,
the jolt in the room.
Let’s keep busy
so we don’t have to reply.
Is this license
to just take the trouble to ignore someone?
Seldom I got a reply.

The root task
and how profound it is.
It’s indeed the world.
It’s indeed larger than the universe.
I can’t carve this out for you.
I can only sing.

I don’t know the Rumpelstiltskin of your life’s work.
Your struggles are a Banyan tree to me.
See the consciousness there?
It has handles on it.
Study books and thought process,
I don’t think you’ll arrive at the explanation of the universe.

Can we hold a tree?
What do we do with time?
How do we say the world to ourselves?
Do you hear the inner speech?
It’s spoken softly in so many inner ears.
You’re readin’ it.

It’s what you hold in your hands
in an ancient text of wisdom.
Not everyone has the fire.
Not everyone can read the text right.

And we’ve come back to your story:
not everyone has the inner fire,
though they long to see the universe as it is,
though they long to be more than what they are.
Can you grasp this?

You light it that way:
the object of your romance with time
the inner fire
to see the Invisible.

I think you’ve accredited universities with this task.
I think you’ve stopped at representations.
I think you’ve stopped at outer process.
Hidden meaning.
Self-doubt see
in your own blue pen.

Who am I cooking?
Jessica Frazier
the academic.
Have a little
finger pointing in your own direction.
The TVS fixed.
It was incredibly difficult.

Why do you believe in miracles?
I’m standing one.
You hear my measurements?
The boy in the yard.
Bigger then reality
I have not made them.

For years I’ve been sending emails to scientists and academics, or I’ve commented on a tweet of theirs, usually with links to something I’ve written involving inner exploration. Less than a handful of times have I gotten a reply, and when I have it’s just to express thanks for reading them, not to engage me over the importance of such experience. This is the latest example of such an email. If you’ve been reading my latest poems, I’m trying to show where we fail as a world. Here, it was not from reasons of moral outrage, but it was one of the titanic: the best minds aren’t. It was from an ‘expert’, i.e., a person influencing world opinion on an official level, in this case a person assigning meaning to the world, not listening to someone trying to get their attention, someone who just might have something valuable to add to the conversation. Click on the link at the end of the email, read the article, and tell me that’s just not possible.

[Subject] “Communicating with someone, and learning what they have to teach us…

learning to adapt our view to the information they give.” From your YouTube video Gadamer. Hello, I’ve just read your article in Psyche “Ancient Indian texts reveal the liberating power of metaphysics”. I’d like to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible please. “We can do something extraordinary: our mental parts can climb out of the window of the body, and up into the higher levels of reality.” What a wonderful statement worded so well, but are you speaking literally of actual hands on spiritual experience, or are you talking about using your imagination and having high thoughts? I think it’s the latter, and it’s precisely here your article doesn’t capture truth, that being what’s actually going on or has. “I might live in 2022 in Oxford, but I can share the experiences of persons in Thailand or the US, and imagine different lives I might have lived. With the help of scientists and philosophers, I understand levels of the cosmos that lie beyond the senses, and can access realities, values or ideas that cannot be destroyed with any mere physical body.” What it seems not only you are missing, but also the scientific establishment and the humanities, as university teaches them, is that it’s possible to have the experiences that the mystics (or metaphysians describe). They are not only basing their ideas on the use of their imagination or on their thoughts. Many if not most are basing them on firsthand experience. Furthermore, though beyond this email, the authors of the Upanishads and the Vedas did not compose their writings but heard them via the inner voice. Do you know the meaning of Agni in this context? In other words, the texts came whole and ready made from their inner vision, one or a few lines at a time, and they wrote them down, something not possible unless you’ve had the experiences the texts they wrote describe, what would open a rishi or seer to such inner vision.

Although I can give ample examples of the latter, the inner voice writing one’s seer-poetry (you can look that up if you want), I will only give an example of the heart of the matter of the email. It would be quite something if you even read it. There’s just so much vying for our attention, and something from out of the blue and from someone unknown, well, that’s usually what automatically gets sacrificed to the expediency of time:

The Spoiler
What’s bigger than the universe? Hang on, What’s bigger than everything?