Between Jerusalem I’m Sorry, Chapter 1

SIX DAY WAR. ISRAELI PARATROOPERS STAND IN FRONT OF THE WESTERN WALL IN JERUSALEM by David Rubinger (public domain)

Where White Puts Supremacy Last

On a bright day in Jerusalem in 1995, a young woman approached our little hunger strike camp like a Buddhist goddess, with her flowing orange robes, crew cut, and a face made out of sunshine, or so it seemed, and I was immediately enchanted. Walking straight up to Lars and I, my partner in the hunger strike, she deferred to us like we were kings, calling us hunger strikers like it was a title that meant we were God’s gift to the world, and we just ate it up, since we both secretly considered ourselves such a gift, and we gave her our complete attention, fell over ourselves to seat her there in the center of the world with us, fooled like everyone is by where our senses place us in the scheme of things, dead center. Hen-ya was a master at this disguise and was not aware she was wearing any, had lost herself completely in the part she played, a young Jewish woman defying the powers that be, embracing another religion, and daring to love everyone, but I could not see her self-ruse at the time so lost was I in mine.

I’d have followed her anywhere, and when she urged us to go to Safed after the strike, it was there I would go, Lars going back to Denmark for some soul searching, having his individual world somewhat altered by the intense clash with the world itself. He had, alone unto himself, considered himself the Mahdi of Islam, having converted in Iran and been treated special because he was a Caucasian convert, the only one around. Not understanding why he was the honored guest at every household he went to, all that special treatment went to his head, but the Golden Gate did not open to him when he touched it, when we were taping poems of mine on it one midnight standing on our tippy toes on Muslim gravestones, and it was supposed to open for the Mahdi according to some prophecies, and that had sort of rocked his secret ‘I am the one’ world, not to mention someone else in his face constantly reminding him others saw themselves at the center of the world too. That person was me.

Returning to the present of this story, it happened that after the strike, which wasn’t a real hunger strike because we drank milk and vegetable puree, although we technically didn’t eat anything, everyone went their separate ways except Zeke and I, who went with Hen-ya to Safed. Although Lars and I were the only ones not eating, by the time we finished, Easter and Passover of that year, 1995, a small band of people had joined us at our camp. Most were backpackers who wanted to be part of something interesting, but two were perpetual pilgrims who had made careers vagabonding the Holy Land: Zeke, a Russian Jew, Torah scholar, and Kabbalist in his 5o’s, and Andre, a self-proclaimed Catholic monk from French speaking Belgium just turning 30, who figures in the story from Tongues “Without a Miracle a Few Fools Salvaged Hope”. It was Zeke who had persuaded us to stay in our camp early on when a group of young Palestinian men had threatened to kill us if we didn’t leave, our test of fire during our action. It’s not an absolute rule of world action, but it happens often enough to be a guideline: when you draw a definite line in this world, stand up for anything with enough force, your resolve will be tested. Watch what happens with anyone that proclaims they love the world: someone will come along that shows them to be a hypocrite. Sorry Ari.

Safed, in the north of Israel in the Galilee district, is the highest city in Israel and is considered a center of Kabbalistic learning, or became so after 1492 when Jews were expelled from Spain, but my search there for mystical practice yielded no results, only what seemed to me a confusion between that and being ultra-orthodox, although my search was admittedly limited by language and culture. I slept in the old cemetery and in the bushes of a small park in the artist’s quarter, spending only three or four nights inside in my month or so there. I was used to that since I’d been sleeping outside during the three weeks of the strike, but of course I wanted to be indoors. Zeke, being Jewish, easily found houses to sleep at. My dream life was quite enhanced in Safed, and not only was there a lot of lucidity but also very deep dreaming, and it was apparent to me that the location was quite conducive to inner exploration, either because it had been used for such over a long period of time or because it was just naturally situated to be such, like an unusual mountaintop in a region or a strange and special place in a natural area, but it’s probable it’s for both reasons.

It was in Safed that I came to terms with my inexplicable Jewish identity that had been coming up in dream for years. I reasoned that maybe it was because I was circumcised, but that wasn’t sufficient to explain it to myself. It felt more substantial than just having a conditioned penis. While there I explored the possibility of converting, after having a powerful lucid dream about what Jewish identity meant. It was set in some European city sometime before WWII, judging from the 1930’s style clothes. I walked into a city square, a plain one surrounded by brick buildings without any grass. There was a large pile of kippahs about a meter high in the center where the fountain usually is in a square. After a moment of deliberation, I took one off the pile and put it on. As I did, a young, married Jewish couple walked by arm in arm, and the man saw I’d put on the kippah, and he said, ”You know what that means don’t you, putting on a kippah? It means you’re a Jew, and that means being part of a people.” The sense was not any kippah would fulfill that for me, only one from that pile. That I was lucid added a lot more weight to my decision, as though my waking self had made it, not only my dreambody.

Of course that I was surrounded by young Jewish Americans exploring their Jewish identity aided my feeling to convert, not to mention where I was, but I ultimately decided against it because I didn’t want to become an orthodox Jew, which was at that moment in Israel the only way to become Jewish, and there were two kibbutzes that specialized in that, where I’d go if I converted. Besides, it wasn’t the religion I identified with, not in the least; it was the people part of it that I identified with, but that’s what makes one’s Jewish identity so difficult to explore: can you be a Jew and not practice Judaism? Or put differently: can you separate Judaism from being Jewish? That’s a question that probably has as many answers as there are Jews, but all I knew was that if you want to convert you have to go through the religious side, and I didn’t want to do that nor had that calling. The real reason I didn’t convert, unbeknownst to me at the time, however, was I was being called to another path. To this day, my Jewish identity still comes up in dream, but I know now where it’s coming from, but you won’t easily believe it unless you hear how it fits into my life story.

I was born in 1961 into a White Protestant lower class family that became middle class during my early adolescence, after a divorce and split. The identifiers, i.e., what group identities were most stressed while my ego was being formed, were being a Duke, White, American, Texan, southern, and male. I should mention that the southern identification was with the South of the Civil War, as the Confederate flag, heroes, and symbols of the South peppered my childhood world. My father regularly schooled me on the inferiority of both non-Whites and women, and it was his attitude in regards to the latter that made my mom ultimately divorce him when I was six. Although a racist and bigot, he was not anti-Semitic, and I never heard him belittle Jews. He greatly admired Israel, and it was a country regularly put before me as deserving of respect, mainly because it was able to defend itself so well against what seemed overwhelming odds.

I remember once he was driving the family down the road, right before the divorce and right after the Six-Day War, and he was turning his head back and talking to me in the backseat, as he did often while driving, as though my mom and sister weren’t even there, and he was telling me about Israel, how it had been surrounded on every side since its birth, by nations that wanted to wipe it out, and it had just beat them all again. That, he told me, was a nation to admire.

He didn’t, however respect Black people. He taught me often that African Americans were an inferior race, were little more than monkeys. He called them niggers. So did, inceidentally, every other White person I knew except my teachers at school and the clergy of our church. One day, when I was four or five, and we were getting out of the car to go to the house, I saw the only Black family on our street standing in front of their house, a couple of houses down from ours, just the mom and dad, and I went up to them and told them “my daddy said you were monkeys,” said it loudly and proudly. They looked a bit stricken but didn’t say anything. I’ll never forget them standing there silently looking at me the way they did. They weren’t mad and didn’t even seem offended. They looked very sad and looked at me like you’d look at a small child that didn’t know what he was saying. It did not match with the behavior of monkeys, and even then I could sense a discrepancy, and I teetered a moment looking at what I now know was their humanity, what it was they were showing to me, but then I marched back to my family, thinking my dad would be proud of me. He was embarrassed, as was my mom. I didn’t understand why he was. After all, he’d taught me that so confidently and righteously. He didn’t scold me, but he did tell me that I wasn’t to do that to Black people. Our neighborhood of Southpark was in the preceding years to experience what was called back then White flight, and in time the racial demographics changed completely from a predominantly White neighborhood to a predominantly Black one.

It would bear mentioning that among the kids that I played with on my street, Southmund, and I lived at 5918, we all identified with the Rebels and not the Yankees, as the Civil War was a common theme of our kid talk, like it’d just happened a few years back. I do not know, nor can remember, why, except to say that the Confederacy was such a part of our culture. Once I told my older sister Gwen that I liked the Yankees, and I always secretly identified with them, since I liked the blue uniforms better and the fact they were Americans, and I really identified with being an American. Gwen said she’d tell Pepal, my father’s father, who owned and worked a small farm in East Texas, one I’d live on as an older child. I remember how serious she was—you know how kids are—and how afraid I was that she’d tell Pepal, as if it would’ve gotten me in big trouble. I immediately took it back and said I liked the Rebels.

When I’d return to Houston after living on the farm, I’d be an avid reader, and I liked to read war stories mostly, and on the war shelf in my school, George A. Thompson Intermediate, there were biographies of all the Confederate heroes, and I read every one of them. There weren’t many biographies of Union heroes that I remember. There was, however, a book I kept passing over, because it was about a young Union soldier, and I actually felt guilty to even leaf through its pages, like someone would see me and tell someone, the historical novel Rifles For Watie. It turned out to be the best book I read about war while in that school. With such an obvious effort to keep the Confederacy’s memory alive in a school library, you would not wonder over the fact that the city of Pasadena, Texas, whose school district I attended, had a sign at each of its city limits well into the 60’s that read, “Nigger don’t get caught here when the sun goes down.” It also had a KKK bookstore that stayed open until the end of the 70’s. More than one kid in my high school went there to get material for book reports. I visited it when I was 17, and, although I was of the cowboy crowd, called KIKKers in my high school because of the country and western radio station KIKK that the cowboy crowd listened to, I felt as though I was in enemy territory and looked at the guy behind the counter as a goon. I went there with my two best friends at the time, both KIKKers, and they felt the same way. The book reports, too, were not pro KKK. There’s a hard thing to get across here, and that is, although people of my immediate culture were racist and still identified with the Confederacy, and even the popular country radio station’s call sign sounds a lot like KKK, most anyone I was ever around growing up didn’t like the KKK itself, did not take their ill will towards Blacks that far, not even my racist father.

Although racism against Blacks was a common feature growing up, and I went to school with many Black children, who, however, made up a small minority of the schools I went to in and around Houston, I didn’t encounter much anti-Semitism, other than I’d hear someone being called a Jew if they were stingy with money, which is of course still anti-Sematic, and there was only one Jewish person that I remember in elementary school, Kelso Elementary (a part of H.I.S.D.), a girl who sat beside in second grade, but I never saw her harassed by the other kids or singled out by the teacher for being Jewish, and I knew that she was Jewish because she talked about it often, as it was such a part of her identity. I didn’t look at her any differently than if she were Presbyterian or something, as my family were Baptists. I remember that she was quite headstrong for a girl, vocal and not hesitant to stand up for herself, and we clashed along gender lines, as per dad’s indoctrination. I actually had a crush on her that I never could quite admit to myself, and I was a romantic lad, had had girlfriends since kindergarten.

In high school I had a Jewish girlfriend with those attributes, Rachael, but she had converted to Christianity, something strongly opposed by her family, and I faced off with her older brother a couple of times over it (she and I were 15 and freshmen), but I just thought he and his family were ignorant of the truth, since at that time I was a ‘Jesus person’, (Jesus freak to my classmates), that is, fanatically devout and evangelical, and so in my mind Christianity was the only true religion. But I did begin to understand that being Jewish meant more than being simply a Presbyterian or such, and that there was something stronger about being Jewish than at that time I could put my finger on.

I don’t remember when I first heard about the Holocaust, or realized what I’d been seeing in the media and whatnot all my life in regards to it was an event called the Holocaust, but I do remember, once that realization came, that I was baffled as to why Jews would be singled out. Hitler and his henchmen were in my mind the face of evil itself, and it was the same for my society, as this was only the 60’s, and WWII was yet fresh in the Western collective mind. When my reason was sufficiently developed, I attributed it to Hitler’s madness and the insane evil of the Nazis, but of course my reason was informed by my society. As I got older I began to understand the need in human society for scapegoats, and the more authoritarian a society the more violent would be the singling out of scapegoats, and, as I saw it, Jews in Germany at the time were the most convenient target.

That is certainly true, but could the willingness to accept them as the scapegoat have anything to do with the behavior and/or attitude of Jews themselves? What we have lost in the Western time spirit’s adamant directive against blaming the victim is the whole picture behind any occurrence of people harming other people, and I must say the issue here isn’t just harm but attempted genocide, which is all the more reason to be open to seeing the whole of the matter: so it doesn’t happen again, to any people, and that it has and continues to this day may have something to do with the fact that we hold the victim aboslute in their innocence of becoming and being the victim, will not admit any ‘fault’ on their part that might’ve made them targets in the first place. Wearing kid gloves, with an attitude of respect, I aim to question Jewish bigotry in the light of the persecution Jews have faced. Don’t count me wrong. I’m of the opinion there is no justification for persecuting anybody. Just listen.

In college I worked for three years as a doorman, valet, and concierge for a high-rise condo complex in Houston, Four Leaf Towers, and many of the residents were Jewish. I was an employee popular with the residents, and I was well taken care of, although I had to pay the price of my privacy, as I’ll explain later. Working graveyard, I was an ear for some who had no one else to talk to about things, and one of the residents who came regularly to talk was a concentration camp survivor. He never talked directly about his experiences in the camp, but he showed me his tattoo, as did others there. They were, in my mind, people to care for and listen to. As an undergrad minoring in History, I’d come across many firsthand accounts of the Holocaust in my studies, as part of my class work and what I pursued on my own, that event in history standing out to me as holding some key to our evil that, if we could find it, could possibly show us how to heal human evil itself.

It’s pertinent to the story to mention here that during those three years of employment there I was a post-baccalaureate studying Classical Greek at the University of Houston. I had no major but did have a focus, once, that is, I dropped my plans to do graduate work in the History of Science. I wanted to learn, which was a project of self-study, the process of both individual ego transcription and how we became human beings apart from other animals in the first place, where human identity came from and how it’s continued with each child we have. Greek was a doorway into the ancient world as well as a means whereby I learned to think, as learning that language broadened and deepened my ability to think, and think creatively, as much of ancient Greek writing of significance is poetry. It also helped keep me, along with my job, grounded in the outer world.

It was during that time I had a spiritual experience that rearranged the identifiers in my ego, or a series of experiences I should say (and include in that metaphysical experiences) that showed me we not only share a field of consciousness, are connected to one another in our inner lives, and communicate with each other therein, but that we also share identity, and my racial, familial, national, religious, regional and gender identities became flimsy things only skin deep, not who or what I was, although I am still influenced by them. Focused on the inmost feelings of another human being around the world is how I might put what it’s like to identify with humanity as whole, and it’s not a decision I made that I try and live up to; it’s who I feel I am, a human being first and foremost, here in the flesh among human groupings that is, however much I fail to treat everyone with the same importance I give myself, as my ego has not been surpassed, just rearranged, where humanity has become the group I identify with as opposed to some grouping within humanity.

It’s this identity I took to Israel, one human-wide despite my failings, and I was very surprised to be discriminated against by Jews because I wasn’t Jewish, just about every time I turned around, as I’d naively thought that Jews, because they had been discriminated against so harshly and for so long, would not be prejudiced against anyone. Chalk it up to not understanding human nature, how we tend to become victimizers if we’ve been victimized, turn around and find our own scapegoats if we’ve been scapegoated. It’s important to mention that I knew next to nothing of the treatment of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis (not all Israelis) until I heard and saw this firsthand in Israel.

It’s not easy to identify the problem, simpler to assign blame to this people or that, but once you see the problem it becomes rather obvious, like the snake you didn’t see in the grass in front of you: humanity is divided into groups, along many lines, racial, religious, national, regional, gender, etc., the group being part of the very identity of the individuals in it, stressed by ritual and whatnot to every child from birth onwards, and each group puts itself before the other groups, not always in theory but how it happens in practice, and no group identifies with humanity as a whole more than it identifies with itself, puts humanity before itself in importance, acts in the best interests of humanity at the expense of itself when faced with a choice of putting one before the other. If you stop and consider this for some time, recognizing that the overlay of the ideal to ‘treat everyone equally’ is only that, an overlay, not how either you or anyone else always or even often behave, the problem will become crystal clear. It will be the solution we’re looking at in that clarity.

“You’ve got to be kidding me Zeke. Human unity means nothing to you when it comes to your Jewishness? You’re a Jew before anything, feel you’re one more than a human being?” I was exasperated at him, having just been abandoned by him for the second time in a moment of need, when I was being discriminated against because I wasn’t a Jew, and one of the main topics of our conversation had been, up to that point, the ideal of human unity. We were in Safed, standing near the back wall of the artist’s quarter, having gone there so not to be heard, as he knew I had a bone to pick with him about not being Jewish. On the other side of the wall was the cemetery, which was quite large and occupied a downward slope of the mountain. The city was on the top of the mountain, which wasn’t like mountain mountain, with ragged slopes towering to the sky, but you wouldn’t call it a hill either.

“Why yes of course,” he said with the same sweet smile he always wore. That’s just what I couldn’t get over, how equal he seemed to all things, was a person you couldn’t make mad or even offend, did not ride the usual emotional rollercoaster most of us ride, although he did get a little upset when, in the chaos of our camp being temporarily turned up-side down by the aforementioned Palestinians who’d come to threaten us with being murdered, all his Hebrew dictionaries and references were stolen. A short, little, skinny man with an almost perpetual happy face, offset somewhat by peering eyes intently regarding the world, he was the first person to give me an email address, as he used the net back then, and I remember thinking how nerdy he was, how I’d never use such a thing to communicate with him or anyone else, ignorant at that time like most were of how the net would soon become the preferred postal service of humanity, would become virtually the world for many if not most of the literate among us. Here, however, with his blatant racism, what I’d come to call religious racism upon leaving Safed, he was neither being equal nor pioneering. What he’d been was a coward.

“You don’t think that’s wrong?” I asked.

“Morality has nothing to do with it. It’s a matter of what it means to be Jewish.”

“Even when it means just standing there and letting your friend be treated like a dog? You were such a coward, and that’s the second time.” It had happened that we went to a Moshav on Shabbot, near the time of the second shabbis meal, the big dinner of the week. I’d been taunted from the moment the men there learned I wasn’t Jewish, young men, native Israelis, who held me in such contempt I could feel it assaulting me like blows. They had started out by asking me if I liked Wagner, and not wanting to show my ignorance of Classical music, not knowing Wagner was greatly liked by the Nazis, and that I was being asked the question to see if I identified with the Nazis, I didn’t answer right away. My hesitation they took for a yes. Finally I said I didn’t know the composer, but it didn’t matter what I said. They assumed all non-Jews were Nazi-like in their hatred of Jews, and here was a non-Jew, a Nazi-lover as they saw me, and so I got blasted with their hatred, the kind that uses the power of the sneer and cruel laugh as opposed to actual blows, but it hurt nonetheless.

I had looked to Zeke and my other friends who came with us for some support, which included the all-compassionate Hen-ya, but they ignored my eyes asking for help, just sort of looked down shuffling their feet and such. I was bewildered, as I hadn’t expected this, could not make any sense of it, not only the ridicule but my ‘friends’ not standing up for me. The men rudely told me I couldn’t eat there in the house with everyone else, had to eat in the barn, and still my friends didn’t say a word, and to the barn I went, feeling like a whipped dog. Lucky for me they had an omega member, as all human groups do, a non-native Israeli from New York, older than the others. He lived in the barn, and we shared dinner together. He told me not to let it bother me, as that’s the way things were, but I could see he wasn’t too happy about his low position in the group. It happened that he had all the volumes of The Zohar there in the barn, the basic authority on the Kabbalah, although people I asked about the Kabbalah were adamant about it not being in a book. After we ate, I asked him some questions about the books as I flipped through them, and then we talked some of mystical experience, which he didn’t have, or none really he could count on his fingers, he becoming intrigued at mine, as I knew he would. I guess I bragged to feel bigger than being put in the barn made me feel, but I was a braggart in the best of circumstances.

The first time Zeke abandoned me was while we were still in Jerusalem, just before we posted my poems all around the Temple Mount, as it’s known to the Jews at least. It was just past dark, again on Shabbot, and we were sitting on a tourist bench inside the ruins of a Christian church right above the Wailing Wall. It’s hard to get a picture of the surroundings on the black and white of this page, but it was a bit like being back in Biblical times, the way the darkness meshed with the ancient scene in the seat of my feelings. I was explaining the meaning of a couple of my poems, when out of nowhere there appeared four or five men dressed in black wearing the kind of hat men wore in the 40’s, looking to me like the Gestapo. I’m sorry, but that’s the way they looked to me in that moment, as they wore that attitude. They were angry and asking if I were trying to convert Zeke to Christianity. They spoke good English. Stumbling on my words, I managed to blurt out that I was just showing my friend my poems. One of them snatched the poem I was reading out of my hand and read over it a few seconds and proclaimed, “This is gibberish!” It was the poem “Speaking of the Devil”. I could say here: “and speak of the devil,” but the irony isn’t lost to you, or is it? That he considered it nonsense and hence not a threat to his religion got me off the hook, but his pronouncement on the poem rather stung. Then they turned and questioned Zeke, very kindly, as though talking to a child, as they recognized him as being Jewish, but they had to confirm that. They then asked him to come with them to dinner, to their house, to share in the Shabbis meal, and I was sure he’d say no, so as not to abandon me, but I was surprised to find his face light up with an immediate bright yes, and off they went, leaving me alone in the dark with my poems in hand and wondering over exactly what had just happened.

Partly because of these reasons and also because it was the happening place in Safed for young people at that time, I began to hang out less with Zeke and Hen-ya and more at Avraham’s art studio, which was in the artist’s quarter of the old city. It had been a large Arab house, which consisted of a main house, courtyard, and a couple of out buildings surrounded by a wall. In 1948 all the Arab inhabitants of Safed had fled, after a plan to kill all the Jewish inhabitants on the part of the Arab Liberation Army had failed, leaving the former inhabitants’ homes open for Israelis. The now art studio and home of Avraham was one of these. Of course it certainly helped my inclination to hang out there that most of the young people, including Avraham, were fellow Americans.

A common language and culture are powerful magnets, and they are not wrong magnets, as neither are the magnets of a common race or religion, or gender or sexuality for that matter. It’s when a magnet sees itself and its members as the only real human beings, or the most important, that it becomes a magnet that’s a force that acts, however slightly, to destroy humanity and not ensure our survival. Up to this point in our history we’ve had a world that could contain this ignorance of which I speak, putting a grouping within humanity first and not humanity itself, at, however, a huge cost, which is as plain as the nose on our face. We’re rapidly approaching the point where the world cannot sustain us separated in this ignorance of the superiority of our group, which also should be as plain as the nose on our face. Let us not let it become the writing on the wall, but, knowing us, it will. That won’t be the end of the world though; it’s our usual call to action: we have no choice.

Avraham was a young man from America who had made Aliyha, which means he came to Israel declaring himself Jewish and thereby was more or less automatically accepted as a citizen, once his Jewish identity was verified, to say it concisely. I don’t remember where in the States he was from, but I don’t believe it was New York or New Jersey, like most of the young Jews I met there. He was a struggling artist supported by his parents, who lived in America and came to visit him while I was there. They were quite rich, how Avraham could swing having a studio. His canvases consisted of collages of cut out Hebrew letters and Jewish symbols with a dab of painting here and there, nothing even remotely resembling art, but, as he was the man, the one you saw for a shower, a meal, a hangout spot or whatnot, you didn’t make negative comments on his work, and most just didn’t say anything. He was quite tall and rather slender, youthful looking, with dark hair and eyes but a friendly and open face that smiled easily but could get wrapped up in a frown just as easily, not so much a frown on others, the kind of frown that tried to deal with adverse circumstance, and that’s what I’ll say about him, he tried.

Whatever talent you had, the way the place was scheduled, you could sit in the courtyard at a certain time of day and show it to a small audience, the regulars hanging out there, which consisted mainly of young American Jews who’d made Aliyha and lived nearby and ones that had been just passing through on their tour of Israel but had decided to stay awhile because of the happening scene. Non-Jews were welcome to show their stuff too, and at that moment it seemed no distinction was made between Jew and non, but that would change in the days ahead, partly because of my poetry and for reasons that became apparent later. I had read a couple of poems of mine in that venue and was so enthusiastic about my poetry and performing it (whether it has any poetic merit or not, and I’m now inclined to say no or not much), I managed to convince Avraham and the ‘core members’ to allow me to do organize a poetry reading in the courtyard, where I’d be the MC and a poet reading his own poems.

I called the reading Noise From the Innerwho, and I’d started it as a monthly gathering in the veteran’s center of the small American town I’d been exiled from, Garberville, California, what I speak of in the Tongues series. I was a cross between the town prophet and town fool, more emphasis on the latter I see now in my later years, where I’m still the fool, jumping up and down and waving on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Medium, and Internet Archive saying, “I’m still here!” You aren’t liable to give me a medal.

The poetry reading was a monthly show I put together mainly with the homeless population of Garberville, but poets also came to read from the general population. It was there I first began taping up poems of mine around town, on bulletin boards and in front of places significant to the community, doing that twice before I had to leave town in the dead of night, a public fall that gave rise to the journey of redemption the Tongues story wags on, a story the town never heard, a redemption that never happened. While all of human society would at this moment disagree with me, it takes the support of a community to bring a person out of their bad in the same spirit it takes a village to raise a child.

Even before the reading in Safed, I’d begun to clash with people over not being Jewish, since I was quite present in their circle, unlike the other non-Jews, who showed up one day and were gone the next, and it wasn’t like there were many of them either. With Zeke’s help I’d gotten a backbreaking part time job removing large stones from old abandoned houses that lined a street near there, not getting paid enough to stay in a guesthouse or hotel, just enough not to be a beggar. My afternoons and evenings were spent with the crowd at the studio, my fellow Americans, who were mainly there to explore the religious side of being Jewish, and so the Torah and Talmud were major topics of conversation as well was what it meant to practice daily being a religious Jew, an orthodox Jew but not an ultra-orthodox one, not a Hasidic Jew. They were learning to observe Jewish law, all 613 of them, although in my understanding some of the laws were for olden times and could not easily be applied to the modern day. In such a circle of course the non-Jew would be a bit of a problem. Most had had a secular university education, which was clashing with their adoption of such strict religious beliefs, internal clashes which added to the clash they had with me, although I did not try and dissuade them from becoming religious and observing their law, as I was torn at that time over the question to be or Jew or not to be. What I did wrong was just be my mystical, bragging self.

At that time, and for a long time in my adult life I am sorry to say, I wore my metaphysical and spiritual experiences like merit badges and readily proclaimed them to anyone who spoke with me of anything religious or spiritual. If that wasn’t enough, those experiences topped anyone else’s I had ever encountered in person (I am sorry but what can I say?), and I regularly had lucid dreams, and every so often out of body experiences, where I explored reality with a passion, always having a question to ask or task to complete when I got my conscious will online in sleep. Even most of my ‘unconscious’ dreams were quite vivid and interesting stories in themselves, and anyone around me when I woke up got an earful of what I’d experienced during sleep, although I was also keenly interested in what whomever had experienced, and being around me meant talking about your dreams and things first thing in the morning. If you didn’t remember your dreams or they weren’t all that lustrous, then you could not help but feel a little outshined, quite inadequate I’d imagine. I’m sorry.

I was oblivious to this so wrapped up I was in being me. I’ve since learned it’s really our most basic difficulty in relating to one another, one I yet grapple with, what it is about human relations, or our relations with other forms of life, that’s the stick in the mud. I’m talking about the weird and enigmatic way we are situated here on earth, so common we don’t even question it, where our senses put us in the center of the world with a vivid inner life environing everything our senses engage, but we don’t hear or see the inner life of others (not directly that is), neither feel their bodily pain nor pleasure, only our own, certainly don’t see others sharing the center of the world with us a center unto themselves, see in the sense of know it because that’s how we experience it, however much we can infer others do by how obvious it is that they do. When you add all that up you get a world where it’s not only not easy to love your neighbor as yourself but also damn hard to see any and everyone as you see yourself: centrally placed. You get a world where we can turn our backs to one another at the drop of a hat, kill each other over the turn of a phrase, or just sit and spout about ourselves at the expense of others.

Although I used some Christian symbols in my poetry, I’d left Christianity, had quite suddenly put my Bible down at 17, realizing religion was just a set of clothes I’d put on and not a good stand in for an actual relationship with God, God being something or someone I still believed in. It was just religion I rejected. But about three years later, at 21, going out the door of an aircraft as a Green Beret in the army, I realized I hadn’t done the usual prayer and rededication to Christ before I jumped as I always did, no matter how strongly I’d resolved not to do that before going out the door; I realized I’d fully become an atheist, what I was by that time (1982) except at those scary moments in an aircraft seconds before a jump. Only God knows if there are any atheists in foxholes, but I’d imagine so, although in the army I never heard a shot fired in anger and can only reason there are. In any event, being an atheist notwithstanding, I continued to question the makeup of my reality, in my inner life as well as in my outer, explore both with a passion that enabled me to surpass the normal limits. As my muse says, “Passionate people alter space.” And so I didn’t remain an atheist, as I don’t think anyone would if they went out of the bounds of everyday life, and it was God they went out there to find, but neither did I simply just decide by my reason or emotion that God is, did not use belief. What initiated those three years of metaphysical and spiritual experiences I’ve spoken about, that happened before my trip to Israel, to place us in the story, was going beyond the forms of our world and encountering, with my very own eyes, a very different answer to the question of God.

The rule moves on and you need love— [line heard sung]
a holistic speaker.
Let's not damage Jews.
They're everywhere.
They're so much of ourselves.
We get bigger all the time.
We need to understand somethin':
you won't find a separate people.
They don't exist.
We are humanity.
A group exists in that,
and that's its very nature,
no matter how much they conceive themselves a separate group.
Our world depends on this.
You hear humanity?
We need each other,
and a people survives on that,
great the people are.

Next post:

Chapter 2
Questions by the Moon

Between Jerusalem I’m Sorry

Cover art by me, photo by Douglas, Star of David via Wikipedia Commons by Midnightcomm, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, Sri Aurobindo’s symbol via Wikipedia Commons (public domain)

From Safed, Israel, the book’s primary setting, I tell the story of my life, in terms of inner and spiritual experiences, and also of my shadow, in both prose and poetry, doing that with an almost constant eye on racism, from the perspective of a White boy growing up in the 60s and 70s in the South of the U. S. and of a non-Jewish adventure traveler in Israel in the mid 90s, the former where I am the racist, the latter where I’m discriminated against. In light of all that, I examine the scope of reality, inner exploration, the human soul, enlightenment, religious orthodoxy, the heavens and the hells, the demonic and the divine, how we became distinct from other animals, the development of the ego in humanity as a whole and in every child born, Jewish Identity, Israel, The Green Berets, tactical nuclear weapons, the Holocaust, the healing of human evil, LSD, human unity, the International Township of Auroville, taking back the world from government overreach, the coming evolutionary change in humanity, the inspiration of poetry, and the purpose of dog. You in?

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Between Jerusalem I’m Sorry, Epilogue

Me, photo by Nitish

Epilogue in Ideas

Would the Jews inherent the Earth and will Jerusalem be the center of the world? Now it’s time to put two and two together. As I told that Jewish Messiah not-wannabe in King’s Cafeteria, every human being on the planet will be the Messiah, but I’ll add not now, and I’ll have to make exceptions and exemptions, as in any movement Nature undergoes. We are evolving to a higher type, and it will take thousands of years to arrive at our supramental selves manifested here on earth in earthen bodies flexible to forever, but not exactly immortal bodies, give or take thousands of years. So what gives, why even talk about it now? It won’t happen in one sudden go. Many stages have to come to pass before that comes to pass. It’s just time to start taking about it as a world and begin working towards enlightenment and the soul change, as a species and not just as individuals. Low and behold, we have the net now. Get ahold of its horns, did you think only mammon will do that?

We have this tendency, born from being able to hold only one idea in our minds at the same time, to figure too that every human being has the same ultimate goal, and you can say that, as you can just about say anything and capture something of the truth, like Jews are the alphas in Western society, but each soul, one though it is with every other soul and the world soul, has its own destiny in world process, and some may choose to enter Nirvana, some some Heaven of an ideal, for some long sojourn, and some even to become Hostile beings, for however long that happens and however rare that is, if that is actually possible, and the list isn’t exhausted. It’s a soul thing and not some choice ego’s incarnated in a body make. I think, though, we all make it back here. Where is here? That’s the point, isn’t it?

The Jews have had a lot to do with the necessity of moving humanity into or at least closer to an individuality more centered on its own fulfillment than on the group’s and not only more focused on the outer world but almost exclusively so. That Jews perhaps have the strongest group identity on the planet gives this its go. It was an extreme necessary in order to move back to a balance, because the opposite extreme was in play, no real individuality to speak of and an outer world sitting there almost exclusively on the superstitions of the inner. Jews will not have a lot to do, or not more than any other people, with the necessity of moving on from the extreme of the industrialized world back into an equal inner world focus and group focus, albeit now as individuals, neither more important than the group nor less, and the same can be said about the inner and outer world emphasis—the actual arrangement each circumstantial need would determine. See the flexibility?

Underneath it all, in all this talk of world process and this, that, and the other, I’m trying to show something we’re really not allowed to see, not because it’s openly prohibited; it’s taboo. People are scared of it. When you start messing with it we scream. It’s changing the ideas of gender; it’s changing the ideas of marriage; it’s changing the ideas of sex; it’s changing the ideas of correct behavior; it’s changing the ideas of correcting behavior; it’s changing how we make babies and raise kids, how we make human beings. You see the terms of man? Now, if you want to change the world, change those, like not just one, all of them.

You can protest all you want, block traffic, throw mashed potatoes at famous works of art, but until you get down into those terms with a better way of doing it, you won’t get far in bringing change (I think Mao Zedong and the Chinese have provided the perfect example of how not to do it and the things not to mess with). The Jews as a people have been a catalyst to change those terms in the distant past, albeit unawares, speaking of them as a leaven, with their more individualistic terms of man more centered on the outer world, to help to bring about our modern, industrialized world. Now, however, it’s a conscious decision we make as a world, to change those terms for the better, for a better world, all the peoples of the world, and it’s going to take a long time for us to be convinced of that all over the globe. Now, we’ll fight it, but that’s all part of the change.

The New Jerusalem will be Pondicherry, India. You know I’m joking, but there is some truth to the thing, or the idea couldn’t exist (Auroville is in circles; we need many Aurovilles). That’s where it happened, the idea of Supermind opened out onto the Earth. You’re not getting the idea. I don’t think you yet understand the difference between Supermind and Overmind, the latter where all our ideas and ideals of God come from, and consequently the form and formation of human civilization, in a manner of speaking, because Overmind is a filter for the supramental, and all things of Mind are a reflection of Supermind. In other words, although we haven’t had the idea of Supermind itself in any popular notion until recently, we’ve had many of the ideas of its way of change and doing things about us probably since the start of our history, carried by one person or another, and I think in ancient times, more individuals and their circle carried them than now. It’s simply the holistic way of doing things, what I’ve been showing the length of this book.

A mind open to the infinite,
a larger sky,
that’s what I’m courtin’ here
and all the fish that entails.
Read the history of the world’s cover up in Vietnam
to discern the feeling in democracy,
and its skipped over.
To get the hell outta there.
Throughout history,
where the kids are.

You know what she said?
Today’s and tomorrow’s the radiation in the eardrum.
That means I’m not listened to.
You know, I’ve been rejected,
by the whole planet.
And he likes a lot of people.

The ant’s showing his instructions—
300, 200…
Know how to be an idiot.
How well would you handle her?
Her name Donny.
I understand captain.
Everybody’s pullin’ on ‘im.
I’m not gonna go back and celebrate
book published.
I’ve got voting in just a minute:
plain clothes with the screeching
of “I don’t like adult things!”

Original Ganesh,
woodcutter is here.
Firecracker will come. [three lines spoken in the ending of a dream]
The Gods need us
to be there for them.
Some incoming,
they are our soldiers on the line.
They have every element,
and that’s not the half of it.
They’re our friends.
We need them to stay close.
They help us along.
It’s not that we overcome them.
We outgrow the worship of their form.

We still love them.
We’re going to Supermind.
Okay there’s a gap here,
but it’s not that we reject them.
They are just not our aim.
I think you’re hearing them speak.
We get along.
I’m open to every House, you know?
I’m a gatekeeper for them.
I’m not always who they wanna talk to.
Fine, I’ll come on a rocket ship.

I will just keep coming.
This is what a seer does.
He wouldn’t count listeners.
I care about you but what can I do?
I’ve certainly spoken much.
Oh here we go again counting tables.
What do I do with word?
I just keep going.

I’m singing for you.
That’s his belly.
He’s really into you.
Got it.
We’ll just keep taking notes.
One day we’ll say, “Hey! Look over here!”
And that’s got it.

That’s the fix.
I have humanity’s pants down and I’m counting.
I’m upstairs,
where you see the world from Mind.
You don’t see me.
Oh my gosh we put so much stock in ourselves,
have to be the center of that looking.

Don’t worry about it.
Mr. River,
what a beautiful piece of property,
this copyrighted book,
1983 is it?
2022 and counting.
There’s a version
you wanna put somewhere safe.
Interlopers will get ahold of it
and people that delete text.

I don’t think you know the value of sky thinking.
It shifts though process
on a bigger than group level,
and some people don’t want their ideas overturned,
and this person wants his ideas to the crowd.
They’ll change it,
if this book gets to the press,
and we need a copy to show them that’s not true
they got it wrong.
I’ve written in speak easy terms,
and it’s got so many ways of sayin’ it.
Everybody would disagree with it
on some level of its pages.

Now get in your voice,
Mr. Way-With-Words,
think about some improvement,
where you are a better word,
you get better at it,
your powerful mantric voice,
and actually change the world.
Bye bye.

We’ve given prayers like this Western
in an interview
the net’s been given me since I began.
It’s in many places online.
It’s round there somewhere.
It’s here right now,
and I’ve got the stuff for it,
the world.
And I had to go and just lock him in here but
the exercise room’s here.
Have a good one.

My fucking God!
this is a strange house.
You’re really on fire.
I’ll delete you if you come any closer to me.
He’s adorable,
thinks I’m the Supermind.
I’m not the Supermind.
I’m a Heaven giving out its word,
a higher Overmind
open to the public.
There’s all harmony up there.

I’m tryin’ to do something here.
We have a sense of good.
We can feel it in our very bones.
It’s not the man-animal good.
It’s not based on law and punishment.
It’s got a whole other change ahead.
You’re hearin’ its worth.
You’re hearin’ it loud and clear.
You won’t know what to do with it,
but here it is.
It’s yours.

Many people don’t know how to say goodbye;
is that what this is?
I come in peace,
and that’s all she wrote folks.

I genuize human word,
and smack!
it’s on your lunch counter.
I’ve fashioned your word.
I spawned it through Pondy,
and here we go.
Let’s look out to the sky.

Where is that phone?
Where is the bike?
Almost it’s expensive work to do.
No problem on our arrangement of things.
I am not overcome by the world.
It’s great, isn’ it?
Feelin’ of ‘im,
talkin’ with ‘im,
guru swami,
and that rocks.

On the pound board,
I’m supposed to say this;
you’re supposed to say that.
Weren’t you guys listening?
We let this book go in Pondicherry,
still very much segregated—
the conditions of this book.

Are the publishers to admit
there might be a superior way of doing things?
Have I said it all?
Do I leave anything out?
I’ll leave it here on top of the refrigerator.
Somebody’s bound to come along
and put it in their reading list.

We didn’t finish.
You, got a dress on.
That’s just hot material.
Can I interest you in some change the world?

We need to look at this arrangement
a reader has in his hat.
Hi Bruno,
are Monday after August?
You dirt digger,
don’t pull down my pants.
That’s the formula to change the world.
You got a problem with that?

Make the sex lives scandal,
one of your favorites.
You’re not gonna get away with it this time, buddy.
I’m gonna hit that muffler
in the nuts.
Sorry not sorry.

The voices talking somewhere in the house, late spring,
and you're drifting off to sleep with your teeth in your mouth.
You are here with me.
You are here with me.
You have been here and you are everything. [verse heard sung by R.E.M., “You Are the Everything”]

Right action,
we need Auroville.
I don’t know how to tell you this:
stuck up.
It’s not the ideal city,
with or without who’s in charge.
The Indian government
needs completely out of there,
and that’s the ball
that determines world change
in our hands right now.
A microcosm of the whole
put in world terms,
can you see this?
Please do.

No light went out.
We’re still here.
We’ve got a world to change.
I’m lookin’ forward to yah swami.
That’s King Caliber,
the needed change right now,
a better caliber of people
involved in skyline,
a better herd,
really into one another
for the benefit of all.
We need to say we’re sorry
for just kicking people around.
Judgmental and mean
we look at the world today.
I’m sorry that’s bad.
A better caliber of motion picture
would certainly help.
All the media,
being nicer to each other,
why don’t you guys come up with that?

I’m a fool on TV,
and that’s the statement in the room
you will judge me with.
Read the book and tell me how big a fool I am.
It’s dangerous, isn’ it?
to the hemmed in TV,
to the world brought out in paper money.
They laugh.
What were they to do,
be heroes with me?
Life is not a box of chocolates.
It’s a field of endeavor
aimed at you.

Post office,
can you give this a world book list?
I don’t think you saw it on the first page.
We’ve got to get this show on the road.
We need to gird up our loins
and begin monumental change.

I’m working on that progress right now
in how I turn you my own teeth,
in my daily life and routine.
That’s my measure book.
You can’t get home without it.
And I’ve said enough.

That’s the limit on hearing,
how far we need to go
to hear my voice.
It’s acrobatic wheels.
I’m right there behind yah
about to say boo.

And that’s the in on.
I think the terrace would like this atmosphere,
hallelujah.
Who have you been writin’?
With your believin’
you need to go to bed
and pregnant voices some.
All manner of God is there.
You wanna be in the arms of God,
lookin’ at the world through those eyes.
Now there’s a world we can work with.
Will you accept my apologies?
Thank you world I’m done.

Just to get you to first base
is hard enough
in the world we live in.
Well you’re on first base
all of a sudden.
Put a candle in that room.
I am here.
Look I am not joking.
I’m waltzing in with the military,
sooner or later.
You hear me George?

Come here I wanna talk to you about something.
You came here to pick me up
or tell me I’ve sinned?
Please be a good report card
on your own progress through life.
Can you be good to people?
That’s why I sent you Rottweiler,
‘cause you learn how to
not just look at Rottweiler and think bite.
The kisses mine gives me believe in goodness and light,
and they’re really there.
Now go read me
a Rottweiler’s love.

The first puppy we’ll have to listen to is this one:
the bad puppy.
They need more attention than anybody on this earth
that are big.
If you can see that,
you’re ready to help humanity,
Rottweiler and all.

We agree
it’s time to help.
You think you accuse people and that brings change,
like it keeps people from fucking up.
Where did you get your humanity,
from street dogs?
Can you see reality?
There we are one.
How did we get here?
See,
see down behind movies,
see us all there free.

That is a controlled demolition.
I think you’ve said the book.
We rose water.
We’ve got a big change ahead.
That smarts.
And we’re on our way,
and that’s it
I’m done.

Douglas and I, photo by Nitish

Edited by Douglas Mcelheny

The End

Between Jerusalem I’m Sorry, Chapter 12

My beloved puppy dog Lisa Joy Rottweiler, where is she? I had to educate myself. Photo by Kamesh

We Grasp the World Now

I settled down on the beach there in Tel Aviv, sleeping in the sand in my army, down, sleeping bag. Bodies littered the area around me. I made friends. They watched my backpack while I went to day labor. They didn’t work. There were two principle guys that the group revolved around, both from Holland, an 18-year-old boy called Rhino, and the de facto leader I told you about, around 22. I forgot his name. There were young teenage girls all around him all day long like groupies, and he’d usually have one he was wrapped around, she just glowing with being the chosen one at that moment. They were Israeli girls, and all went home around sundown. I don’t know what it is about 14-year-old girls, or I do, but you won’t believe me. Most were around that age. This was to be his undoing, really what destroyed the whole thing, that nice, freestyle party we had going on the beach, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was centered on pot, though, not girls, and Rhino was a dealer, De Factor like his front man and advisor, but he’d smoke us out for free, the little beach crowd, and we smoked almost continually. We sat in the sand under an umbrella-like structure made of stucco that would fit several people, and Rhino would always be the bong master, and he’d put one hit in the bong after another, always taking a hit too each time he gave one to someone in the circle, and on and on and on. Every once in awhile he’d let De Facto be the bong master, but no one else. I got smoked out when I went to work in the mornings, I mean, I went and stood at this street corner not too far from the beachfront where men and sometimes women would drive by and look at me to see if they wanted to hire me for the day. I got work everyday. Anyway, the first thing I’d do coming ‘home’ from work was go to that bong meeting. It wasn’t always going on, but when I came back from work, Rhino would fire it up. He knew I could use it, and he was kind. Use it? That was the most I’ve ever been addicted to a substance in my life. It was all I wanted to do, get stoned. Life was hard. It downright sucked. If you’re wondering about the other people on the beach, the civilians, De Facto said not to worry about them. We actually believed him.

Work was taxing but interesting. Where else but Israel would you get hired for the day to mix cement for a construction crew that talked about Spinoza all day long? I spent one day working for a crew ran by a couple of brothers who were really into him. He converted into Judaism but wasn’t Jewish originally—that question of Jewish identity again: what, exactly, is a Jew? I knew nothing of Spinoza, and they were quite uppity about their knowledge of him and their love of philosophy—it was really something, what it being a construction crew and all—and they looked down on me as if I were some commoner unable to understand what they were talking about. There was something about being a gentile here, with them I mean. I had to brag about my spiritual experience. I chose Silent Mind to describe. It shut them up, because they only had knowledge, not actual experience, but I didn’t get hired for the next day. You have to be careful one upping people if your survival is dependent upon being a commoner.

Finally I got the job. It lasted for a couple of weeks or more. The order of events here and time are so screwy in my mind. It could have been a month. It was a small company that installed glass windows in buildings under construction. Boy what a view of Tel Aviv. It was owned by two brothers, the older one ex-Israeli special forces (they had an uncle on the ground at Entebbe they told me), the other a young man with long hair in his late twenties who was the supervisor. They were secular Israelis. I think they kept me, and did so until I left Tel Aviv, because I was ex-special forces, even though I was a bit of a butterfingers with the glass sometimes. When they saw how much I liked going to the buffet style cafeteria for lunch, we went often. I’d usually only see the older brother at lunch, but when I did we’d usually talk about SF. It’s a brotherhood that transcends nation states.

I told him about the Israeli captain that I went to the Special Qualifications Course with (6-82 WETSU! (We eat this shit up)). He was really impressive, he and the Canadian officer. They were both well-liked by the class, as they were good at everything we did, didn’t get in the way like other foreign officers did, like for instance the Saudi Arabian officer, who always lagged behind, but he pulled a rabbit out of the hat and helped me and two others pass the land navigation course, which 60% of the class failed and hence failed the Q Course. It was a mother. I must ask for a moment of silence and say that the Liberian officer was killed on a parachute drop. He was the nephew of the president. Heads rolled over that one. It was a jumpmaster mistake. False DZ. The man landed in a big, deep pond, and drowned, tangled in his shroud lines. Fellow classmates pulled him out of the water as fast as they could. SF candidate medics worked on him for over an hour, one of them my good friend, who told me the story. It was a no go. He was gone. I washed clothes with him right before it happened, and he was an officer and a gentleman.

Camp Mackall, North Carolina, 1982, dark thirty. I had to find at least one stake in a swampy to dry land forest to pass the land nav test. Our maps, like I said, were out of date, and the stake was not where the map said it was, or rather, it was, but the land had changed, and I couldn’t find it. We had to find four in the daytime and four at night, or at least five in total. The four daytime ones where a piece of cake. Night time, however, was a different story. I encountered two other SF candidates trying to find the same stake. They couldn’t either. One I had been avoiding the whole course because he’d been a Ranger Indoctrination Program (R.I.P.) assistant instructor that had beat me upside the head as I dropped out of a full equipment rucksack run right before I quit that program. Rangers are not SF. They are not unconventional. That’s all I’ll say about that. That was after I first enlisted in the army, three years before this present incident, and that quitting still haunts me in dream. The commandant of the program tried to tell me I’d regret it, but I didn’t listen. Does anybody ever?

Now, a sergeant myself, although only an E-5, I really didn’t want this guy to embarrass me in front of myself, and so I tried to avoid him as much as possible. Here I had to face him. He was honorable and said nothing about our previous encounter in the Rangers. We got in a line like doing a police call (picking up cigarette butts) but still couldn’t find the damn thing. Time was running out. Finally we sat down, frustrated. Then we heard the unmistakable sound of someone opening a C ration can with a P-38. I got up and went to the sound, and I was at the wall of a draw, which is a thin stream running through the land, invisible because on both sides was tall, impenetrable vegetation. They were the bane of the SF candidate at Camp Mackall. The others motioned me to go through the draw, which I had to do on my belly the brambles were so thick. Low and behold, sitting right next to the unfindable stake was the Saudi Arabian officer eating a can of peanut butter. I went back through the draw and gave the good news. Soon, all three of us were there punching on our ticket to prove we’d found the stake. It was in the middle of a small, triangular island of land made by three draws, each in a different position than the map showed, and it showed no island between draws, why we couldn’t find it. How the foreign officer did I will never know, as he trained mostly in the desert, or so we figured, but, needless to say, we respected him after that.

Back in Tel Aviv I was smoking pot, a world and 13 years away from Camp Mackall. It happened one day, on a weekend I think, that I was given the honor of being the bong master. It was delicious! I had as much to smoke as I could smoke, finally, and I just inhaled it. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I was hit with that undeniable urge I’ve described in the Jewish Messiah at King’s Cafeteria story. The urge was to get up and run away from there as fast as I could because the cops were coming. I couldn’t believe myself, and it was as though I were watching myself from outside as I thrust the bong to Rhino, mumbling something about having to go, and go I went and fast. I got maybe 20 meters away, walking along the top of the beach where the promenade started, and I told myself this was crazy, and that I should go back there and smoke. I turned around and stopped dead in my tracks. The cops were there busting everybody. I turned around again and walked away, quite quickly, safe and out of sight, thanking my lucky stars.

They took only Rhino, but took everyone’s else’s information, that they would use later. De Facto went into action, or thought he did. That night I saw him on the phone with Rhino’s parents, on the promenade up from the beach. He’d assured them all would be well he told me. Rhino’s parents had just visited him there in Israel, and we were still munching out on all the Dutch chocolate they left him. It was sad, and I really felt for those parents and their child. I was cautious about going back to the beach after the bust, of course, only went back to the promenade, but De Facto wasn’t cautious, for some stupid reason I couldn’t figure out. I’d taken three friends of mine and went to a squat another friend had found for me in Jaffa. It was just in time too because the cops raided the tourist backpackers scene near the beachfront that very next day, going into the main bar everyone hung out in and really busting heads, beating the shit out people, and they raided the main hostel too, or a couple of them, to just clean the area of all that riffraff, as they saw us anyway. De Facto got hauled in too. I had warned him in that conversation at the public phone stand, but he told me that, before he’d left the beach and made that phone call, he’d told an undercover officer on the beach that the man was one, explaining to me it’s the law they have to tell you if they are, and the man told him, “You’ll go far”. He seemed to feel that was some kind of proclamation that he would not be busted, or something like that. He got seven years in prison, Rhino five. The issue of the young girls was the main issue at trial I heard, not so much the grass, but I wasn’t there. A few of the girls were at the trial, someone who was there told me, they loyal to the end.

The friend that found me that squat in Jaffa was not happy I invited three more friends to join us, and he made himself scarce. He said it was just for me, a safe place he’d given me and me alone, although he’d come and stay there too he said. The relationship had become complicated. He was in love with me. I really don’t know where to fit it on the timeline, our friendship, but we went to Safed together for a day and a night, and camping in a gorgeous gorge that had a lush forest at bottom and a rushing river. We went there with the three other friends I’ve mentioned. They are spoken of more in the collection of stories about the hunger strike and poetry postings called The Journey of a Thousand Tongues. He didn’t like them and they didn’t like him. I really like him though, and that got misinterpreted.

He was a young German man named Hans there in Israel to explore the Holocaust, why his people did that, and I’m putting into compressed terms the reason he told me he was there. He was very German in appearance and in accent, and I’d offend people by trying to describe the German physique, even by saying there is one. Let’s just say he was tall, muscular and naturally so, in a gangly sort of way, and he had blond hair and blue eyes. He was a bit scary looking, like he could break you in half if he wanted to, but he was the opposite of mean, a very gentle man actually, baffled by people’s reaction to him, or their first, unconscious reaction, before they got to know him, if they did. He was having a hard time in Israel being German. He encountered a lot of hate. He came wanting to work in a kibbutz, but was rudely refused on account of being German. What a chance at healing, what was really being refused. Now he was just roaming around, vagabonding like I was. I don’t remember how we meet, but we became fast friends for a while, until the romantic/sexual thing cropped up fast and hard. He bought some herbal ecstasy, a bundle of tablets and such packaged neatly, one for me and one for himself, wanting to go to the squat and do it together, before the bust and all, and I’m not only talking about do the ecstasy. He was so disappointed at my no that it ended our friendship. He was not, however, caught up in that bust. He was very proficient at being on his toes and could handle difficult situations. He just couldn’t handle unrequited love. Are you there Hans? I’m sorry.

Where exactly it goes in the timeline I don’t rightly know, somewhere before the bust though, because De Facto got some heroin for B Actor and a couple of others from the studio crowd in Safed. Sounds awful, but hear the story. They were as surprised to see me as I to see them. They just showed up one day at the beach, looking for heroin. They didn’t know I was there, but when the saw me, and saw I was ‘on the beach’, they asked me to help them get some. B Actor and another young man were looking for the smack for a young man with them. They came all the way from Safed, the boy in tow, to find some for him. He was about 22 or so, and he’d lost his mother some months before, and the grief was a noose around his neck still. He’d been a heroin addict before coming to Israel, and he’d come to free himself from it, but he’d convinced his friends, B Actor and another young man, that if he could just get one hit of heroin, that would really help.

They knew nothing of heroin addicts, obviously. My big sister Gwen had been a heroin addict, for a long while, and I knew from experience they were making a big mistake believing him, as that one hit would just put him right back into the addiction, but I don’t remember if I tried to tell them that or not. I do remember B Actor explaining to me that, according to the Torah, any kind of plant use was okay, or some such, meaning, as he saw interpreted that, it wasn’t against the Law to buy the heroin nor for his friend to take it. Incidentally, some of the ultra-orthodox grew some potent skunk I heard more than once while in Israel. I never smoked any, and so I can’t confirm the story. Anyway, I asked De Facto to find some for them, and he did, and they bought it from him and thanked me. It all happened in the space of an hour. In parting, B Actor said something like, “Oh, I see these people love you, and so you’re okay.” “What?” I thought, “How incredibly insincere.”

I left Tel Aviv with 700 shekels, headed to Eilat down south on the Red Sea to work, as people were saying that was where the money was. I traveled with those three friends, and not one of them had a red cent, and so I paid for all our expenses, which were not too high, as we were hitching mostly and cooking on my miraculous, burn common alcohol, one burner stove, but still, it took all my money to get us there. I also did all the cooking. There was a young Englishman whose name I can’t remember, a young man from the Netherlands, Alison I think his name was, who features in the story from Tongues “The Guests of Unseen Egypt”, and there was Jack, a young man from South Africa that did not like Jews, and maybe didn’t t even like himself, but he was my friend. Goddamn did he cuss. Here’s some advice: never pay for everything in a group without writing it all down to show the group after, or they’re likely to deny you paid for most anything.

The Eilat thing didn’t work. Oh I did get work, but it was terrible there, just awful, and so I took what I made and went back to Jerusalem, leaving the Dharma Bums behind, what I called, and subsequently they called, our little group, especially after me telling them about the book by Jack Kerouac on the way, and then finding a copy of it under my bed of the hostel we booked into, Home Hostel, upon our arrival in Eilat, like right after checking in and going upstairs to our bunks. There were no other books under that bed or any other, nor a bookshelf in the room, not even a stack of books. It was a miracle, and I know you don’t believe me, but when we found that book, well, we actually became the Dharma Bums.

Landing at the bus station in Jerusalem and wandering around the new city was the lowest point of my Israeli adventure, a low point that would score high in low points in my life, meaning I was pretty dejected and down and out. I forgot every synchronicity, every magic event, every miracle, and I just wanted to cry. We are so that way. I had worked my butt off but only made a few shekels, which the bus ride from Eilat had taken. I began to sing the song “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” but changed the lyrics to say, “I am weary, feeling small, and tears are in my eyes. Will you dry them all, be on my side? Oh times are rough, and friends just can’t be found…” I didn’t just sing out loud to the street. I sang from the depths of my bleeding heart to the love of the universe. It’s said we are hardwired to respond to a baby’s cry. I suspect angels and the like are likewise hardwired when it comes to our cries, if they hit that spell-bottom note, and mine had.

When I finished singing I looked around. I saw a new age spiritual bookshop nearby, and so I went in. In the lobby was a bulletin board. On it was a small flyer about a weekly meeting for world peace but no address, only a phone number. I got permission to use the phone in the shop, and I called the number, and a lady answered, who was very cautious. I rattled on about the hunger strike and the poem postings in the Old City of Jerusalem and how I wanted to continue to Mt. Sinai and maybe even to the Great Pyramid in Egypt. It was all for world peace, I explained, both inner and outer. Reluctantly she gave me the number of someone else, who, after I said the same to him, gave me the address and how to get there and when to come. I was to take bus number 8 from the city to a suburb of Jerusalem. I was to meet Issac, the very next day, whom you will be pleased to also meet. He was to set my feet more than just on the path to Egypt. He also introduced me to the Mother, via a book, and he was into books.

I met him in his small yard outside his apartment. As I had walked up the path to his place, I saw a man in a wheelchair, and he had a pencil in his mouth and was reading a book and turning the pages with that pencil. I was surprised, not expecting this. He was paralyzed from the neck down. I will never know exactly how to look at someone with a noticeable disability for the first time and not feel that awkward, “Am I doing this right?” He was reading The Urantia Book. He greeted me kindly and a bit on guard, not knowing what to expect from me either. Meeting for the first time a man with hair past his shoulders and a long beard, who dressed in colorful, baggy clothes, and a lot of purple, there’s some doubt as to whether or not he’s a bit of a loon. We exchanged the normal how do you do routine. I told some of the story of the peace work I was doing with poetry. I don’t remember if I gave him any of my poetry to read. I’d had many photocopies of the poems made on paper of different colors, and so it’s likely I did. Neither do I don’t remember where my gear was or where I was sleeping.

He asked me to do energy work on him. I had not done that before, hadn’t been to India yet and hadn’t learned about pranic healing. I did know about Reiki, but I didn’t know a thing about it except you use your hands as vehicles of energy so to heal people. I tried to tell him I didn’t know how to do it, but he insisted. As I put my hands on his legs he told me how powerful I was, and I was secretly pleased, as someone had seen my power. He gave me a hundred shekels for the Reiki. When I went there again another man was doing doing Reiki on him, and I heard Issac tell him he could feel his power too, and he also gave the man a hundred shekels. Embarrassed at myself to myself, I realized Issac was just a really good guy, liked validating and helping people, and the Reiki was his way of giving money and also giving someone the dignity of having earned it.

When I left that first time, he loaded me down with three or four photocopies of popular New Age books, one by someone claiming to channel angels from the Pleiaides and another author aliens from Sirius. There was also some Robert Anton Wilson. I had read his Cosmic Trigger and The Illuminatus! Trilogy. That was before Silent Mind. After experiencing that, a book like that didn’t interest me. It doesn’t go there. We are sectors, sectors in the pond. You’ve heard it reveal itself, just throw away material. Don’t tell Issac, but all those photocopied New Age books went into the trash.

I was to get to know Issac, and we were to become friends, even writing letters to one another after I left Israel. He broke his neck diving into shallow water when he was 16. He came to Israel and made Aliya as a young man. He was in his thirties now. He was orthodox at first but took off the Black clothes and eventually embraced the New Age. His parents were quite rich, and they supported him and provided round the clock nurses to care for him. I was to become friends with them too, but they were weary of me at first, like I was going to be a mooch or leech or something. They protected him from his generosity. He was profoundly disturbed about being paralyzed. I’d never been that close to someone completely paralyzed, and in time I’d be right there as he was fed and taken care of, and it was painful to see and also humbling. Issac told me that sometimes he jus lost it and broke down into screaming tears on account of being almost completely paralyzed. The woman that answered the phone number on the flyer at the spiritual bookshop was his girlfriend. She loved him dearly and also protected him from his generosity, why she told me she was guarded in that initial phone call. He told me that, when he broke down like that, she would just hold and soothe him. In my mind’s eye I could picture her doing that, as, in getting to know them and hanging out there, I’d see her wrap herself around him in his big chair, trying for all she could to keep him safe from pain, as much as her female power can.

That other man doing Reiki that first time I visited was named Jeff and was from New York and into being a healer. He talked about Christ consciousness a lot. Neither Jeff nor Issac seemed to mind I wasn’t Jewish. Jeff was in his late thirties. He lived with his girlfriend, who gave him a limit on how long he lived with her, as Jeff did energy work and no other kind of work. It didn’t pay well. Jeff was, like Issac, somewhat developed, and by that I mean they did not have big reactions to things that other people did, not usually, and they were kind to everyone and had genuine concern for other people. They were warm human beings.

Jeff took me to a place he said I could camp, which he said had strong Christ energy. It was the forest behind Yad Vashem, the holocaust remembrance center of Israel. It was also slightly above Ein Karem, the village where it’s written that Mary went when she was pregnant with Jesus to live with her cousin Elizabeth, who was pregnant with John the Baptist. The book of Luke says she went there hurried but doesn’t say exactly why she went. She went there to be safe from stoning, but the Gospels don’t say that. Instead, they make up a cover story to hide the fact Jesus was born from a teenage girl, who got into trouble, getting pregnant before marriage. I’d imagine it was the same with her cousin Elizabeth, the two girls put together, for how ever long, to help protect them from society. I camped in that forest for about three weeks, preparing for my trip to the Sinai and to Cairo to post my poems. I camped in the ruins of a family healing center, its actual name I’ve forgotten, but it seems to me it was for families coming to Israel from war-torn Europe and from the Holocaust. There were no buildings left, just the ruins of a fence with the sign identifying the place. It was on the side of hill, right near the top, and it was a clear area, a good place to camp. I had no tent in those days. SF had taught me to sleep anywhere and to be alone in the forest, or wherever, and not be afraid. Every time, though, I slept out alone again, and it’d been awhile since I’d done that, it’d take a couple of days for the fear to leave, but I wouldn’t be too scared to go to sleep. One night on that hillside, I was awakened by the loud yapping of some kind of canine-type creature, but I had no idea what kind. I don’t think they were dogs. Half asleep my first thought was that it was ultra-orthodox Jews, and that might’ve come from the dream I was just having, but I don’t remember it and so really can’t say. I was completely surrounded by them, as I could hear the yapping coming from all directions, directed at me, but I didn’t come out of my bag to try and see them. So sleepy, I just went back to sleep.

The reasons I thought it might be ultra-orthodox Jews had to do with, yes, still being in sleep mind and not yet fully in waking mind, but maybe they were in the mix because twice when I was sleeping out in Israel I awoke to an ultra-orthodox youth leaning down over me and looking at me. The first time was in the cemetery on the mountainside in Safed, not far from the mikvah, and I just woke up to him staring down at me, saw he meant me no harm, and I went back to sleep. I just figured his elders had sent him to see who was sleeping in their cemetery. The second time I was sleeping in a pile of people on a hillside of Meron during Lag BaOmer, the mother of the boy I had a crush on, Zeke, and maybe Ger, but it could’ve been Hen-ya. I don’t remember. The kids were not there. It was a real Croods evening. I woke up and an unbearded, ultra-orthodox youth was peering intently down at me, again, but a different youth this time. I looked up at him a moment, showing myself to him with my eyes. Then I closed them and went back to sleep.

Lag BaOmer bears a moment in this book. It was there I saw the tribes of Israel. I mean saw Jews in tribes and as tribal. Just about everybody I knew in Safed walked over the hills to Meron for Lag BaOmer, in their own little groups. I walked (and slept) with the original crowd I hung out with, whom I named above, but I had dinner with the art studio crown. We ate on a forested hillside, and it so reminded me of SF. Mosheheim had prepared dinner, one of the spiciest meals I’ve ever eaten, hotter than fire. Everybody praised him for his cooking. I don’t think everyone was sincere. I had done that chameleon thing again that I did a lot traveling, which is to put on the dress of the culture I was in, take on its look, but not exactly, and not exactly purposefully, more like the artist of the Art Cafe of last chapter, who’d take suggestive shapes appearing on his canvas and bring out the suggestion. I was dressed with my very long hair down, but combed in such a way it appeared I had long, curled payos, and I had on black clothes, a t-shirt and slacks of some sort, but black nonetheless. I wore that white kippah I’d found in the cemetery. I think I was still considering converting at that moment. Over the course of the evening, a couple of groups of young orthodox, laughing, called me over to have me in a photograph with them, and I obliged, knowing they just wanted a picture with the clown. Someone from the studio crowd told me they were making fun of me, but I was thoroughly enjoying myself and didn’t mind. It was a lovely evening, so much excitement in the air, no bonfire of the vanities.

So you can see why I thought I was surrounded by ultra-orthodox yapping at me. Anyway, I spent my days in Ein Karem visiting the churches or just walking around, finding nice places to sit awhile, and I went to Yad Vishem two or three times. I saw some art there that bore the unmistakable mark of being created by someone who’d suffered something of hell. There are universal forms that remind you of the Void, even if you don’t know the Void is there, remind you of terror at its most real, and I saw some of those forms there too. I felt so much pain in places there. But I looked and looked for some indication that… I’m sorry, I don’t know how to say this. It will take some telling.

After the inner journey to the well of soul I related earlier in this book, I began having dreams of being Jewish, and I continue to have them. Some three or four years ago, I had a definitive dream that showed me my last life was as a Jewish man in Nazi Germany, as I’d had a definitive dream of being a Black guitar player in the American South around the turn of the 19th century. The memories of the Jewish life had been activated by the contact with my soul essence, and memories of past lives are stored near the soul. I was in hiding in the country in or near Germany, and I was very poor, came from a poor family. I wasn’t killed in a concentration camp, at least not that I can recall, but the threat of being discovered loomed over me heavily.

The soul math, derived by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, does not add up; there’s not much time between the death of the Black man and the birth of the German Jew, and they say that the more developed a soul is, the longer it spends in the afterlife. Although I cannot quote any authority other than my own knowledge and experience, I have good reason to believe my soul came to maturity, adulthood as it were, at the end of the Black man’s life, making it free to manifest in the world, take births, at its choosing. You can look at this life, its inner and world experience and see something out of the ordinary is going on with my soul. This is what it looks like when a soul has grown into the adulthood of the soul, this type of participation between the world and the individual, the individual and God, but I must make a distinction between my soul and my ego self. My soul chose in this life me, meaning the outer personality Donny, someone born under the influence of a hostile being, a demon, and all the weirdness and bad that entails. This is for the purposes you see played out in this book and in my other works. My muse says enough about those purposes at the end of this chapter, has been talking about them in much of the poetry of this book, so I don’t need to go into that here.

But back to that German Jew. The dream of being him was representational, not like the dream of being the Black man, in which I actually lived the last hour or so of his life inside his body, hearing his thoughts, feeling his feelings, and mine at the same time, like when I was in my grandfather’s body as he died. Here, I was both the character in the dream and an observer of him, alternating between the two, normal dream stuff.  In the first part of the dream I was on a passenger train before the war and the pogrom against Jews. The train was later to become the cattle cars to a concentration camp. Now, though, it was where rich Jews really living it up. There was a car that was full of luxury items, really decadent, the most expensive cigars, liquors, liqueurs, all sorts of vice-like things, the best of the best. They were all hanging on the walls as if on display. I went inside, allowed because I was Jewish, and no non-Jew could be in there, but I knew I wasn’t welcome there and would be told to leave if a rich Jew saw me in there. Then the items suddenly all turned into kinky women’s lingerie, and I got out of there, and the dream shifted to during the war, the train something I was afraid of, looking at a it from a place of hiding up in a forest. The train tracks became the focus of the dream, the fear I’d be soon on a train to a concentration camp. I lived with a small group of other Jews in hiding, a farmer hiding us. At one point I was walking down a trail with my wife, the tracks looming large at us down below in the valley. I realized she was Sunshine, a very young woman I had a strong connection to in Garberville but couldn’t figure out why. That knowledge was just part of the dream.

At the end of the dream I was on this strange, huge, contraption beside the tracks that resembled some sort of ride at an amusement park, and it had you go in a spiral on a rope up it, and many people were on it, but not many made it to the top. I did, and when I did I had an experience of Silent Mind. It bears mentioning that in the dream I was utterly dejected, so scared I’d get caught. I hit some kind of fundamental low that triggered a momentary experience of enlightenment. You got to figure that I wasn’t the only Jew, or Gypsy, or gay, or whomever, that did. It’s not only spiritual practice that brings enlightenment. Sometimes the worst thing in the world can bring it, and you got to figure that some, maybe a handful at most, marched into death triumphant.

I could interpret that first part of the dream in terms of the behavior of some rich Jews, not all, during the Weimar Republic, when the majority of the population had to go without a lot.  Even if it were only a small but visible number of rich Jews, and I’m sure it wasn’t only Jews but other rich people too, non-Jewish Germans would, in the manner the masses see, distortedly, build up resentment to Jews in general, and Hitler and the Nazis took that and ran with it. Notice I was Jewish but not really allowed in that railroad car, which represented the decadence of rich Jews before the Nazis, not all Jews like I said, during a time when most other people in Germany suffered want. If you see what I see, it’s not Jews who were responsible for any blindness to and disregard of the suffering of the German people; it’s more the rich. It’s always has been like that, not only in Germany but everywhere, even in communist and socialist countries (the leaders got the good stuff). The rich rule the world, are the true masters of the race, de facto though they be, the ‘good’ rich notwithstanding. Here’s the ticket: we get the rich out of political office and make it much more difficult for capitalism to produce the super-rich. On the table, on the shelf, we have the equipment to change the world.

What I was looking for at Yad Vashem, although I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, was an exhibit of the luxury stuff in that railroad car, with all the names of the Jewish rich people that owned them and their positions in German society attached to the items. You can put their donations to charities there too, their social work, to try and correct what needs corrected in that distorted how the masses saw. I think you get the picture. It means looking at the whole picture and not just at the fact of being victims. Do you like genocide? It will keep coming again and again as long as we don’t look at the whole picture and correct ourselves accordingly.

What do we do, though, with Jewish exclusivity? We cannot deny it exists. Does it lead to Jewish nepotism and Jewish privilege? In some cases of course it does. They’re human. Now let’s go through Hollywood and the news media (have I missed one?) and get their percentage down in those places to somewhere around the 2.4% of the population a net search will say they are, speaking of America. We can also, while we’re at it, make sure there are no areas of New York City where a red blooded American who is not Jewish cannot feel at home, and make sure there is no invisible zoning in Jewish neighborhoods in New Jersey to make sure non-Jews can’t rent or buy homes in them. I’m sure I’ve missed something, but you see the list. It’s ridiculous, and I’m being sarcastic. In the persecution and hatred of the Jews, the reasons thereof, we are missing something, something big that has to do with the abilities to interpret existence it itself and to handle intricately and fastly the outer world. And I’d need to simply spell this out: there is no cabal of Jews controlling the world, but I can tell you where that insipid, unhinged belief comes from. You would not have thought of it in a million years, and you will be so surprised you’ve missed it, and if you don’t believe it, that will be because you don’t want to, not because it’s not true. All the way to meaningful, that’s the position Jews have when they enter society. I don’t think you’d enter that with every Jew, but you have my meaning. And now we look at odd first.

The lights go out.
Strange noises are in the air.
What time is it?
The world transitions into stargate.
We’ll put our hand on the greater,
and we’ll just follow bloody apes will yah?
Joy by surprise
sculptured this to us.
I’m looking at the origins of man, are you?

I can do nothing else than jump into it with both feet. Imagine how we developed human self-awareness distinct from the other animal species. Whether you believe or not in an evolution of consciousness or of identity, what evolution is in its essence, you have to admit something happened to our minds that separated us from the other animals, or somewhere about us. Was that all in one go, or was it in stages, to get to the human identity we have today, ego identity is it? And there’s even a reluctance in science today to admit we actually have one and call it that. First, I’d call it outward tuned (wake-centric) ego individual identity, with an almost exclusive focus on the outer world for the business of human endeavor, and an emphasis on the individual. I’d imagine at first it was the opposite, with the central focus on the inner life and on the group, speaking of immediately after the initial leap or separation point from other species, the  subsequent stages taking us out more out into the outer world with the pinpoint of our awareness and towards being more distinct individuals within the group, however many back peddles there were too, as there always are, not to mention sidelines here and there and offshoots going nowhere.

I’ve suggested earlier in this book that infant orgasm, that administered by a mother, not just giving orgasm but the focused attention too of a love affair, perhaps in conjunction with some substance like ganja or a stronger psychedelic I’ll add now, brought us into human self-awareness, the first stage of it, or rather, brought a baby into it, maybe several during the same time period, but the number is only significant to the time it took this to spread to other members of the animal species that made the jump to man, an animal species that was on the brink because it had started to walk upright, the true king of beasts, us right before we became us. That spread would still happen if the number were one, especially if there were the hostile beings I’ve described, demons we call them, but here the type that construe worlds, making it happen in the first place and making sure it spread from mother to mother, to the fathers too, so the babies more and more would be ‘human self-aware”. If you doubt the power of infant orgasm under the right conditions view my process. It mirrors, minus the substance, how we became man. Here, have an apple Eve. Representative is that story.

The power was out.
I quit school.
Some mail to you:
individualism.
I was stand up.
I was really
excited
to exercise me
outside.
Now you see evolution.
Your turn.

That is all well and good, er, well, not good, but good has come of it, and it’s not my place here to explain our place in the cosmic order, having our evolution on this Earth. I’m interested here in how we got here, to this present stage of human ego identity focused on the outer world and on being an individual within a group. I’ve explained, briefly, that a house in Overmind, a divine Heaven, intervened in human evolution, which had already gone through more than one stage of identity, as I’ve suggested, how many stages it would be hard to gauge, but our milestones such as the development of stone tools, burial, representative art, agriculture, the making of alloyed tools, and writing, would perhaps indicate moving to another stage. The stage that we are in now basically began Western civilization, what has been the dominant civilization in world process (however much that is in decline and being replaced by more Eastern), which itself began when a divine house intervened in human evolution and created the Jewish people, who became a leaven among the peoples for the new stage, our modern one, again, as far as Western civilization is concerned, and I’m taking huge, complicated, and interconnected movements, compressing them and putting them in an ordered process and in neat rolls, but of course that is only for the sake of discussion.

Putting Eastern civilization into the process, you’d put it developing that stage slower than the West, very generally speaking, or you can say that it’s not been leavened by the more recent stage to the degree the West has been, and may not ever be or even want to be, as is evident in the major differences between the East and West, which have a lot to do with the degree of outer focus and the degree of individualism. Looking at the process of the introduction of a new stage into humanity in terms of a leavening, one that takes its time to reach every people on the planet, if it ever does, it would be evidence of such a process that, in both the East and the West, you can find peoples today that still have at least one foot in the former stage, if not both in the case of ‘uncontacted’ tribes, focused on the inner life and the more ‘primitive’ hands on the world and in Nature, meaning more on her level and on her terms, that would entail and all the magical interaction with the outer world such a focus encompasses. Whether that magic is real or imagined is not part of this discussion, but, from my story, you can see it’s not all imagined.

Incidentally, the world culture being created largely by the advent of the Internet, the one the youth of the world seem to be embracing, and with a passion, is basically that Western hands on the world and on one’s individuality. Now you can understand the conflict more traditional societies have with it.

The first thing that particular Heaven did, I don’t know, somewhere from eight to four thousand years ago, give or take a thousand years, was to introduce customs, rites, rituals, practices, laws and the like that cleaned up man’s act so to speak, not only on the outer level in terms of vice and cleanliness, but on the inner level to protect people from the Hostile Powers and those people who used them or were used by them to gain power over other people. It’s really, really strong custom. Most especially, that divine house helped close the door to infant orgasm (and the Pandora’s box that opened) and sexual child abuse, with practices such as circumcision and a more general respect given to a person’s personhood, starting from birth, as sexual child abuse would have been not only universal in early humanity but normal.

That the door to sexual child abuse hasn’t been closed in the Jewish people, or any people on earth, attests to the fact it will take more than law and punishment to stop it, and while we’re on the subject to stop murder, rape, theft or any type of wrongdoing as well, punishment and law being the main means that divine house dealt with earlier man and still deals with us today, why it’s time to change. By those means it aimed to create a holy people, and it did that in large part by separating Jews from the mass of humanity, a mass much different than the one of today, who are, the incompletely or unleavened parts notwithstanding, in the same stage of human identity that Jews are, which would mean the separation isn’t now the thing. Do you see why?

To get some picture of why a definite separation from the common mass of man was necessary, in almost all walks of life, you might imagine a humanity for the most part compromised by its inner life it was so open to it, open more to the Hostile Powers than the Divine Powers in the mass. Violence would’ve been the order of the day, in all its forms. Everyone would basically be a mess, even kings and queens. From the creation of peoples like the Indian and Chinese, as well as other peoples, where a spiritual elite was created, which later degenerated into a religious elite, and I stomp my foot here because that will be on the test, the test being the temptation to return to a society built on that latter elite, the former having been virtually smothered by that latter, it’s evident that other divine houses were intervening in humanity to help besides the one that created the Jewish people and it’s more hands on the outer world individualist identity, but it was that more solid in the outer life and in the individual self that was to take the lead, at least to our present day. It could grasp the physical world by the horns.

Now we can talk about Jewish exceptionalism. It would stand to reason that that their terms of man, what fashions the human ego in each child born, would be more primed to success in the outer world and as individuals, and please understand I haven’t dismissed the group by any means. In Jewish culture it’s maintained something of a tribal nature and hence is what the individuals look up to as in what’s larger than themselves and what they rely on, that pillar of their reliance really God notwithstanding. I’m sorry it’s impossible to talk about every individual in a group at the same time. So many differences and exceptions would be present. It’s this very strong, sometimes exclusive, identification with the Jewish people on the part of individual Jews, over and above the identification with any other grouping in humanity, including humanity as a whole, what was necessary in creation of the people and hence in the creation of contemporary man, which is no longer needed, but that’s not to say the Jewish people are no longer needed, not by a long shot.

A good book to read about Jewish exceptionalism and Jews’ thoughts on the matter is The Jew in the Lotus by Rodger Kamenetz. It has informed the writing of this book, and he emailed me a copy so I could read it because I didn’t have the money to buy it (thank you Rodger), but he wouldn’t go so far as to review this book, of which he only read an early chapter some three years ago, if he even did. He stopped talking to me once he discovered my social stigma. He got a poem. He didn’t respond to that either. There’s something I’ve learned more about recently than at other times I’ve confronted it, and that’s the tendency of us, which has also come from acknowledging my own stubbornness and resistance to change, to not only stubbornly resist any changes to our beliefs and options when confronted with the facts of the matter or the truth of the thing, or some very pointed art that shows us we’re wrong, but also the strange habit of digging in even deeper with our ignorance into the grounds of reality, the better presented the facts, the more poignant the truth, the more engaging the art, the deeper that digging in. I’m just sitting here wondering how we’ve gotten anywhere with that very pronounced handicap in our ability to change. Explains a lot, you know?

Burnt Books in the Margins

You said I know.
The whole class he won’t offer humanity.
My lotus pond,
it calls everybody.
Weren’t those beachers?
They were reporters.
I’ve got a helmet law.
Tell the people who ran for congress.
I’m golden at my job.
You just do away with me.
I need a last name.
Ginsberg no I’m not I’m Duke.
There’s a lot more in compassion
than a sympathy squeeze.
You hold somebody’s hand
people are afraid to be seen with in public.
Now that’s a railroad.
And it’s out of style.
It’s priceless.
I’ve caved in;
talk to someone else.
That’s the Batmobile.
It’s not a hero’s choice today.
They’re all in to counting sin.
See past safety lines.
See what you want to give humanity.
See the right road to humanity.
You don’t bubble anybody,
enforce their isolation.
That’s river of darkness.
You’re not a happy medium.
You’ve just shown humans in caves.
How we treat one another,
it boils down to this simple test:
will you shun someone shunned?
You’ve got a measure for humanity here.
I can call out witnesses,
even Jews.
What’s it take to learn this:
you are your best person to all?
Of course you sit out here:
that’s in such a bright answer
in nonjudgmental’s ways.
You reckon not their sin
or ugly feature.
You give them your humanity.
That’s how they learn theirs.
Am I blinded by the light?
I’m seein’ our course today.
That’s the necessity
at bottom
in humanity.
Examine history,
what’s the common of our feature?
A history of scapegoats.
A borderhouse,
it’s so much cultural today.
You kinda wanna give ‘im a nice healing procedure,
what I propose,
some of that book.
You made me a promise in pages:
the culture of humanity,
we give it every last ship.
And you made me a hope,
you the author:
there’s a vocabulary for the unknown.
Spread it your wings.
It is full of Jews
and the father thinking people,
your whole life?
Know their dimensions.
Is that a copy
of a fascist’s popularity?
In its backyard,
turnin’ your back to me.
I’m not gonna start sizzling,
show everything on the planet,
but enlightenment,
you got rid of this too?
I have to say something.
Where are the wings?
What do we withdrawal?
Where are the eyes?
Maybe subject to copyright,
it says:
here’s the door;
don’t let ‘im in,
human divinity.
Do you have the tree?
Do you have the classroom?
I’ve mentioned Savitri.
I have horizons.
Just get rid of it.
It’s testing human boundaries you see.
Over the head some opportunities,
and you just throw it out?
Ground Control to Major Tom:
train your eyes on me.

Now, he doesn’t have the slightest clue as to where that exceptionalism actually comes from (I don’t think anyone else does either), and he doesn’t go as far to say that Jews are basically the alphas in Western society, but you can call them that, for the reasons I’ve explained: their terms of man and the leavening of them into and through out their peoplehood. They are not a race but a people, some common physical characteristics notwithstanding. You would not take the authority of the Nazis to call them a race, as some people are doing today so to try and remove White Jews from the stigma of White privilege. And Jews have no innate superiority. Not knowing where their exceptionalism comes from and not understanding their elevated position in society as a result of it, resenting that, and smarting from Jewish nepotism and Jewish exclusiveness and Jewish privilege, where those do show themselves, and they don’t everywhere Jews are, although they really show themselves in Israel, they get persecuted. Do you see the difference?

The night before our little group of four left for Eilat from Tel Aviv, whom I’ve called the Dharma Bums, which the universe did too I’d argue, the Englishman and I were sleeping next to one another on the beach not far from where De Factor and Rhino were jailed, which is more down towards Jaffa than the place on the beach the bust had happened. We’d left our squat, and I forget why we’d temporarily separated. He was in his early twenties and was slightly developed, in the sense I’ve described that, a comfortable and warm person to be with. I’m sorry I’ve forgotten his name, like I said. We woke just after dawn, and I remember looking out over the land and water from our little sandy perch on the world, my body still cozy in my down bag, just my head sticking out, and for just a moment I got that sense you sometimes get that the world is a strange place, unknowable really, like an alien planet, and it felt good, because I was part of that unknown, as alien as the world; you know what I mean?

I told him the two very powerful dreams I remembered from the night, dreams that still carry significance into today. They marked a turning point in my life, the very beginning of freedom. The Englishman just listened when I told him the dreams, didn’t even wince when I told him I’d had full intercourse with my mother for the first time in dream, as a man not a boy, and that I’d come a long ways to be able to do that and not be freaked out by it. I’d told him of my love for little boys, as I told anybody that got close to me and that I wanted to keep as a friend, with some exceptions of course. I just knew some people would not be able to handle it. If the person remained a friend after that, they were more likely to be true friends. The Dharma Bums were such friends.

That first dream opened a door to freedom, as weird and taboo as that might sound, which was represented by the second dream. It released the second dream. I was a prisoner in an ancient prison, and I was locked in the inmost part of it along with many others. There were many outer layers of the prison, each fortified and guarded to the max. The inmost prison was the most heavily fortified and guarded. The walls were the thick, old, yellowish, stone kind that make up the ancient sectors of the old city of Jerusalem and other places equally ancient. The guards had swords and spears and were dressed in ancient armor. I attacked a guard and took his sword, killing him, and that started a rebellion, as all the other prisoners followed suit, attacking guards and killing them with their own weapons. It turned into a fierce and bloody battle, severed limbs and heads flying everywhere. There was quite an emphasis on the bloodiness and ferocity of it. Then we stood on the ramparts, bloody, war-torn, but free men, having killed all the guards and liberating the inmost prison, looking out at the next level we had to take, knowing there were many levels and it would take a long time. In the reality of that dream we had already won our freedom, and it couldn’t be taken from us, and it was only a matter of time before we would be out of the prison entirely. The sense was that we hadn’t just won our freedom in the inmost prison, but that we were now free men, the coming battles to write that out like thoughts you think out but don’t have to because you’ve had the wordless thought already that held the kernel of the whole thing. Need I tell you what that dream represented? It’s like I was surrounded by layers. In the most basic one I’m free.

There is but left one constituent element of becoming this thing that you all hate to show you. It’s the clincher. It’s what not a one of you see, or even want to. You’ve heard me tell you I was girl crazy as a boy. Oh, even at seven I could see I liked younger boys, but there was no sexual thing attached to that, not yet. It was girls I was attracted to. I did a lot of sex play with other boys growing up, the whole nine yards, loved it too, but I’d have pushed the boy aside if a girl had come into the room, or behind the bushes, or wherever it was we did it. Entering adolescence, I was a girl lover, coming out, a boy lover. What happened?

I told you I became a Jesus freak, a very religious young adolescent. I tried to be a perfect Christian, and that included purging myself of impure sexual thoughts and sexual acts, which was not only masturbation. I was sexually active with girls my age, even had intercourse with one, at 13. The fear she was pregnant was also a big catalyst to my becoming a Jesus person. When I became sexually mature, I stopped the sex play with other boys my age but began that with little boys, and with a couple of little girls, in my neighborhood, this even as I had sexual relationships with adolescent girls. I was a sexual kid. So, when I began to purge myself of sexual thoughts and acts, even rebuking my penis in the name of Jesus, I only purged the thoughts of sex with girls my age and with women, allowing the thoughts of sex with children, especially boys, to continue, and the ensuing masturbation. I did that because I hadn’t admitted to myself that I was sexually attracted to children, was in denial of it even as I entertained masturbatory fantasies of sex with little boys. An adolescent mind is a complicated, divided thing. You see I was programming myself, unawares. You really are no help here, you know?

We do not realize that what goes down in adolescence has a lot to do with the adult we are to become, shapes us, not as much as the first years of life do, but shapes us nonetheless. All the constituent elements of ourselves are up in the air, and how they are fitted back into place, if they are and aren’t rejected with enough force to put them down into the subconscious in some lock, what I did with my attraction to women, determines the adult we are going to be. That our sexual/romantic attraction does change in adolescence if evidenced by the fact that, normally, unless someone is on the track to becoming a pedophile, a boy becoming sexually mature will change his fantasies from little girls to girls who are sexually mature, to women in other words, although there is usually attraction to the mature female all along. So our sexuality is not engraved in stone as many now believe it is, but if you want to change the engraving, you’d have to do it in early adolescence and with a religious fervor. It has to be that strong, not that you have to be religious to do it, which means you have to will to do it and will intensely, and it can’t be forced upon you. I entered adolescence with a sideline attraction to little kids and came out of it with that not only as my main attraction, but my exclusive attraction, boys being the focus of that. And there you have it.

It bears mentioning that this is my ‘pedophile becoming’. Someone else’s would be different, maybe not so dependent on early adolescence to seal the fate, and, while we’re on the subject, I can’t tell you what all early teens need, but I can tell you what I needed. I needed to have sex and that often with a girl my age, preferably one that had sexual disorder issues too. We’d almost have to restructure society to know those things about our kids. Big Brother couldn’t do it. And while we’re on the subject of forced sexual morality, let me ask you: what would you rather have, and say you had to choose between the two, a pedophile or teen sex? That’s what I thought. Have you ever thought about this?

Returning to Ein Karem, where I was camping and waiting to take the journey to the Sinai and Cairo to finish the art action of posting poems in sacred and powerful places of my culture and civilization, doing the groundwork for a book such as this I see now, I got invited to a full moon gathering in Ein Karem that Jeff was attending, but I don’t remember him inviting me. I think I got noticed walking around, looking like I’d just stepped off the New Age, candidate for Christ consciousness bus. It was a New Age gathering. It began after dark, and we were on top of a wide hill above the town, above the tomb of a Sufi saint whose name I don’t remember and whom I can’t find in a Google search. Maybe it was a Christian personage of importance? We were gathered standing in a large circle holding hands, and the first thing we did was sing our names, each one of us. I sang out Don like an opera singer, what I called myself back then. Now I’m Donny, my original name. It’s like the story of the mountain becoming the mountain again after it being so strange and different for so long.

After the name sing out, Jeff was giving the reins of the gathering, and he had everyone do his thing, which was hold your two hands close together and imagine a ball of energy between them, feeling of it as if it were really there. I could never actually feel that. The look on his face when the woman who’s property and house it was, the host, abruptly gave those reins to another person, and then another, and another, as we made our way to the house some distance away, it was not a happy face. It was more like a slapped ass. Sorry Jeff. I’m showing my butt too. The reins of the group were given to anyone that had a thing they did, energy and group-wise that is. I don’t think Jeff quite appreciated that, as he kept saying, each time we came together a moment, that he could handle the group the whole time, offended he wasn’t being allowed to, but he wasn’t angry or terribly upset. He was just showing his spiritual ego, the bane of the spiritual path because it’s so visible to people around you but so invisible to you.

Some years later I’d be sitting in a similar New Age circle, although much smaller, in the Inca ruins of Sacsayhuaman above Cusco, Peru, seated with natives of the city, not tourists. Douglas and I had apartments up there. We also had a weekly TV spot on the local Good Morning Cusco show (I forget what it was actually called) teaching yoga. We turned into a comedy hit, for a little while, doing theater skits about horny yoga instructors like Pedro Perverso and channelers and their handlers like Imposlosdos. With our badly pronounced Spanish and rather poorly done yoga postures (we were not really Hatha yoga practitioners), we just hit the right spot at the time, the city’s funny bone. It was something walking down the street and having people come up to you and know who you are. Anyway, Louis, the leader of our little group, a local dentist, gave me the reins, asking me to lead the group with that Indian mantra I sung a lot (it was the Gayatri). Anything Indian was prized, but word was around there that the Andes were the ‘new Himalayas’. Funny, I never saw any deep spirituality there. It was all New Age. When he introduced me to people, he’d always say I’d lived in India for years and years, and I’d have to always say I was there only for six months, but you know, he was actually being prophetic. I led the group in one repetition of the mantra, felling that ego swell you feel when you’re leading people and they are a following, or at least I felt, and then he gave the reins to someone else, and forgetting all about ole Jeff, I got offended.

In that gathering in Ein Karem, our movement ended at the back patio of the house and had been reduced to just a handful of people. The others were eating or milling about. We were seated in a small circle. A young woman had been given the slot to do her thing, which I was to learn quickly was channeling. The way she slightly convulsed and then introduced herself as Jesus, as if her words were about to change our lives, seemed forced and smacked of so much pride. Afterwards the other host, the husband of house, told me it was obscene, and I agreed. He commented on how everyone there now knew my name, and how lovely I’d sung it out, and I was so flattered.

That would be my last night in Ein Karen, and in the morning I would go to Issac’s and get the cash to go to Egypt and post my poems, as he was sponsoring me, just enough to survive seven days, and I was to return almost shekeless, but I managed it. Issac gave me a copy of The Sunlit Path, a book of talks by the Mother, my first introduction to her. He gave me a copy of the book, not a photocopy, as he’d ordered it for himself originally but decided to give it to me, saying he’d order another one. What struck me about that book was the photo on the cover of her standing on the stairs, looking like feminine Mystery herself, and, in the book’s contents, her understanding of childhood education and of the spiritual path. I stayed in a spare room in Issac’s apartment for a couple of days before I left Israel and went to India, to Auroville, his blessings speeding me on my way, his and Jeff’s, as he had given me a tour of a Jerusalem I didn’t know existed, leading me down thin stone steps into a cistern two thousand years old, and I had walked within a few feet of the entrance many times ignorant of the depth of time just in arm’s reach, into other places as well, where the cafes are underneath the city in three thousand-year-old stalls, and I didn’t even know they were there. He went with me by bus to Tel Aviv to the airport, he paying the fair, we both sitting like kings in the two front seats of the upper carriage, the windshield so big it went from our heads to our toes, the sunlight so warm it went into our hearts. Thank you Jeff, and thank you Issac. It would be a gross violation of good faith and given hospitality if I didn’t also thank in this book the Israeli family who lived in Yemen Moshe, near our first hunger strike camp, who feature in the Tongues story “Behind the Mask Jerusalem”. The father Josef, his son Milo, my age, and the mother of the family, slowly adopted me in my six months in Israel, encouraging me, dressing my wounds, giving me food, cash, and near the end a place to stay. And thank you so very much Israel. I couldn’t have done it without you, and that’s the spiritual path. Now can I give you something?

How do you start?
You cover it,
where you go wrong.
That’s your principle change.
You work on that.
It’s where you’ll find a handle for the world.
That’s my method.

That works for some,
if you’ve got this big wrong to the world,
somethin’ you can’t handle,
somethin’ that just takes you by the nose and runs you in ruts.
I don’t think good people understand it.
They are so self-righteous mean,
lookin’ at you.
You don’t know what to tell them.
Freewill is strong?
It has you by the balls.

I’m a lead on that rope.
I will help you get out of it.
It can be done,
and you’ve got so much help doing it,
if you can open yourself that far.
I’m on your side.
I know how it is.
A mountain,
you see it?
You’re climbing the path of yourself.
What makes you tick
you investigate,
look at everything about you.
That’s the spiritual path.

You are discoverin’ the truth of yourself
and where it intersects the world.
You want to find yourself,
who you really are.
It’s larger than spheres,
so you’ve got a lot of work to do,
investigate everything,
so it doesn’t falter you.
Nothing can stand in your way
if you are truly exploring yourself.
This is so much an inner journey.
You have so much to discover,
so much to do,
so much to learn.
It never ends.

Substances matter.
Our officials
need to embrace social change,
need to let ‘em in.
I’d caution agains pot
as a daily stopover.
as a habit forming substance.
Now read me
no substances.
We move on from that crowd.
It has its price.
Diamond LSD for pedophiles.
Can you see the social change?

Boldly face the world a question mark.
That’s how you begin.
You see the process?
You just keep asking questions.
There’s a gap here,
and it quiets down.
The hush,
they themselves,
and then with God.
You learn to be quiet inside,
not to react so to outer things.
This is at first impossible.
I think we’re dealing with this right up to the very last.
It takes such a long time
to quieten yourself down,
be calm.

God is your front man.
I told you the story
of how God happen.
He becomes everything.
You’re not foolin’ this.
It’s the reality behind the times.
You’re lookin’ at it when you see the world.
How long it takes you to see that.
You have no idea.
You just begin.
It’s your handle on meeting the world.
God has so much to teach you.
There’s God.

Oh my He hit me,
and you learn about agency,
the order of things,
everything.
Why is this happening to me?
It’s not God’s fault.
He went the other day look.
I don’t know what’s you’re talking about.
It lasted forever.
You know who that is.
I’m editing your clothes,
your clothes,
your plain old clothes.
Did you know beyond my nail?
Have you learned reality yet?
Whatever comes,
practice God,
and the Hostiles,
you’re outgrowing them.

In ten you grow up.
I’m lost in God,
minutes deep down.
Chevy bubbles up.
It’s like he inquires
and commercials.
Your status
as a person in a hotel room,
relax, there’s a video.
Like substance abuse area,
watch out for false gods,
and hit your national registered cottage
right in the face.

Nobody knows how to concentrate
integral spoon.
As you know,
there’s some forced toys Sri Aurobindo asks
to leave alone.
Don’t leave here the here out of it:
aware of my shortcomings.
I listed them,
I looked at them.
It didn’t help.
They baffled me.
I’m ready to tell me
I can’t do it.
I’m impossible.
With another life two things:
I am actually human;
I can work on it.

I improve.
I get better at it.
Then the breakthrough came:
I can do it.
I began to celebrate.
Things go backwards.
Things go back and forth.
Finally I realize,
my attitude had to be perfect.
I don’t brag to the world,
and I don’t brag to myself.
I don’t practice any firm believers.
I’m a lawyer back.
She just asked for things stolen,
and now to remember
tears what happens.

Come ‘ere.
I was okay.
I was not a monster.
I was not an evil person.
This is lawyer.
I can.
I can do it.
With that I continue,
and in time there it is,
my freedom.

What wisdom I picked up along the way.
I got to know the world.
I got to know the reason we fall as human beings.
I understood.
To remember:
how close I am to fall,
and I keep from it.
Every place that used to be alright
to show my weaknesses,
I became strong instead.
You won’t pass this zero direction
without the knowledge in my material.
I’m a unique influence,
a map
of integral healing,
a soul process.

Auroville’s national trust,
let me have ‘em.
You read your name
you a journal.
The other group
you cast out.
Noway,
you don’t do it.
You don’t do it that way.
We turn this into a peaceful
under that gun you know.
I’m admitting Auroville and me at the same time.
Entered through a curtain of bring mind,
you stock the Earth.
You have integration key,
a harmony of all parts,
a natural healing method.
It works.

Something happened
that involved the world
at its deepest level.
It touched the Earth.
The spiritual path is the path to freedom.
Enlightenment comes,
but it’s not the main goal.
Don’t worry,
it’s always there
waiting to happen.
You have a temple of God
in your very life.
All things ensue from there.
It’s beautiful.
It’s wonderful.
It’s real.

We’ve spiritual’d this out.
We’ve put it in ground zero of the Earth,
and that’s the live event,
what counts in world terms.
A book,
volumes of poetry,
they could be read or not.
This is live wire
for fuck’s sake.
I’m gonna go
and be that land to the Earth you need,
and I love you,
regardless of what you’ve done to me.

I see the whole,
and we are a part of each other,
whether you admit it or not.
No, I paid for it,
all of my mistakes
on that ugly.
You’re such the terrible thinker.
I’m redeeming the world, you know?

Concentrate
on the needed change:
we love one another,
each and every one of us.
I’ve explained what that means.
Let’s just keep going.
Whether you read me or not,
this is world process.
I’ve awoken earth kind
at the dim roots
of world need.
This is what I have done.
Hear my report.
Human behavior
has got this key in its pocket.
Now anybody can draw it out.
Do you see we are not dependent on outer circumstances?
We are here,
all together,
all at once.
Here, have this knowledge.
It’s free.

Call 911.
Someone’s violated the world.
You’re looking for
a means for change.
It’s where you also process risk.
Oh you insecure people,
you can’t let that be,
and you can’t get rid of it.
You’re so afraid of it.
You remove it from us immediately,
if you have the hands to,
and there’s where you stall change.
There’s where you blot it out.
Remove the stimulus,
we’re fine—
the report you give to the world.
I’m tellin’ yah we’re not.
We’ve just been made to do no wrong.
It hasn’t come from ourselves,
where it has to come for change to happen.
You don’t see this.
You don’t even know it’s there.
You just react
to the possibility of risk.

It’s all along the line.
It’s everywhere we turn.
It’s in your car, your sleep,
your walking down the stairs,
your cross the street.
It’s on your bicycle.
It’s on the ground.
It’s everywhere you move and live and eat.
It’s all around us.
That’s why you’re so afraid of it.
We can work with risk,
don’t let it take us,
but come together with it.

Now there’s the risk to harm a child.
You take them to school everyday.
Do you understand what goes on at school,
how many teachers abuse,
how many children bully,
how much pressure there is?
Real harm happens there,
I would suspect more than children are molested.
You have some inkling of this sometimes.
You send them to school anyway.

Am I gettin’ through?
School’s a terrible place,
but why do they go?
You think they learn there;
that prepares them for life.
And they are damaged for life because of it.
Is this not the truth?

Why are you so stubborn here?
It has to do with convention.
We are herd animals.
I’m talking out of the herd.
I show you a different way of doing things.
I show you real.
It’s right here in our hands.
We learn how to use them properly.
We learn they are our friends.
Can I get you to see this?
Can I get you to try?

He offered it,
and the election is:
oh my gosh,
that’s weird.
It’s how we change ourselves,
putting will on the equation,
putting it there.
You inform your will you understand.
Knowledge and will do meet
at the crossroads.
Let’s take the world there.

Have you ever heard this spoken so plainly?
Have you ever heard change done right?
Now hear this:
you are…
I’m an ashtray.
The butts of America
put themselves out on me.
What are you livin’?
Are you livin’ a horror story?
Are you really hurting people?
There’s danger,
but there’s also help.
It’s here.
It’s in this room.
Can what I do help you?
Yes, yes it can.

We are in serious business now.
What do I do?
You really engage yourself,
apply the method I’ve employed.
I don’t plan to take his side of it.
I’m here alone.
You’re valuable,
and help is right there close to you,
if you can see ‘em.
It is you open’s Heaven’s gates,
more so than the master.
Don’t sit there and entertain bad thoughts.
Call on the divine for help.
Call on God.
Voices hearing will not be a waste in your ear,
urging you to wrong.
You will hear the inner voice,
coming in on the situation.
Learn to discern the difference.
It moves you towards light,
doesn’t flatter you
or put you down.
It’s sweet and open.
It loves the world,
so you see
it’s what you listen to,
and it loves you,
firm but sweet.
Here I’m showin’ it to you.

Now come on,
no one has to kill anybody,
and don’t believe it.
You know you want safe.
You know it’s there.
Move into it.
Be there with yourself
and give that freedom to sin the number
you do not dial.
You’ve understood how delightful it is.
You’ve understood what no one can about it.
You feel a shape of God there.
You have some sense of mission.
You feel empowered,
excited.
I’m not really tired.
I just don’t want blood on my hands, you know?
I can’t help but feel bad about it.

Look, help is coming.
You can see it in yourself.
It’s not because it’s bad you stop.
You don’t want to hurt anybody.
You don’t want blood.
You see the situation,
and you see the way out.
Take the way out.

And Nature herself will help you.
Circumstances change.
It’s not so easy to slay.
It’s not so fun either.
Or maybe it’s all one big plan
you’ve played out so many times.
You don’t want to do it.
You want to be free from this.
Come, let’s go.
Let’s get out of this mess.
Let’s get on with our lives
freed from horror story,
and let’s do this everyday
for the rest of our lives.
Be in command
of what ails us.
Be free from it,
the horrible blood-taxed tears
of death
in the eyes of other people.
Come on let’s go.

Laugh at it
don’t touch it,
I know that from dream,
what a smart Bible.
I know a lot of things from dream.
I know my life from dream.
Finally,
I got that ancient knowledge,
your interpretation of dream.
It’s a representational channel,
showing the inner essence of things,
movements in your life,
this and that happenstance,
the nature of the universe,
what are you doing in it.

It will tell you about yourself
in no uncertain terms,
like show where you are,
what you are
at any given moment.
It can talk about the past it can talk about the future,
and most dreams are about the next day and the day before.
That blows your mind.
You can’t get over it.
Now let’s predict the future.
Your dreams do it everyday,
every single day.
How do you read that?
We are loved and cared for.
We’ve got a lot to be thankful for.

You don’t even know why.
Episode—
how horrible you are,
gunna be,
to another person,
to this flagship of people,
and it could be Nature’s gifts you know.
It was prefigured in dream.
You saw it
but did it anyway.

Amazing grace,
you’re shown to report to yourself how to change.
Seeing this over and over,
you get out of it.
You stop doing that to people.
It’s all in the book,
the fantastic book of dream.

You’ve got your own dream maker
put in light of the universe
a representative of the divine,
so you know what to change.
Incredible, isn’t it?
You won’t find anything on earth like that.
You won’t even know where to look.

It’s right here in dream,
and I’m beggin’ you for it,
so stupid with this world’s things.
I’m sorry I managed this.
Behind you look.
The stunning creature
put you in a spell and you did it,
but at least you didn’t do that boy’s ass.
You find boys won’t let you do that.
It’s a grace season.
Let’s get on with our lives.
I’ve given you a key to dream.
Put it in your pencil work and wrap your head around it,
and we’re all better for it.

You measure change
into whatever movie you’re watching.
And I’ve given you the interpretation of dream.
I’ve put it down on paper
in this digital format.
That’s the actual of dream,
telelink
to where you’re goin’.
Wait I hear negative footsteps.
There’s oil in that dream.
Don’t put it on a kid’s bottom and smash it in.
It’s not tellin’ you to do that.
Get out of this mess.
A probability has arisen.
Don’t shake its hand.
It’s not what you have to do.
It’s a probability has arisen.
Don’t make it anymore than that.
I’ve told you how to do it.

Look,
just be gentle with him.
That boy can love you so much without sex.
You needn’t cross rivers.
You needn’t take his stock.
He is so into you.
Look, he’ll give you himself.
There’s where you stay:
respecting himself.
I’d love to John but
he’s just delicious.
How many years has it been?
Nine years,
we started when you were three.
How many people say uncommon here?
This is all over the world.

Parents love their children,
and so many have sex with them.
It’s not something you want to see.
It’s so human.
Do you know how common this is?
Not so unusual,
and we’ve got a world to find out.
They walk around angry wound.
It’s their adulthood.
There’s only one way to stop it.
You stop it yourself,
and you’ve never licked the bottom before,
and to think you have to’s a trap.
There is no bottom here.
There is only continue.

Alright daddy,
mommy,’
you’ll win this war
if you try,
and I’m helpin’ yah try,
showin’ you the way out.
There’s only stop,
because you love them,
and all the knowledge keep
that informs your will,
and you stop because of this:
you love them so very much.
Please listen.

We’ve put this in the book to show you
we can change the world.
We know where the levers are.
Can anybody hear me?
Does anybody care?

Where I come from,
man I told yah,
I had sex from birth.
You know my mother stopped.
How hard that was for her,
how incredibly difficult.
I loved it,
though it was awesome scary sometimes,
her lust,
her woman’s lust.
Now you see why I like boys
and don’t like women.
We’d need a transition here:
really scared of a woman’s lust
deep down in my bones.
I’m showing you the copter,
and now we slide the transition in.
I’ve contact with God,
and there’s the way out.

Open that door,
and a hurricane comes through,
but what a gift she gave me.
She put stop in my plan.
You’re hearin’ it today
so you can stop.
That’s the master plan.

Can you offer such advice?
Can you stop them?
You see where I’m comin’ from?
That place of heal.
It’s got so much love on it.
Do you love?
You just to want to catch and kill,
or hold them in prison for the rest of their lives.
And we’ve made change?
You’ve just spit on us,
again.
You’ve spit on the whole human race,
and that’s just how you do things.
Who’s the killer here, anyway?

He lost Buckshot.
Oh God daddy. [Nitish’s voice, terribly sad]
Oh, my, God. [heard sung by Diamond Eyes, song “23”]
There was some dog there.
She was my Rottweiler companion,
glued to me like my shadow.
She was killed
by a veterinarian mistake.
Lisa Joy Rottweiler
we called her.
She was principle human,
so safe to be with
if she had you in her paws.
No death has rocked my world more.
I don’t know what to do about it.
It’s still hurts so much,
a year later.
She misses me.

You would not believe the contact we’ve had
with her on the other side.
It would educate you to the dead in our lives.
I don’t want to think about it,
but she presses on my mind all day.
I give her my grief.
We have a special mission together,
and letting her go is not an option
until it’s done.
I will rescue her
and give her
her sanctuary,
where she will wait
until I return
when I die.

Right now she’s in hazard,
a dark place between worlds,
caught in the trap of her love for me.
She will not stray far from the window to here,
and I can see that,
and oh how that hurts.
Silly puppy,
hers is a protection range.
I can’t tell you that demons rattle the house,
besiege my room,
and I fight with them everyday.
Only sometimes a form I see.
They speak in my muse.
They harass my boy in dream.
She’s a protection model,
my beloved Rottweiler girl,
and she helps keep me safe
against intrusion,
me and my little boy.
She’s an angel really.

This is field of my house,
and she’s focused on us.
Her presence comes to me so often.
I just cry,
embarrassed someone might see,
and look out the window.
She sees this,
and gives me visions of her great big head,
so close to mine,
that tongue of hers lolling out in smile
like dogs do
comfortable and at ease.
She is so strong.
She fronts evil with her paws.
She’s great.

Now what do I do with that?
Give you a vision of dog you’ve never seen before.
Oh how home they are to us.
They’re not just dogs.
They’re angels unawares,
and when you get one like Lisa,
you see the reach of dog,
but what suffering has brought this to you.
You think I’m bluffing,
but a dog’s worth
can equal ours
if they’ve reached their human,
and she has.

Now I’ll show you one more thing,
the love of dog and child.
It moulds their lives,
gives them love to play with
and loyalty
wrapped around that child.
They’re cleansers.
They’re such unabashed lovers
it makes the child’s heart sing,
and you don’t know the strength of this bond,
or you have forgotten.
Look into its eyes once more.
Now tell me God is not the cause of this.
And they are here to school our children
in love and fidelity.
Wow, what principle dog,
what holy sacrament.
It’s too common to believe,
but I’ll let Lisa show you,
that big wonderful dog
waiting on her master.
She’s here.

I’ve heard the angels sing
right here.
We each hold water for this dog.
You’re not human,
Bruno be quiet.
He’s a troublemaker,
that one.
He’s so shadow,
and I don’t know how
to get him
to stop botherin’ the female dogs.
We measure heartbeats,
not spankings.
I hold it for ‘im,
his paw,
a lot when I’m at computer,
just so he knows he’s safe and loved.
He’ll bug you to death if you don’t.
And we take care of children.
What else do you do with dogs?
And some dogs work too.
So what?
They’re still our kids.
They are our special angels.
A thought in the mind of God
that balanced our mind
with a companion of love,
that’s dog.

A catalyst for change,
you know it,
that’s the history of this book.
It’s a divine love laughter science with a twist:
it brings you home.
It’s got everything in it
in the need to see.
It’s a holy book entails
so much interpretation.
We wouldn’t treat it that way.
A lot of interpretation’s already in it.
These are your divine glasses.
They help you see.
They help you be real.
I could use some reality myself.
I am an integer in this book
just bein’ myself.
I’m not in divine form yet.
I’ve just got to where I love you,
and I do that like myself.
I’ve just go to the point I love you
just like you are.
I see the whole
frequently.

I try not to step on your feet.
I just spent the evening with my little boy.
We loved dog together.
We got crazy
with his homework.
Potty humor spell it out.
I think we belly laughed.
And the way that boy looks at me,
oh wow, it’s got stars in it.
I know we have fleeting time.
Boys grow up,
wouldn’t you know it.
He looks at me for keeps,
tells to shut up about growing up.
He likes it just the way it is.
That’s our life,
and it’s good.

Do you know the meaning of the book?
It’s bigger than stars.
We would go out of the universe with it,
and we would be ourselves.
There’s an on high,
a riding car
regarding time.
That’s us in there,
making our lives matter.
It’s the principle person we are.
It’s who made the universe
as a field for its self-expression.
We become that self.
It’s higher than thought,
higher than Mind.
The Gods both help us and oppose
our moving beyond them.
You would think I’m the Devil said that.
It’s just virgin territory
for religion.
It’s who we are,
that self on high,
who we are becoming.
It’s a new interpretation
for the book
of man’s journey through time.
It’s bound to raise some eyebrows,
religion or non.
It’s the shape of things,
explains why we’re here,
and there’s just so much to that,
more than religion can figure,
more than the human mind can know.

We are a free ship
in our truer selves.
We ride there
a vehicle of God’s love,
an expression of His force.
Great the angels sing.
We hear Supermind
beyond angels,
bigger than any God
in the cosmic sea.
That’s our real self,
the true individual
that we are.
It’s bound to come sooner or later,
the advent of Supermind.
It’s here among us now.
We wouldn’t gauge it rightly.
I see it in my room.
The form doesn’t show—
its all eyes presence.
It’s everywhere at once.

God’s presence is there
the sustainer in the room.
Supermind is our true self.
God is the whole thing.
Supermind is small in comparison but God nonetheless.
I meet Supermind
my Godself
stand and sing.

Tales,
that’s what you read here.
What do you make of it?
It’s real it’s live it’s happenin’.
I put it on your block corner today.
You will not for me let anything enter your house you don’t know.
You block the unknown.
I’m a blog unknown,
and I listen to you I’m sorry.
It’s evident in my speech.
Kunji, kunji, kunji,
why does it go so high?
Why is it the main meal of the day?
Why do you have to do it?
Can’t you just do something else?

Animal,
that’s where it breathes.
You can’t arrive there without it.
It’s hungry.
The animal nature sucks.
It’s perturbed.
It just wants to eat
and guard its territory.
How do we get rid of this
animal nature?
We evolve,
and evolution will take us to a higher type.
That’s direction enough.
I’ve put it down on paper
how to resist
in digital words.

That’s ludicrous:
we can’t keep from doing that.
We are ordered animal creatures
we can stay awake.
An informed will
bids time
it’s rock solid.
You’re lookin’ at it.
I take your hand.
It’s need,
just how whole you are in a big bed.
I have written the vocabulary.
In the future,
I think you’ll use it.
Can I just see?
I really do have the vocabulary.
Are you gonna wait until I’m dead?
It would help you now,
boy would it ever.

We have crossed the world
in the entire of a book.
I just don’t know about the read thing.
You don’t seem to want to.
Okay it’s out of my hands.
It’s written.
Bye.

Agent provocateur,
come back here.
Uncle,
grandfather,
we’re listenin’.
We’re really readin’ it.
We just don’t say a whole lot.
I don’t know if thank you’s the right word.
What’s you’ve given us
defines the world.
I am so excited to read it.
I’ve read it done.

You just never know
what those views mean,
and right now,
they’re few and far between.
I’ve published a book
online,
and writing it while I post it,
well not completely.
It was finished some.
If this were an experiment in reading,
like that alternative format,
the results were dismal.
I think we’ve processed delete,
and we can get rid of it today,
so easily.
No, not this baby.
It’s here to stay,
grounded completely in time.
And that’s the storybook.
You hear me Houston?
Okay world,
I’m done.

A laughter love story,
it’s yours for the takin’,
divine word.
We laughed at ourselves for an hour,
and then just went to sleep.
Divine providence reads it.
I am so very careful with seer.
I don’t hit you over the head with
I am a chosen preacher,
and I am a the prophet;
God will destroy your city if you don’t;
He’ll make you eat your children.
Oh, I’m going too far.
Let us return to peace.
It’s a book about me,
but it’s not centered on me.
I am infallible,
that’s not me.
Look it’s God I want you to look at.
God is free.
Even in Supermind we adore Him.
Just wait and see.
Goodnight people.
Snorin’ dogs will put me to sleep,
and I’m complete.

The prophet speaks.
Will you shut up?
Align with me.
I am a seer see,
a poet-seer,
and there it is.
Will you shut up?
Rage puppy,
oh I forgot about that crowd.
How to burn a book
if it’s online?
Hackers,
they won’t let you read,
or they try and stop you.
Not the brightest crowd,
damn right dumb if you ask me.
What are they tryin’ to prevent,
manipulate public opinion?
Hey look,
they are so manipulative,
block you from reading material
that would make you think differently than them,
and that shows their superiority?
They just hate, you know?
She was singin’ bye bye Miss American Pie. [heard sung, by Don McLean]
If you leave me now. [heard sung, by Chicago]
Uh oh, we’re windin’ down.
See yah later.

Teacher, leave those kids alone. [heard sung, by Pink Floyd]
Shut up.
You’re just a Hostile power
mixin’ in my music.
I can recognize you,
see?
And we wrote it down,
the whole nine yards.
We’re done.

We’re ready to happen with society.
Brain pickings
five hours from now,
but that’s gonna last
so happily through the ages.
So long.
He reveals himself
that part of man’s mind that thinks of Him.
He reveals himself as a God link,
and that’s the driving of this book.
The author’s stuff,
his worry,
is just a vehicle to get there.

Totally devoted to You,
that’s where we’re goin’.
That’s the icing on the cake.
It doesn’t get any larger than this.
Do you understand my balance?
It’s a vehicle for this Earth.
Beings are a dime a dozen.
We get to know God.
Public spirit
we got there.
Supermind was just a stepping stone,
tremendous,
really, really big.
Come on let’s get going.

The stigma of the pedophile,
that’s not read today.
The stigma of the pedophile,
it won’t let anybody believe it.
You are not supposed to speak,
you’re feeling the taboo yes.
It’s a better book that way,
more real, innocent.
I would not be cosmic:30.
I would be a wharf in your room
where you can dig for deeper fishes.
I am so led by history you have no idea.
You just say no.
And no shelf
of no read
will keep this book from being read forever.
You’re intendin’ me some just by bein’ here.
Adios.

I peed in my pants.
I clean it all up.
Now showing in the depths of Auroville,
the liberal elite.
They don’t got any stakes higher than that.
As besieged as they are,
I’m on their shit list.
Now you wanna landmark?
There it is.
I ask you to read my book and pass it on to Auroville,
a pick me up,
right about now.
I remember thinking
what can you do?
Too angry to set fire to my words,
Aurolow is in a bad position.
We need to get them off the ground.
We need to get them started again.
The ways and means committee decides how much politics,
how much voice.
Everybody’s staying here tonight.
We’ve got a lot to go over.
That’s your package.
I’ll see yah in the morning.
Goodnight.

What do we do for air flyers?
You’re writing on her book.
Didn’t know she’d do that
after questioning the law from destruction,
and it started everything:
and help me I’m super.
We’re not gonna use your word.
Don’t just stand there and shoot human unity.
I’m sorry,
I stood between you and Tamils.
I am not that now,
and try not to be in on this shot:
the secretary will try to kill me,
once she gets a load of me.
I barely remember that from dream.
Dream exaggerates,
but you see the threat.
Now she’s a pole employee,
and that pole can be removed.
It’s all in the book.
Are yah hearin’me?

I’m on my way.
Here, make a story different,
make the whole thing different.
I’ve got your love at heart.
Piece me together, will yah?
The history of a lifetime
gets you a private school.
I’m lovely to your cold tablet.
Just pick me up.

You read it.
I can feel the shift.
To be interested in the best and the rest reading,
Auroville give me a glow.
I don’t think you understand I’m your seer,
and cities like you have always had one.
Why wouldn’t it be now?
Modern times exclude them?
You just don’t know what you’re looking at:
divine intervention
that a seer expresses to his world.
I didn’t get a chance to show you
years ago:
my mother and sorrow and with other man to eat,
the one I was years ago.
First thing do gonna take medicine,
what this book is on its most basic level.
Have it course,
have it now.
Stand for the movie.
You’re likely to get inspired by it.

He was so impress us.
His cells early had the light.
We gave him our middle finger.
Come and doubt
what make me visible again.
Is that yours?
I am, really, truly, here.
Can you forgive me?
Our museum,
no it’s crazy:
everywhere you come you die.
We just don’t know how to listen to kids.
We don’t know how to listen to anyone.
Alright Auroville, alright,
you have so much of my stuff.
He hung up,
and now it got weird.
You might say he had some friends.
They helped him—
Auroville live up to your charter.
Hide away,
here we go.
Ooh grandmother,
you’re serious.
That’s the Mother,
and she’s here,
sending modern letters to the captain
because of Brian.
Get ready.

Computer this is,
computer teaching,
your fault.
You’re acting the whole comes out,
and forget it.
It’s far from you.
People don’t understand the need to read human things.
We just hand-me-downs.
Hey buddy,
you’re not the only one
provide answers to humans.
A little tired baby,
a little headache braid,
that’s what it does to you,
the computer medium.
In heaven,
even if they die,
we’re gonna feel their aftereffects a long time.
They dangers in using them
put us all at ease.
Computers generate hostility.
There’s your Internet.
There it is plain.
Let’s get back to microphones
to call one another.
They mysteries of the airways have us all on our feet.
Are you listenin’ to this?
You don’t know it, do yah?
Now this book is processed
a room to say you’re sorry in.
Give it to people.
Alright everybody,
I’ve said enough.

A Medieval adventure,
why they after the camera?
A Hindu camera,
Islamic State in religious observation.
Fear this.
Nobody wants it,
especially the people who think they do.
Get it the Matrimandir,
they’ll eventually control India,
tougher even
than any Moslem fundamentalist regime.
Come on,
Auroville’s where we meet.
Every able-bodied person in the world
converge on Auroville.
Free it from government hands,
and bring it
to the uplifting of the world
a human unity center
and the place we create the new human being,
where love holds the door,
nothing authoritarian.
Come on let’s get out of here.

It is time for me to say
goodbye.
Who am I fool?
I can’t get read today
because of the tightly controlled races.
A computer never allow me.
Hero fantasies,
hero wars,
that’s what you’re doin’ online.
You don’t have a clue what’s goin’ on.
You’ll stop and tweet
to say somethin’ profound:
I don’t know what to do!

Manny you’re next,
but you’re naked.
Now I’ll tell yah,
just like there’s right action there’s right speaker,
and you’ve found him.
Here I am.
It’s that dog.
Yeah, it’s that dog.
You don’t have to worry.
I’m afraid you’ll never see me—
everybody’s censorship.
Put those on a month.
In less than a month
I’ll be in your garden.
Mornin’.

9/11 came from conflicts in Israel.
It happened there—
and you understand it.
Israel’s got the foreign policy of sharks.
Okay and we see that.
Now let’s go
channel her to humanity.
You know the flavor of this book.
It calls for peace in all settlements
in the land of Israel.
We’d need to help them do that.
You hear me?
Don’t fudge on this.
The Jews have to accept humanity, period.
It’s the only way out of this mess.
And we’ve got a sovereign State of Israel
learnin’ how to love the world.
Okay I gave you the book on that.
I mean we begin.

That will certainly relay the cosmic guitar
you get in Heaven.
It’s not a dust model.
It’s clear open and honest.
It’s good.
Throw the dust toy a limited view.
This is more about models,
sky history.
Paint it red and orange and gold.
Let’s get on with it,
building our reality.

My talking to the announcing editor also helps.
Who’s sleeping all in they’re a baby, isn’t it?
Nature added up the original score by banging it.
You see what I just did,
shaking it for to our understanding.
Memories of leaven filled the pie.
Seconds of the processing center,
listen to my voice,
you are still illegal in man’s eyes.
We get there from here,
to a whole lot of redemption.
Then it will have
live poetry reading.
That’s what you said.

Luna,
what are you doing?
That’s not your bag that’s Lisa’s.
Human awareness,
that’s your ordeal too.
Let’s bake this bread,
take this show on the road,
get right down to changin’ the world.
Would the world hear me?
Would it even care?
And we get the equipment,
regardless.

A monumental change
is happenin’.
You know what they say about the missing link?
That’s his file.
Wow, hallelujah.
That was hung over.
Look at that process,
a success.
They’re all over the place,
world ideas.
You can’t find them
on a regular news stream platform.
Now look behind you.
You’re going out of business.
Look they network.
They get to humanity despite you.
Blue line,
from orange to some practical gold,
ask anyone,
it’s the dream of humanity vision.
Oh my God it’s you.
See yah in the morning.

We’re thoughts on the line,
every picnic basket,
every universal human.
They’re in every principle place on the planet.
A milestone
this book is formed.
It reaches you anyway,
even if you don’t read it.
World process is not dependent on books.
They give rise to things already done.
They’re just a record.
What has bubbled to the surface for our keep?
Now I’m a national anthem,
and we employ a world chant too.
Peoples of the world unite.
We got a lot to do,
boy have we ever.

Sorry,
you’re hearin’ my boy in my arms,
sleepin’ away,
and a five-year-old
I let him be with me.
A ten-year-old would be big and little at the same time.
What I love you takes care of them.
They are so sweet and little, you know?
Look I’m tired.
We go to the lake in the morning.
We must be there
the finishing of the book.
That’s all I’ve doing, writing,
just about nonstop.
So long.

A five-year-old,
he hangs out with me.
I love my golden retriever,
and that’s the storyline.
We got it.
What are we doin’ here?
My God that’s bigger than answers.
You see?
And we’re ready to go.
We’re on world terms.
We’re where they happen.
We’re in sync with you.
I’m right here to inform you
a world is on our table.
Half exists
as a physical motion.
The other half’s comin’ out of the water now,
right before your very eyes,
bright world ideas dripping with change.
Gather ‘em up, move ‘em out.
We're in the light of time.
We’re there, you know,
a world round at your feet.

This is ridiculous.
Gotta get some sleep.
I hand you the world
for your good keeping.
Take and disrespect it no.
A world is at your eyes,
and like a child watch it grow.
That’s the large part,
and that’s our expression now.
A bell for humanity,
I’m showin’ you the way home.
I’m showin’ you
the large degree.
Keep it safe and warm.
It’s your very child.
He has such soft skin,
and I could hold him in my arms all night.
I usually do,
those nights he stays with me.
Goodnight.

Bruno,
stop pawin’ the boy.
Gimme your paw.
I’ll hold it too.
Dogs and kids,
the dogs are a little jealous.
Luna where you at?
Right at my very feet,
and we’ve got ourselves a convoy,
takin’ night to a good night’s sleep.
Sweet dreams.

Leelow stop beating your tail against the bed.
You fat dog.
I love you too.
I think we’ve counted everything
in the world’s bed
we need to draw attention to.
Stop flappin’ those ears Luna.
I know you’re here.
Please bear with me.
I can’t turn this off.
Ah, there it is,
the lever.
I hold you in my arms tonight
world.
He said he’s going to Cleveland.
Who pulled your chain?
Now goodnight.

He’s slept through this whole muse envision—
kids.
Oh God is that the fires of dawn?
Muse, let me go.
And we go.
Thank you.

I’m ahead
of where you think you are.
Okay that’s litter.
I’m in the beginning stages of man.
Try again.
I’m at world process, you know?
I think we’re comin’ along.
We Grasp the World Now.
I do. I do.
Good answer,
those risks
are quality,
and I’ve been showin’ you that all night long.

Oh the importance of dawn,
even birds sing it.
All the animals sing it,
it’s so good to see.
It lights up our world
with the responsibility
of daytime.
Now before we get out of bed,
let’s fly this room
right into dawn.
Done,
the book is finished.

Nitish sleeping with a jealous Bruno beside him. Photo by me.

Next post:

Epilogue of Ideas

Between Jerusalem I’m Sorry, Chapter 11

When you see Supermind, sit down without interruptions. This help us. And things sat at Egypt, quite a chart, occult seat. Get the government out of there. Photo by me.

Now What About the Bathroom City Toy?

These were poems posted at the hunger strike camp in Jerusalem, outside Jaffa Gate. One or more of them were posted at the top of Mt. Sinai and around the Great Pyramid in Egypt. I don’t remember which ones.

It happened as soon as I plopped down on my bed in my efficiency there at Hyde Park Apartments in the Montrose district of Houston. The whole room erupted in vision. I was watching a storm at sea, and everything was purple, the sky, the mounting waves, the ocean. Thunder and lightning punctuated the scene, and the lightning too was a shade of purple. A woman on a white stallion was looking at me kindly, the horse expertly riding the storm under her body commands. She was dressed in the buckskins of a male American Indian warrior. And she smiled. As I looked into her eyes I was suddenly seeing through the eyes of innumerable individuals, and how can I describe this? They were a single person, all those beings, not entities in union sharing an identity and field of consciousness, but one individual that existed as a multitude. Each was a specific personality type, or character, as this rider of the storm was, and each was strikingly different from the one on either side, as it were as though they were all in a curved line, or some such figure, facing out. That vision within a vision, of seeing through multiple beings, multiple poles of experience at the same time, lasted only a second or so, but I saw. Then I was looking at the woman again, and she said, not exactly, but this is close, “Nirvana expresses itself through the forms.” And the vision ended. And my world fell back into place. I was okay. Meaning refilled my room.

I could now go on, live my life and with enthusiasm, the luckiest man in the world because I had seen what I saw: the world is a meaningful expression of Nirvana, that being for me at that time a name I used for Reality, Buddhism being my mode of study  back then. I called that person that had multiple selves the Nirvana people, for the same reason. Once I took up the study of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, I was able to connect the dots and realize that stupendous being was a representation of the Supermind, it being one entity expressing itself in innumerable distinct personalities so to ride the universe. It also came to me in the study of his yoga that was where I was going as the force of kundalini began to rocket up the base of my spine during that momentary experience of enlightenment described in the last chapter, and I was headed back up there where I wanted to be, as he says that you normally go to Supermind on a thin edge of existence, side by side with extinction, the exit out of cosmic existence, but instead of leaving, you go into your real Self, and I’ve put into my own words his teachings. Stupid me, I stopped myself, not understanding I was returning where I had done that intense sadhana to return to. Now, a couple of weeks later, with that woman on the horse, I saw the nature of myself on high, the aspect of Supermind that rides me, and thus my essential nature, I a rider of storms, in cross sympathy with the two sexes we wear, comfortable and at home a stranger in a strange land. It does fit me well, as I’m a homemaker, after being an adventure traveler and a Green Beret, and I live in India as an Indian a White man, and one storm after another hits our house, some carrying the flesh of death, and I, used to it, unperturbed for the most part, just continue.

You would be right to ask me how could I have been so fooled by the momentary experience of Silent Mind into thinking the world wasn’t real when I’d experienced Supermind and seen with mine own eyes the reality of everything. That’s the way it is with us, our present circumstances far outweigh our past and future, living as we are on the cusp of some present moment forever slipping into the past, even before we can grab ahold of it. I didn’t realize Supermind but just had a fleeting experience of it, and it wasn’t me that experienced it but Supermind, the remote, unmanifested Supermind high above the head. It did change my life, or redirected it rather, and all I wanted was to “be Myself again,” get back up there on high. But the world was still the same for Donny, that little I driving the truck, once the experience was over. He had seen and now knew, but he wasn’t changed. No-Self, however, that silent emptiness, hit me right in the seat of my perception of the world when I looked at anything with my eyes, or with my mind’s eye, for the couple of weeks after the experience. I was looking at emptiness, a world void of meaning, one just one step from nothingness. This is, by the way, one sure way of telling if you or someone telling you they have actually had an experience of enlightenment. You’re just stunned for days or weeks afterwards.

At Krishna’s in Safed, Israel, about four years later, I was basking in warm sunshine. It wasn’t that he was impressed with those two over the top spiritual experiences I described to him—I don’t think he really grasped them. He was purposely providing a safe space for someone being outcast to feel the support of community. I can’t tell you how much that helps, even if it’s only a heartfelt hello or a bright smile you give such a person. It makes our day. Here, it was healing my wounds. He said it was movie night, and that David the Sefirot artist and his wife were coming over to watch Mrs. Doubtfire with us, the film he’d chosen for the evening. Funny that film, and funny that very open man. I kind of think the universe chose the film, but I suspect David was showing his support too, not necessarily, like I said, for me personally but for the person being outcast. It was lovely evening. To be indoors, to be in polite company, wow, what a boon. Thank you Krishna, and thank you David and your wife. You are wonderful.

I don’t think I’d planned to leave Safed that next morning, although I was planning to go soon. After leaving Krishna’s refreshed, taken care of, on a high note, I encountered the crowd I initially was involved with in Safed, the one Hen-ya and Zeke, were a part of. Actually, I only ran into Ger and the little boy in the group, and they were about to go on another weekend day trip to some place or another interesting not too far away. I’d gone on two of those excursions myself, one to that moshav ‘dinner in the barn affair’ I told you about, but I’d had a falling out with the group over my attraction to that little boy, which manifested a bit like the behavior of a male dog not able to stay away from a girl dog in heat. I mean he’s right there as close to her as dogly possible. The boy didn’t mind the attention, although he wasn’t the type of kid that liked attention to his genitals. It was just something that alarmed the females and caused Hen-ya to tell me, a couple of days before the morning I’m at now in the story, that she wanted nothing more to do with me, period. When I informed her of Ger’s behavior with the boy’s fourteen-year-old sister, she became angry and told me that I was lying. Even though it was true, it was illegitimate of me to implicate him so to take some heat off me.

As I watched her walk away from me, I remembered her telling me some days before that she’d seen God in her room, and when she said it she giggled like a naughty child, and she proclaimed there was no longer any need to meditate or do anything like that, as if her vision, which she wouldn’t describe to me other than to say it was a bright light that was ‘God’, was the sign she’d achieved the goal of the spiritual path, and so it’s no surprise her way of dealing with me was to tell me she would no longer be my friend. No integral understanding there, no heartfelt compassion, no sign she’d seen God with the essence of her vision of self and world. Whatever she meant by seeing God, it was not a light that enlightened her.

Ger and the girl were quite the spectacle. Often in those first days after my arrival in Safed, when we were a group together, before I turned more towards the crowd at the art studio, Ger and I would be alone with the kids, and they would be lost in each other, or what was really going on, she using him as her sexual pedestal, her exploratory tool, they kissing and feeling of one another, passionately, she often getting on top of him and straddling him, he opening his legs so they could be genital to genital, both fully dressed though, and they dry humping each other, her so hot to her awakened sexuality you thought she’d catch fire. I would be nearby with the boy massaging him everywhere but where I wanted to and where he didn’t want me to, or I’d be doing whatever the boy wanted to do so to keep his attention. It was really in the atmosphere, their sex. We don’t know to take that into account in the pedophile’s wrong.

Ger was about 27 or so, and his name is the Hebrew name for stranger, and it’s part of the Law to treat a ger kindly, and so his name gave him special treatment. Zeke told me that was the type of non-Jew most welcome among Jews. I don’t know really why. Zeke was never judgmental or cross about me being with the boy, but he did study it, warned me the others didn’t like my focus on the boy. Zeke did not know about Ger and the girl. Only the boy and I saw that. He did, however, tell me the mother was a sharlila, the word I believe he used, and that people looked down on her. Ger had sex with the mother, and so that sealed his in with the family, as there was no father, just the mother and her two children.

However she was with men, an easy woman or what, or really, a contemporary New York City girl (girl—she was in her late thirties I believe), she was straight up with her son and his package. Everyone had been who’d been in close caretaking roles with him in his infancy and toddler years. No one messed with his thing. He was now 7, and the ego was in full swing, old enough to keep people off his privates because that’s they way he’d been taught, that they were private, his, not even his mom’s or dad’s. Here’s some useful knowledge: if you don’t play with your baby boy’s mailbox in any way, shape or form, don’t even open it in the attitude, meaning wash and heal it holding it away from you in your mind and in your own genitals, not in a fearful or morally indignant manner, which has its own consequences, but respectful of the boy’s privacy, and if no one fiddles with it other than other little kids, which is no problem here, then that boy will say no to some adult or near adult who wants to play with it or worse as the kid grows up. Someone can still get past those defenses, as it’s not so hard to get into a kid’s pants, but those defenses will still be up, be a barrier to someone trying to get some handful or more out of them. This boy was such a boy, strong in his strongbox, because his mother had been careful with him and it. It’s usually the mother who has the most say here, if she is the primary caretaker. Sometimes, though it’s the dad or a close relative.

If, on the other hand, a mom or somebody caretaking close fooled with it, twitched it up and down, or outright played with it some, in a baby’s first three years of life or so, then they will be open down there and give a great big yes to adults that want some of that. If it didn’t reach a certain level of intensity, didn’t go overboard, then the boy will become  a man somewhat crazy about women, probably disrespectful towards them, and if the mom’s, big sister’s, aunt’s, or grandmother’s hand got carried away often, he’ll become a sexual harasser or quite possibly a rapist. Can you see the equation? Judging from the reports worldwide of men sexually harassing women, raping them, it would seem there’s a pandemic of women into their baby boy’s stuff. When’s Me Too going to examine itself? Here’s the line: if the woman gave that infant boy orgasms, or played with it frequently in an overtly sexual way, to erection and beyond, or any adult did that at that tender age, then the kid will grow up to be a pedophile if he stays on course for that, and there’s a demon attached to him from birth, the same one who got the woman, or whomever, to mess with him, making sure that boy stays on course. Do you have any idea what I just showed you?

For his part, Ger was only mildly bothered by me focusing on the boy, and we talked about it, as we did about what was going on with he and the girl, he saying, not without some truth, that he was only giving the girl what she wanted and that he wouldn’t have actual intercourse with her. I did not, however, see him the most patient and trustworthy teacher there. In the course of our conversation about my attraction to little boys, I told him about my mom giving me fellatio as a baby and toddler. He was not a coarse or macho man, was quite gentle and sensitive actually, his passion with the young girl notwithstanding, was someone I felt okay to talk to. He told me that, once, listening to a radio talk show in his native Norway, he heard a young mother talk about her infant son’s penis, how it would become erect, and she wanted to suck it. The radio host, he said, got quite alarmed and told her not to do that. I looked at that story as showing the tip of an iceberg, not only in Norway but in humanity, and how alarmed would you be to know it is? Meaning more mothers than anybody would believe suck that little thing, and it made me feel less weird about that thing happening to me.

I ran into Ger and the boy after I left Krishna’s. They were about to leave on a day trip somewhere. Ger told me he felt bad about how things worked out, or I think he did. Maybe it was just the way he looked at me, sadly. The boy was doing something boyish as the two waited; you how boys don’t just stand there. He looked at me briefly, with those big, brown eyes of his, and I was searching that look for something to do with wanting me to come too. I was infatuated. He was just a boy. I couldn’t see a hint of me in his eyes. Instead of speaking to me, he asked Ger when they were going. I think it was at that very moment I decided to leave, and I did. I had my stuff with me, a backpack, and I went to the out road so to hitchhike to Tel Aviv, which was about half the length of Israel from there. I’d just been wined and dined by Krishna, validated and stood by, but that was yesterday. What did you do for me today God? My boy had rejected me. That was all that mattered. It was June 4th, 1995, my 34th birthday.

But God is faithful, even to boy lovers, or really, still loves and shows them that love, despite their mooning over boys. As I left I was also carrying the confusing rejection of me of all those young, Jewish Americans. I deserved it you’d say, or I’d imagine you would, and that even Atheists would, the oneness crowed too (that oneness crowd isn’t), but God doesn’t see it that way, and I mean by God the Supreme, just to make it clear I’m not talking about a particular God. I will always have trouble getting this point across, as most ideas of God have Him hate you, or at least turn His back on you, if you sin, that point being God loves, period. I’ve explained before that the crowd at the art studio weren’t rejecting me because of my love for boys, or predatory behavior I believe it’s called today, as that point never came up with them; they were rejecting me because I wasn’t Jewish bottom line, although that rejection had a lot to do with the strength of my spirituality, but if I’d been Jewish that strength wouldn’t have been a point of interest among them instead one on which to exclude me. It’s always possible Hen-ya or Zeke talked to someone from the studio crowd about my pederasty, to call more what it’s more truly called, or has been called down through the ages (we are strangers I know), and so you can’t scientifically rule that out, but it’s not probable given there were no go-betweens between the two groups, no friends in this group that also had friends in that one. And besides, neither of those two, despite their other failings, were gossips, and neither were Ger and the mother.

There’s one thing I haven’t mentioned about leaving Safed, something that ended up eclipsing that boy it was so big, had God in it if you want to know the truth. Out of nowhere had come the strong desire for a chocolate croissant, probably because of the comfort it would provide; we are so comfort food bound when it comes to being depressed about something. The desire was right there in the front of my desire soul, hitching down to Tel Aviv. You don’t hitch in Israel with your thumb. You hitch by reaching your arm out as a vehicle goes by and pointing with your index and middle finger down to the road, maybe shaking it up and down, maybe not, and it’s easy to get picked up in Israel, probably because a lot of the hitchers were soldiers on their way home from duty, and everybody but the orthodox have to serve. I was halfway to my destination when I got dropped off at a desolate spot. “Damn,” I thought, “I’ll never get a ride here.” I looked at my surroundings, for the best place to hitch from, and I saw a light pole that hadn’t been completed yet at the best spot. It only reached about waist high, and it had a flat top. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I literally rubbed them. On it was sitting a fresh chocolate croissant with a single small bite taken out of it. Now, I’d been outside awhile, homeless, and that bite didn’t mean a thing. I snatched that croissant up and ate it. When I finished a car came by and picked me up on my signal. I sat in the front seat, and the driver shared a bag of fresh fruit with me, and it was wet and cool and delicious. He was so kind.

I got to the city and jumped out of the car, landing on both feet, meaning I quickly got a means to eat. From past experience, I knew the restaurants on the street opposite the promenade hired as day labor bussers (the slang for bussing tables was something like pic-a-lo) and dishwashers, and the down and out tourist manned those day jobs a lot. You got paid with a meal at the end of your shift if it were only during the lunch or dinner rush, with a some shekels too if it were all day. Israel is a traveling experience like no other. Anyway, I got into a dishwasher’s little world, the plates coming in still half full of food, and not just any food, fired shrimp, my favorite food, and cheesecake, my favorite desert. I was washing and eating. In my mind, it was a feast fit for a king, but the waiters there didn’t want me to do that. I think I was eating a partially eaten piece of cheesecake when about three or so came in and stopped me, but not rudely or meanly. They were actually concerned, and a bit tickled at the same time, maybe at my long-haired and bearded appearance or at my unabashed delight at the food, but it was probably both, and they asked how long it’d been since I’d eaten. I explained I’d not been eating much, but I did have dinner the night before. One waiter took me by the hand and led me to a table out on the main floor, and they served me a wonderful meal, and I really, really enjoyed that meal, a memorable meal in this table of a lifetime, and then I went back to the dishes. Happy birthday. Thank you God, and thank you people. People can be so wonderful, you know? This is knowledge of God.

Along that stretch of restaurants and cafes across the street from the promenade in Tel Aviv was The Art Cafe, a very striking business front with colorful art on it. Inside it was crammed with framed paintings, and the painter could be seen, back then at least, busy with his latest painting right there in the cafe, who was also the owner of the cafe and its only employee. It was a small place, but there were several tables and a feeling of depth, as in size, once you got inside. I was drawn to the place looking over at it a lot as I left my sleeping place on the beach coming back and forth from day labor, which wasn’t in the restaurants but in construction. My new group of friends were the down and out tourist crowd haunting the beach in those days, all non-Jews except for the bright and shiny de factor leader of the group, a very young man with long, blond hair down past his shoulders and blue eyes from The Netherlands, de facto because he could speak Hebrew and knew the limits of tolerance, or we thought he did. He didn’t.

The Art Cafe drew me, and soon I was there watching the man paint after I got off work. There was no distinction, that I could feel at least, being made under the water of Jewishness or non, and that seemed pretty characteristic of my experience of Tel Aviv, but it would be too early to ascribe the religious racism I was experiencing in Israel to only the religious. At the time, his stuff struck me as only an attempt at art—after all, he couldn’t make it as an artist and had to have a coffee shop, and there were so many paintings, felt like a dime a dozen. Funny the common blinds. I’ll let my muse interpret his work though, through its lens of today: “Why don’t you just consider the width of the creativity? Draw another line across it. It was very beautiful.” He’d paint a background any manner of ways, one solid color, a color of many shades, or of many colors, any manner of shapes, on which he’d “paint paint onto, little dabs of brushstrokes here and there, let it stand up, let it stand out, on which he would ascribe meaning with that dabbing.”

I convinced him to host a “Noise From the Innerwho” there at his cafe, about two weeks after my arrival, which I put on with my beach friends, a sandy, disheveled handful of people, but loyal friends, and we had to be to one another; we were all we had. He made a little, long, rectangular painting for the bottom of the flyer, but unfortunately I don’t have a copy for you now. One published local poet showed up, with his small entourage, a middle-aged man whose style of dress spoke of university and ordinariness. He was quite snobbish, though, once he heard my poetry, had this little smile on his face that said something like, “That’s what I though, hippie, you don’t write poetry.” I felt the same way about his after hearing his, and reading his he was as arrogant as I reading mine, and as blind to that ego swelling as I. Funny the poetry sphere.

I was carried over to Auroville from Israel on my knee. I got put on it just before I left Safed, some months before I left the country for India. Those small two boys I told you about, whom I was teaching meditation and pranayama to, who were around 11, well, it was a knee thing with them, although you’d call it the predator. I showed them, manually, like really hands on, the cross-legged position I used to do the deep breathing exercises, one that made it easier to draw up the perineum, that place between the anus and genitals, but you had to have one heel directly on the perineum applying pressure, the the other foot on top of the bottom foot with its heel pressing against the genitals, quite an exact position and quite a stretch to make. In putting their heels on their perineums and against their genitals, I got handfuls of their package. For them it added to the thrill of it all. For me I got a little of their life stuff, a little thrill as well.

Okay, well, uh, the last time I did that with them, I mean the instruction, and regardless of what else was going on that was too, we did a sprint race, a spontaneous thing that just happened when we got up, the boys just wanting to, just the length of the artist quarter square, but it was enough to pull a ligament in my knee, although one could’ve been torn for all I know. I never went to the doctor about it, couldn’t afford to. That injury was to last six months, drug on and on, and I could no longer do my meditation/pranayama exercise, that specific one that raised the kundalini. That’s not all it raises, what my muse showed you last time. I could walk okay, but any bending of the knee beyond that hurt. Made it hard to do construction work, but not impossible.

About a month or so after I got to Auroville I went to their pranic healer for help, a middle-aged Indian woman that had a slightly saintly demeanor, not in the sanctimonious sense, in reality, but she was so down to earth you saw that earth first. You just believed in her. I lay down, in a little healing room made with thick concrete walls—everything is in India. Windows are cut out of it, usually with nothing between you and outside world when it was open except bars, and bars don’t keep the bugs out. Here, if I remember right, no bars, and the windows were high up on the wall, long slits, like windows in bathrooms, so people couldn’t see in. I’d told her of the knee injury. She began using her hands to make motions of drawing energy out of it, and I was surprised I could feel that drawing up in my knee. Then she abruptly gave it over to whom I thought was her assistant, a White woman also her age, who was similar to her in demeanor but not earthy, just a little holier than thou. I was disappointed and asked if she were her assistant. The woman was slightly offended by that question and told me she was a pranic healer from Findhorn, a large, enduring, intentional community in Scotland, and she was visiting Auroville.

The Auroville healer left the room, and the Findhorn healer continued the drawing out of energy from the right knee as the other had done, telling me she saw black energy coming out of it, any trace of being offended having left her. She had just gotten right down to business. I became at ease, beginning to trust her. Intrigued she’d mentioned seeing energy, I asked her about it, telling her that I saw lights around or near people a lot, circles, lines, irregular shapes, of many colors, especially when people spoke out for the first time or sneezed or something. She explained I was seeing the emotional aura, the shape and color an indication of what that person was feeling at that moment, a temporary thing. She said the inner aura was more permanent, the colors constant, but in my limited experience seeing the inner aura glowing around a person, like once (in a samadhi during a public meeting in the town hall of Gaberville, but that’s not in the galaxy of this story), I suspect it’s not so constant but changes too, albeit slowly. She finished, and I got up, thanked her, and left. I think it was donation based, not exactly free, and I don’t remember if I gave anything or not.

That night the real effects of pranic healing showed themselves. I mean how it heals, and it’s possible the healers aren’t all that aware of the holistic nature of its healing process, thinking removing the negative energies is the largest part of it. All that movement of energy around the injured knee manifested in a dream the cause of the injury, its inner essence. I was lucid and forgot how that came about, as it’s not usual I’ll just be lucid as a dream begins, but it has happened, and I was sitting on the top of a small but steep and tall hill, with my legs dangling down it was that steep. It was a little like the artificial hill in Herman Park in central Houston, which housed on top the amphitheater I saw Shakespeare’s A Mid Summer Night’s Dream in (or was it Twelfth Night?) with Randy during those three some odd years of intense inner study I keep referring to. What I remember most about the performance was the samadhi I experienced before the show. The constant hum of a normal crowd provides a possibility of inner experience I suspect few realize. It like puts you underwater. I was so disappointed I had to come out of it and go get Randy and show him to our seats. In samadhi, or yogic trance, if you move your body you lose it, but there is the possibility of staying in it and walking around some, a very slim possibility damn hard to actualize, although with any experience of samadhi, you can feel its effects for hours afterwards. You are more inner and quiet, feel that calm in your inner earth.

I went to Herman Park all through my boyhood (here I link later to Richard Linklater. The moonshot movie hung the moon), not too often but often enough, as it’s quite a draw for kids in Houston, what with being able to take a large piece of cardboard and slide down that grassy hill and all, not near as steep as in the dream but sloped enough, and being able play on the stage of the amphitheater. Houston is flatland, and you don’t find many stages open to the public that kids can play on. I frequented the park almost daily once I moved out of Montrose and into an apartment in the museum district during those intense inner years I keep mentioning, am mentioning now. It hasn’t been the stage of many dreams in my life, just a couple or so that I remember, but of course I only remember a small fraction of the dreams I’ve had. The environment of the dream had its own little cosmos to it, like everything was mocked up, swooped up, and ready for representation. It was a representation of urban community, and I was on the heart, or at the top, of that. I looked at my legs, and my penis was on my right knee, not between my legs, and I understood the actual cause of the injury, understood it in the sense I completely realized it, in my very body, and when I woke up I was healed, no pain in my knee at all. I know it’s a risk to show you all this, but these are needed things to see, the ways and means at the heart of town hall, and that it matters so much what goes down there.

You can see for yourself
with someone who is winning in this country
control tower Auroville.
I don’t think you know the danger,
what it means when a government takes over Auroville.
It fails.
No human unity.
Just another Indian city land on the Earth
full of people.

They won’t even admit that they’re takin over.
They lie to get there,
Modi’s government.
And then they punish those responsible
for resistin’ the hostile takeover.
I think the Paris agreement will seal this fate
behind closed doors.
It’s happenin’ now.

Okay how do we turn this around?
No, it’s not possible.
You can’t do anything about it.
Not protest has worked,
and no court has worked.
No course has worked.
It’s over it seems.

What can we do?
Do you hear me?
Nothin’s gonna work.
You have to get international concern.
You have to try.
Here the freebirds sing.
People care about Auroville
who are concerned about government control,
who are concerned with political freedom,
who are concerned with international human unity,
who want the world to change,
who want a better world.

Do you know how to find them?
It’s in your race book,
everybody’s that got a minority skin color
the majority are not true to,
oppressed peoples
in this world,
and the spiritual but not religious,
the freedom fighters,
the utopian dreamers,
the smart people
who see change as the only way,
a change in world happenin’,
a change in the very nature of society.
a change in how we do things,
a change in the very fabric of reality.

Can you find these people?
Can you get them concerned?
It’s in the making.
We’ve got to get this word out:
we’ve got to change the world.
A call for help
is not a call for help
unless it’s that.

It’s not Auroville you want to save.
Just another city under siege,
all these good people oppressed by bad.
You want the world to see the world
change in Auroville.
All the particulars dock soup.
The very progress of human civilization is at stake,
where civilization falls.
Can we go there?
Can you do this rightly
up and down the line?
Go for it.

Do you understand my meanin’?
I’m not layin’ blame pointing fingers,
arguing against your soup.
I’m sayin’ we need to grab the world here
and designate this plan on earth:
a city becomes human-wide,
isn’t bound by any nation,
isn’t so rudely put together
together.
What dreamlessness drove it
to war with itself?

I think we come to grips with those elements first,
the hostile takeover.
We make it a city again
whole in its complete parts.
Then we reach for human unity,
and that’s not a byword or slogan to use.
It becomes the nature of the city itself,
an experimental township
that does things differently
than any place on earth.

It’s got no holes to regard.
No people are a sin.
It strives for healing in every area of life.
What does it mean?
Every facet of society
shoulders the human being.
No one is left out
who put their lives on the line for this.
Who are not strong for this?
They bring it on the line with them:
their hands on effort to be control.
It’s an all out effort
on the part of everybody
to make a city safe
for the human being,
whoever they might be.

Do you see my coffee?
It’s a no holds barred
attempt at human unity.
That’s what we’re walkin’ here.
Can you read my lips?
Can you see the change ahead?
Let’s get started.
We’ve got human worth to consider.
You’re not blind.
You can see this worth everyone.
Let’s do it.
I’m talkin’ today.

Bring the world to Auroville
in whatever form it can arrive.
Flood the city
with the arms of humanity
puttin’ city back on its worth.
Drive the government out of Auroville,
because it doesn’t belong there,
the Indian government.
It belongs to humanity, period.

This needs to be known far and wide:
our very humanity’s at stake
in a city called Auroville,
because that’s where we change into new human beings.
That’s the experimental ground.
That’s the holistic movement towards paradise
on this very Earth,
even though here tangy,
and brought that I wear bone,
hear this person say and that.
We are a work in process,
and we need time to breathe,
but we’re gonna make it
if we have the chance to be.

Oh world will you help us out?
Will you give us our freedom?
We need it as soon as you can get here,
as soon as possible please.
You hear the writing on the wall?

And we get some space for a new carpet.
How forced you must be,
who’s just listenin’ to integers.
You know they’re above Auroville.
We’ve found some on laws,
and that didn’t work.
We have to be free and flexible plan.
And even guidelines can falter
when we’re tryin’ to get rid of dogs.
They belong here,
in our homes not wild in our streets.
Same can be said for people
that God made.
Some people can be in the rough, you know?

The French connection
will bowl you over.
It’s a strong contingent in Auroville
not sure what it means.
Be nice to them,
but don’t let them stand in the way of progress.

They want the Mother out,
and they worship the Mother.
What do you do with the secretary?
They think she’s her.
Careful with this lot.
They’re bound to stand in your way.
Phillip,
hear me out.
You need to listen.

I don’t know if anybody’s worthy of divine livin’.
We stretch this far:
as far as it takes to include everybody
really wanna be
servitors of the divine consciousness.
How learn to do that
in the right place.
This is a sanctuary
for every type of person
whose nature makes them so.
And we play ball
with how this community runs right.
We are here for that.

Every city takes the long game
to get it right down to business.
Every city takes a long time to sort out.
Freedom
lets this happen.
We’ve started this process.
You can look on the calendar.
I have come into particular use.
Have I mentioned the future?
Run, baby, run.

They know what they’re doing.
They’re less than that.
The residents of Auroville are a say so in the matter.
They do it right.
It’s not what they’re tryin’ to communicate.
I think they’re just reacting to a hostile takeover
Like regular people in a regular city
But tellin’ you they’ve accomplished so much,
much more than they actually have.
Okay, give them trees and sustainable development.

I don’t think they understand silence
when it’s called for,
silence to know what to do.
Instead they fight among themselves,
unaware of the spider in the room,
the government takeover.
We’ve got bad teeth.
Can you just leave us alone?

We’re extraordinary timekeepers.
We’ve lagged behind for years.
We don’t understand ourselves,
and that’s a gun.
Chalk it all up to inexperience
with what Auroville was created to achieve,
a balanced human unity.
It’s not the government get that done.
They’ll just chop people up,
make their own playground.
These are the days of nationalism in India.

They Residents Assembly
can’t fight that.
So Auroville is doomed.
A crumble from within and a force from without
kill everybody.
There’s your picture.
It doesn’t make you smile.
Another failure on earth
to make the right society,
to progress humanity.

It can only be done in spheres,
so it can get its act together.
There’s enough room to do that
in an experimental city.
Anything else is too big.
We need these pilot programs
to save the world,
to learn how to do it,
to study so we can.
Can you gauge this?
There is no other city more important.

It’s got our plans at heart.
It’s how we make it outta here:
danger zone.
We study their do it,
the city that achieves human unity.
Small hands large workshop.
It’s the shape of the Earth.

Blanket this in time.
We aren’t going to do this all at once.
So much has to be worked out.
So much to do.
We need your sanction to get on it.
Tell us we have the go ahead.
Tell us now.
Blanket Auroville with your concern.

Take your city into your own hands,
world,
and put it to play in time.
Give it its mission
from your global hands and minds.
That’s where it’s at.
That’s what we need.
Humanity can you hear me?

We require your presence,
and don’t forget to come,
or send some presence of yourself
in communication form.
Petitions are just zero man.
We need your living eyes.
We need this now,
now and forever,
to be your city upon the Earth.
Come.

Look, this 100% know it all God ended for something:
God is not human on earth in men’s minds.
What do we do now?
I lecture in politics.
Okay religion holds a key.
Do you want a Hindu state?
Do you really?
That’s the change that’s happenin’
in India.
Mark my words.

They’re emulating Israel.
You can see them bulldoze homes.
Do we have security here?
That’s where this is headin’ I’m sorry.
You want everybody controlled and regulated.
This is not about politics.
It’s about forcing men and women
to be a Hindu or worship Hindu.
If they’re Muslims they’re out of luck,
or any other minority.
We’ll see if Sikhs hold the candle flame.
And if you’re not Hindu enough,
wham! the police state will ensure that.

You’ve got to wake up people,
and let’s start in Auroville.
It’s the high ground.
We lose it we lose the nation.
I don’t think you know what’s at stake here.
You don’t want police everywhere,
even in your tea.
A China syndrome,
it’s happenin’ now.
Converge on Auroville
all you lines of thought.
Defeat the government there,
and the BJP will lose power.
Religious observance
will not be mandatory.

Auroville holds the master plan.
You’ll find the decision in Auroville:
do you want a Hindu state?
I’ve declared martial law.
I’ve got you to overrun Auroville.
I’ve put people in the streets
blocking traffic.
I’ve made a big clusterfuck.

We have a better plan.
Let’s not invite chaos.
We are not angry protesters in the street.
We destroy no property.
We are serious for change,
and in our behavior we start.
That’s the true spirit of Auroville.

You are so polite it’s not even funny,
and you are observant of India’s laws,
civil disobedient
only if you’re protesting’s been stopped,
and then you do that peacefully
and with measure,
highly respectful of Indian law and custom.
That includes in modes of dress.

We need a war
that hurts no one
except that part in man that oppress,
and we need this in Auroville,
at the earliest possible date.
I’m 12 strong.
I’m using the Mother’s voice to say this.
I’m all over India.
I’m in your shoes.
Now you know I’m serious,
serious as a heart attack.
Come people.
Come now.

We want a better world,
and Auroville is the battleground.
Only you don’t fight.
You respectfully demand for change.
How many dictators rule the world,
how many authoritarian figures,
how many regime governments,
and all these people oppressing one another?
Look at China.
Look at North Korea.
Look at Myanmar
and the Russian government.
I’ve lost count,
but Iran needs a new government too
and Turkey.
Do we count the Philippines?
We certainly do.
The list goes on,
and in America let’s keep Trump
from coming back in power.
Let’s keep him out.
Let’s keep him from holding political office.

Bring all of this to Auroville,
in whatever form you can
Send letters.
Send all you can do from online.
Send your goodwill for change,
your very focused attitude that it does,
and send yourself
if you can get past the barriers
of legal bureaucracy,
and you have the means to come.
We can afford to keep going,
and you have the means to stay.

Have I started an insurrection?
We do not overthrow the Indian government.
It’s not India we’re at.
It’s Auroville.
The government out of there.
The voters can take care of Modi
all India-wide.
He is not your friend.
He’s a danger to your democracy.
He really is.
Stop him there.
We stop him in Auroville,
and we don’t stop until we do.

Organize yourselves
in peaceful demonstrations
and civil protests,
with every means available that are not violent
and that hurt no one
or set fire to anything,
even effigies
or flags.
The Indian flag you put in a place of honor.
You don’t spit on this country.
Rowdy boys stay out of town.
Agent provocateurs identify and tell to leave.
Do not support them.
Do even let them breathe.
There will be no physical violence,
and we will even watch our speech.
Anger will not control the situation.
Firm goodwill will
intent of change.
Now come.
You’ve heard me.

Agent provocateurs,
a protest makes or breaks on that.
Anyone promoting violence will be one,
violence of any kind.
They are removed immediately,
and if they get violent they are restrained.
Just don’t hurt them.
No other order will work.
You’ve got to remove the violence,
immediately,
no ifs, ands or buts about it.
A stormed building is a hostile takeover,
what we’re tryin’ to prevent.
You will occupy no building
you do not live or work in.
You will storm no town hall.

I thought it might be nice
If we didn’t just random protest.
I think chaos don’t like schedules.
Organize the protests around that,
keeping chaos out.
But let’s not be machine-gunned down.
They were disappointed.
They couldn’t fire their guns at an angry crowd.
People just sat down an OM’d, you know?
That’s how to do it,
without hellfire and damnation.

A creative skit,
some good music,
and people readin’ poetry,
yah hear me kids?
Get creative,
not self-righteous and mean.
It’s a human unity problem,
and we solve it that way.

Over a cup of coffee the world changed.
I thought a world out.
Now here’s the nigger of the situation.
Twenty years ago in Auroville I was a bad set of keys.
I got kicked out my name,
and I’ve been outside Auroville ever since,
somebody who wants in.
Well that’s the limit of this verse you see.
Now I’m organizin’ resistance.
The story of my change is in this book.
It’s what you want to read.
I’m not a principle player now.
I’ve just shown you the Mother
and her way to do it.
I am the poet here,
a seer.

I’ve brought change in the book,
as I’ve described my life,
and that’s as far as I go,
as a behind the scene witness.
The organization lead,
I’m not in on it.
If you hear me come.
Don’t hesitate come immediately.
Auroville action,
you must think do now.

Mary Poppins rides a horse in the sky.
I don’t know what that means.
I will tell you.
Come on let’s go.
Judaism,
I don’t know what that means.
I’ve just been very close
to the explanations of culture.
I’ve counted religious expression in my book.
I am not a scholar on Jewish mysticism.
I’ve just shown you my things in light of those things,
and I’ve gone to Safed
to be there with you.

Why do you want that in there?
A disclaimer,
we want to continue with our book,
no holds barred.
Ready for resources.
Ready to tell you what this book is worth.
It’s the next chapter.

And you have all these dogs,
wonderful color they can be seen.
I bet you think you’re complete.
Get a dog
and find out what love means.
While you’re doin’ that,
cats are welcome too.
Are we clear on that?
Good,
I don’t want you to think I’m prejudice.
Oh my goodness,
I do prefer dogs I do I do.
One’s licking my ear right now.
You silly thing,
I sure love you.

I want to work out this obstacle
and behind,
and that’s Arab and Arab participation.
And that’s spiritual experiences,
but
we have to know they’re real.
Can you use me as a gauge?
I’ve presented some plainly.
I’ve shown you spiritual experience.
It’s how we see one another
as where we put our love.
That’s the record keeper.
That’s the storybook.
It’s how we get along.
Can you be potato love?
That’s where you forgive people
as you become important to them.
Let’s hold this flag, shall we?
It’s where we brush our teeth.

Learnin’ on some level gettin’ on the plane,
we’re all doin’ it.
I’m just pointing out particulars
in Israel and India.
I can’t blend everything nicely.
There’s so much to work on,
so much to see.
And if you see I’ve giving you a handle
on world change.
Press the lever.
Come to Auroville now.

That’s the plan
to change the world.
It’s a bona fide hands on opportunity
to begin.
All people of goodwill
won’t you please come?
That’s a safe haven
for the change we need to see.
It’s where we begin.
And it belongs to you world.
Don’t let it slip away.
Don’t be robbed of this opportunity
by authoritarian government.
Don’t just sit there and think.
Do,
and do it quickly.

We’ll be propaganda
for all who oppose.
We’ll be laughed at and ridiculed
for being of one mind like this.
Stupid ideal thinkers,
did you think the world would come?
You foolish man
(who does he think he is?),
can you call the world?

When you’re finished laughing read me again.
I didn’t just piss my pants.
I gave you a lever for world change,
and I know the world like you don’t,
know its deeps.
Okay you ignored me,
and that’s funny ain’t it?
And that is so very sad.
Don’t you want a better world?
Where we gonna find it
if your hands don’t measure up?
Cut the political identities all together,
the religious I am this I am that.
How do we be people savin’ the world?
There is no other way come together.
That’s the vocabulary in the room.

Renounce me as one of the board members
who petrify the world.
Oh you silly people,
you put sex in such first place,
and you think pedophiles rule the planet,
those that want to blame someone,
and pedophiles are free.
Everybody hates them.
I’m not countin’ crows.
I’m lettin’ you in on a little secret:
pedophiles don’t control the world.

They stand and sing
about what smarts in humanity.
They control themselves.
They make it right.
They bring down the word to men and women.
They put children on the right path.
They help make a better world.
They show you how it’s done,
and they put change in your hand,
if you want to use it or not.
I’ve described to you the pages of this book,
who wrote it and why.

You’ll conspiracy this to death,
but there’s only me here and my muse.
Wow, what a heavy punch.
Can you gauge it?
This is beyond the world,
and we give the outcast that role,
take us beyond ourselves.
No one else has mandatory change.
It all fits so well
if you can see it.
God action, you know?

They’re coming.
They’re coming.
And it’s not if I come it’s when I come.
Tell me how you’re gonna keep me out.
Hit all your buttons, don’t I?
Hello?

Now come to papa,
arousin’ the kundalini.
The kundalini,
don’t you do that.
It’s some rough stuff
and will have you sexual in your fingers.
You can’t control yourself.
It is so very arousal.
Or you’ll go crazy
with a bump in the road.
You won’t have a nice time.
Just listen to God,
and let Him reach with the base of the spine.
Sexual purification
before arousal,
and everything gets cleaned
on the way down.
When God strikes that serpent awake,
you’re ready.
Just don’t read the chapter until you’re finished.
That means you wait for God.
Barbara’s here,
where the chapter ends,
and we thank God.

He’s got a little consciousness there about him.
I’m the branch of a tree.
And that’s divine worth.
It didn’t walk.
They didn’t major to erupt.
They brought you in your consciousness there.
And that’s Kabbalah.
Got a foreigner
pickin’ up the Vedas.
And here it is
today.
It’s where we’re at today.
That’s the magic of this special moon.

Luna Rottweiler, photo by me

Next post:

Chapter 12

Between Jerusalem I’m Sorry, Chapter 10

The Cosmic Rose by Hans Vredman de Vries? 1595, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

You Can Gimmie my Car

A day later, on what would be my last day in Safed, as I’d be leaving the first thing the next morning, someone came out of the woodwork and invited me to spend my last night at his house. I’d seen him a time or two, but he wasn’t part of the scene at the studio, although he was an expat American. Like Moshehiem, he was a little older than the rest. He had an apartment a ways down the street from the square the studio was on. When I arrived he told me it was movie night, and we’d be watching a movie with some friends of his that were coming over, but first he wanted to talk to me, see who and how I was.

The first thing I noticed was that I wasn’t a non-Jew with him. I was just another person he didn’t yet know to like or not. This is a hard thing to define, but with most of the other Jews there I could feel this thing between us, a way they had of looking at me inside themselves whereby I was outside of people they identified with. Let me explain. We are taught to value more what someone says to us than the taste of their consciousness towards us, because the latter is so subjective, but it’s in the latter we more live, move, and have our being. It’s the encounter we have with one another in the waters of consciousness that’s the real event, which the words are just markers for, more often than not masks concealing what the consciousness is really feeling towards the other. Study yourself when talking with someone, whomever they might be, and see if your words ring true to, or even come close to capturing, all the many different things you’re feeling inside while talking to them. If you can see it’s the same with them then you can see what I’m saying.

He was in his early 30s as I was, had a head of black curly hair slightly longer than men wore their hair there and a body a little on the heavy side but not actually fat. He had a round, clear face and the type of look in his eyes that tried to let in what they saw, not just study it, but they were not yet the open windows to the soul eyes can be. He told me that, unbeknownst to the others, and he’d like to keep it that way, he’d been the president of a Hare Krishna temple in America. I’ve forgotten where, as I’ve also forgotten his name, but to honor his universality I’ll call him Krishna. He was also a student of the Kabbalah and one that seemed to know more about it than anyone I’d yet met expect Kathinka, a painter in Jerusalem, who figured in our hunger strike because her art studio was the closest building to our camp near Jaffa Gate and because she was a beautiful person, and she figured prominently in my life after Safed, as a friend. She got her world expanded when she met me. I mean her ‘you gotta be a Jew to go deep’. Simply you just have to show the Way is not bound by Judaism. A non-Jew can practice the whole nine yards. She was surprised at me, delighted ultimately. Krishna didn’t know the Kabbalah in the sense of having had deep mystical experience himself, or at least not that I gathered, but he did in the sense of recognizing it when he heard it. He had an intellectual understanding of higher states of consciousness, but it was more than most had, who seemed to associate the Kabbalah more with magic than a change of consciousness into a higher mode. The very first thing he wanted to hear from me, however, was the Hitler poem he’d heard about.

When I finished reciting it, Krishna looked at me a long moment and then declared that the poem was Kabbalah. I got the impression he was saying something just to validate me, something that sounded good but was virtually meaningless. I asked him what he meant by that; does it capture the whole of the Kabbalah or what? He then surprised me by talking about soul healing and how much the Kabbalah had to do with the soul and how it heals. Up until that moment I’d not glimpsed the depth of the Kabbalah and was beginning to believe, as I keep saying, that it had more to do with magic than honest to God real spirituality. Later, with Kathinka, I was to learn it’s even mapped out the higher spiritual states overhead and at least had some idea of Supermind, but more like a forbidden zone. I had had no idea the Kabbalah was so deep, had gauged that far. That means somewhere along the way a Jewish mystic had experienced it.

We were sitting in his living room, he reclined on an easy chair and me on a cushioned sofa. It was a small apartment, and, like most of the ones I’d been in, had been part of a larger stone house that appeared to be a hundred years old or more. He was very relaxed and put me at ease in the way he just let his hair down. He explained why he invited me to spend the night. The day before was Shabbot, and, as with every Shabbot, all the young American’s came over to his house to pray, but on this Shabbot, which was the one I got excluded from, they didn’t pray but talked about the goy, which was me. He said he was in his living room praying and they in the den, and by his description of everything I got the impression he was somebody in their religious circle they looked up to, but he never claimed to be anybody in particular nor spoke of himself as someone anyone would look to for spiritual guidance.

He said they were making such a racket he got up from his prayer and went to the group, who were all kneeling on the floor in a prayer circle, about six or seven young men and women, and he told them they were there to pray, not talk, especially not about other people, and that he didn’t want the word goy used in his house, and that for all anyone knew I could be the Mashiach. That I wasn’t Jewish but still could be the Jewish mashiach, at least for that one moment he wanted to get his point across, the point being I was as important as anyone else and should be afforded the same respect as everybody, shows you what kind of person Krishna was. After telling them that, he sent them all out of his house. He said watching them leave was when he decided to invite me over, and here I was.

Hearing all that, and wanting to impress him, validate his standing up for a stranger, and to give him something in return, as anything we say captained by an ego always has mixed motives behind it, I took a look at my merit badges on my chest, err, my spiritual experiences I wore on my sleeve, and I chose to tell him about the two I had driving my black, Datsun, pickup truck I was driving earlier in this book. They are related, the two experiences I mean. He got a very abbreviated version of the two experiences, but I have the time and place here to tell them more fully, but both have been posted on the net in different places.

It was 1991. I don’t renember how long it’d been since the journey to the well of soul, but I think it was only a week or so, that reaching of my deepest place acting like a springboard up. I remember I was looking at a horned moon that had a bright star, or planet, right on its bottom tip, and I could not keep my eyes off it, although I was driving, from my mom’s house to my apartment just off Old Galveston Road a few kilometers from NASA, the apartment by the railroad tracks. Apartments lined both sides of the street, which wasn’t straight but formed a very long curve. I was stoned on some good grass, had been stoned all day, like I was everyday more or less, and I’d just put out a cigarette. On the radio was playing the Led Zeppelin song “Whole Lotta Love”. I can add sex to the equation to make it equal to sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, but let’s just say that I wasn’t bramachari in those days, although I wasn’t at that moment having sex at the steering wheel, did not have the type of person I’m attracted to there in the truck with me, which is a little boy (I was currently waving in my commitment to the person growth process towards wholeness and healing but would presently get a fresh upgrade). I say all this so to illustrate my path, which is of darkness to light, the very misunderstood tantric left-handed path. It’s misunderstood because people think you choose it. You don’t. You take it because it takes you. I mean, you’re this thing that can’t or doesn’t control itself, which is a debate that has raged for ever, who has the control, you or it, and the path just takes you by the balls.

The song was in that strange stretch of sounds it makes that pull you from the inside, swirling and whirling as they do, and suddenly I found myself a few meters over my head looking down at myself through the roof of the truck as the little me drove it. I say little because that person down there, the whole world he was in, was just an appendage of myself, and not the main event, not even close. I was no longer him but something infinitely bigger. I was very remote from the world on the high end of a long thin line on the bottom of which was that little me, who I could see was in prison so incredibly small and boxed in was his world, which I was no longer in or even in his universe but was beyond both. This I just knew, but it wasn’t what captured my attention.

I was Me! Finally I’d found myself. This was who I was, where I began and where I’d inevitably return, the Person that had ventured into the world’s ocean of lives, the Individual I was beyond all and that watched the adventure from on high. This wasn’t interpretation afterwards but what I knew being Myself. I also knew that when I’d return to the little me I’d never be able to render the experience in any form that would give a true picture of it because we can only see only one pole of experience at a time down here. My vision saw through everything I was driving past, from up there, although I was in a perfect stillness and not moving at all, something that doesn’t sound possible down here in finite littleness.

As I drove down the street, the little me negotiating the curve without my help, I saw through the apartment walls to the people sitting or standing in them, saw through them to their natures, saw through and into the heart of anything I looked at, saw like the One sees because I was one with whatever I saw, and it was the One I saw myself as, not God as you might think, but I knew at the same time I was only a portion of its total see.

I can describe the way my mind thought thoughts, which was like they had substance and weren’t separate from what they thought about or from the outside world, if there was an inside and outside to that Me, as it seemed to me a different arrangement than we have down here, one where there was no separation from the inner and outer, but I’m going into speculation and interpretation, and so I’ll just say that, as suddenly as I found myself up there, I found myself back in my sense-bound prison down here, and I parked my truck in the nearest driveway and cried my eyes out, both overwhelmed by the experience and by the loss of who I really am, and I vowed to become myself again, whatever it takes.

A year later I was driving that same truck, but this time down a Central Texas highway going 55 miles an hour, and I experienced the full force of Silent Mind. I knew something was about to happen in my consciousness, unlike with the overhead experience, and so I’d taken the weekend off to go camping at a place I considered safe for me, a place of power, somewhere I’d been going to since I was a teenager, Enchanted Rock, a State Natural Area in West Central Texas. I was a different person than the year before. The overhead experience had changed my life, turned it completely around. The spiritual path is one thing if you’re on it because you believe there’s a goal, I mean a goal other than going to Heaven when you die, a goal like enlightenment or becoming your higher self, but if you know it’s there because you’ve seen it with your own eyes, or have been it, even for only several seconds as I had, doubt is removed, and without a doubt you as to where you’re going you go. We are very stubborn and ignorant creatures, and the problem with experiences, even one where you become your true self a moment, is that the effects don’t last, those that make you focus solely on the Path and that get you out of moral troubles.

When I drove home from that overhead experience, from being for a moment who I am in reality, and I cannot stress enough that that’s the overwhelming thing you come back with, I had a mission: get back up there, become Myself again. The problem was, I had no idea how or where I might find anyone, anywhere, that knew about the experience. Descriptions of what’s described as enlightenment or realization did not even come close, but I as yet had no idea what that was, enlightenment I mean, only that, by the descriptions, you are still in the little prison down here, albeit unconcerned with it so peaceful, empty, and blissed out you are. I began searching spiritual books, but I couldn’t even find a description of overhead experience, let alone of being that God-self up there.

It happened I bought a book on Tibetan Buddhism by Evans-Wenz, and I found what I thought to be a possible reference to overhead experience, and so I began to pour over the Tibetan writings he’d translated, which consist of three books, focusing on the book the reference was in, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines. It bears mentioning that, sometime later, I read a different English translation of what I’d read there, and there was not even a hint of an overhead experience. Whatever the case, the book did its magic, but it wasn’t to be ‘getting back up there’ that I got out of it, but a momentary experience of enlightenment, a glimpse of reality, how Buddhists put it, but they just have no idea how big reality is.

Using that book, I constructed a sadhana, or spiritual practice, based not only on that book but on my own ideas of what that might entail, deciding to just do all of the above. I quite smoking cigarettes, entirely, any indulgence of sex, stopped the daily smoking of grass, but I allowed myself a joint for a special meditation one day a week, which was in a dark closet I used once a day for my daily half hour meditation, where I just tried to stop all thoughts. I became a vegetarian, but I ate a cheese burger and fries every Friday afternoon, and I can’t tell you how appropriate that was, did a daily routine of the basic yoga asanas, did pranayama, breathing exercises, for one full hour before going to sleep, jogged a few miles one day and did a five mile ‘rucksack march’ the next, stopped any unnecessary chatter with everyone, even Randy, the best friend I told you about earlier, didn’t have a TV, but I made sure I didn’t pay attention to my mom’s when I visited her, which was seldom during that time, didn’t go to the movies or read anything except that book, played continuously a cassette tape of the OM whenever I was in my apartment, even during sleep, and made my mind think about nothingness (because that’s what the book said) as much as I could remember to make it do that.

I should mention that, although I was strict about doing the routine, I wasn’t rigid about it, as you can see from the cheese burger, and I would not do this or that practice if it was inopportune, or something presented itself that appeared to be something that would take me in the direction I wanted to go in a more opportune way at that moment. Sundays was my day of rest from the more physical practices, but I still maintained the sadhana attitude in speech and deed Sundays too. I had one Greek class a day during the week, mornings, and usually an hour or more of homework, which I did at work, and I worked the 3 to 11 shift five days a week at Four Leaf Towers, as a doorman and valet. It should hardly need mentioning that I continued inner exploration throughout. This sadhana I just described I did for about three months. Although I’d worked up to it over the course of time, having begun things like meditation and pranayama before even the soul experience, I came to the point where it appeared to me it was do or die; that I had to just put my life into it, and I could do that because I had no doubt there was a there to go to. But I had no idea what getting up there again entailed, to my true self, since I’d just suddenly found myself in that sitting station above my head without so much as a hold onto your hat, and it didn’t occur to me that wasn’t the usual way it happens. I didn’t know how it happened.

I felt it inside me, something deep and powerful wanting to come out. I just knew something was about to happen, so tuned I was to the feeling and texture of my consciousness, having been so focused on its upkeep and change for a whole season, meaning a period of three months. It was a temporary jet booster sadhana. I don’t know how sustainable it is to do continuously, but the world has things to offer our sadhana too, and so to turn your back to its many voices too long would work against it it appears to me.

I got some time off work, got my camping and hiking gear together, and I began the long drive to Enchanted Rock, a couple of hundred miles. I don’t know where I was in route, but the land had changed from forest to semi-desert and was a rather featureless expanse, something conducive to experiences of the nature of the one I’m about to describe. Probably on account of my impulsiveness, and my habit to smoke grass while driving, and the monotony of the roadway, but it may have been from intuition, I decided, “what the heck, I’ll smoke that joint now.” I’d taken one, figuring I’d smoke it on the Rock and do a meditation, and that probably the consciousness would do its thing. It might’ve happened that way too, and it might not have, and maybe I’d have been able to handle what happened better, but I’ll never know. Anyway, I lit the joint and began to take long, deep drags off it. I smoked it down the roach and put it out. The first thing I noticed was my experience of both myself and the world had undergone a one hundred and eighty degree change: my center of self was gone.

Admitted through a curtain of bright mind
That hangs between our thoughts and absolute sight,
He found the occult cave, the mystic door
Near to the well of vision in the soul,
And entered where the Wings of Glory brood
In the silent space where all is for ever known.
Indifferent to doubt and to belief,
Avid of the naked real’s single shock
He shore the cord of mind that ties the earth-heart
And cast away the yoke of Matter’s law.
The body’s rules bound not the spirit’s powers:
When life had stopped its beats, death broke not in;
He dared to live when breath and thought were still.
Thus could he step into that magic place
Which few can even glimpse with hurried glance
Lifted for a moment from mind’s laboured works
And the poverty of Nature’s earthly sight.

From Savitri by Sri Aurobindo
(Courtesy of The Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press)

Boundlessness, shorelessness, these are ways people have tried to picture the feeling of the consciousness when you’re center is gone. I’m talking about what we all take for granted, a center around which we revolve ourselves, that little knot of ego. The illimitable state had an edge to it that made me feel like I had to swim, had no land or even a buoy that I could grab ahold of to stop swimming awhile, whereas, captained by an ego, existence is just automatic, no swimming involved. The swimming, though, was in an ocean of peace, as contrary as that might sound to it having an edge.

I reached for thought, and the thought I was thinking branched in two, and I actually saw this in my mind, the train of thought branch in two, and as soon as I saw both thoughts at the same time, my thought process came to an abrupt halt, like an engine that had just had a wrench thrown into it, and Silence and entered the room, something that wasn’t just an absence of sound but had the stuff of substance, as contrary as that might also sound to the presence of emptiness that had just shattered my world. Believe me, I’ve tried many times to remember that train of thought. I’d imagine it might be a trigger, but maybe only under those unique circumstances.

Not knowing what on earth to do, I started pranayama, starting out by taking a deep breath, but when I exhaled, the breathing also abruptly stopped, and there was no need to inhale again. If that wasn’t weird enough, my heart took a couple of erratic beats and then it too stopped, yet I continued driving, a dead man at the stirring wheel. The Tibetan book does not mention this; nothing in my whole life experience had ever even hinted such was possible, and I just drove down the road the biggest exclamation point ever hovering over the roof of my truck as figures and such do in the characters and such of video games, figuratively speaking. This lasted for maybe a couple of minutes or more. I don’t rightly know how long.

I had a mantra, or rather, a snatch of a popular song I was using as a mantra, what I’d sung in my truck often while driving, and only there, what incidentally, I heard one night working the concierge’s desk at Four Leaf Towers when I picked up the phone, heard just that snatch of song and nothing else, an example of the mind games Interfin played with me, for whatever reason, but probably had something to do with that damn demon I’d conjured some two years before, or maybe they just did that with everybody, to show you they ‘knew’, but it wasn’t happening with other employees I’d asked. The mantra’s from a song by Noel Paul Stookey, “The Wedding Song (There is Love): the snatch of it I used was “the union of your spirits here has caused him to remain, for whenever two or more of you are gathered in his name, there is love.”

I have no idea how I could sing it, as I wasn’t breathing, but you must remember we are already walking on miracle here, holding hands with the impossible. There must have been enough air left in my lungs to sing it once, but I don’t rightly know how it came out of my mouth. On the word love my voice changed to some incredible metallic sound, but it had nothing to do with the sound of machines or insects. That’s just the closest word I can use to describe how it sounded. It was not of this world. It was also beautiful.

At that sound, or rather, on that note, I felt a burning sensation at the base of the spine, and then I felt a force ascending up it, and I say force, but it was like a rocket ship. It got about to the region of my solar plexus, and, for reasons I still can’t figure out but probably have to do with some automatic reflex when confronted with strange after strange overtopping one another, and this was the biggest stranger, this rapid, rocket, ascension, I literally shook the holy fire out of myself and stopped it in its tracks, and still to this day that charkra is blocked.

Everything turned back on, my heart, my breath, my mind, my ego, but it didn’t just suddenly end; I bounced back down there to that bear bones reality a few times, not getting even to the illimitable, but close enough to feel the reeling of the infinite bound down upon me once again. I just couldn’t take it and stopped at the next store, a lone one on the highway, bought a pack of smokes and smoked one after another until I could smoke no more. It helped to ease the emptiness.

Arriving at Enchanted Rock, I was visited by the most forlorn feelings I’ve ever faced, and I walked around the outdoor theater there, not even bothering to climb up the mountain. I just walked and talked to myself, trying to put reality back into its place, but it wouldn’t fit anymore because I’d seen there was no reality, or rather, reality had no substance to it, was not real. You read about some spiritual state and right away want it, but when you actually experience it, it turns out to be very different than you imagined. The Tibetan book had talked about the state of enlightenment as being characterized primarily by emptiness, although there are other aspects of it, and it was emptiness I’d been meditating on, but you really have no idea what books are talking about until you experience it yourself. And then you want to throw the book away.

I don’t remember the drive home or really very much of the couple of weeks immediately after, except that I no longer had any motivation to do anything, continue with school, meditate, seek anything at all either worldly or spiritual. I was stunned, in a state of shock basically. Why bother doing anything? It didn’t matter. The world had no meaning whatsoever. I’d seen it with my own eyes. What kept that new abysmal attitude from being despair was the peace I felt, which was even in my body. Everything was still, quiet, peaceful, and it didn’t feel bad. I could just ride to death that way.

I remember I was walking in a Houston park I frequented, and I’d just come out of the Rothko Chapel that sat in that park and was walking down the sidewalk beside the chapel, on a street lined with old oak trees, which formed a canopy over the street, giving such an environing beauty, and a man about my age came up to me and asked, “Are you Buddhist?” Now, this was Houston, Texas, and I was in a t-shirt and jeans, and working where I did, at Four Leaf Towers, I was clean cut in appearance. In other words, there was no reason for him to stop me and ask that question, and it was more than a little odd he did. It was actually a bit extraordinary, but to you who’ve just heard the story behind it, it might not seem so, but understand he hadn’t heard it. I stopped and came out of my slight walking reverie, looked at him and simply said, “No, I’m not Buddhist,” and I walked on so as not to engage in conversation. He said after me, “You look Buddhist,” obviously a little disappointed I didn’t want to speak. He’d asked me that because saw the peace. It was, like I said, even in my body and its movements, not only on my face.

I continued going to my Greek class, but I stopped meditation and spiritual practice, and and reading therein, although I remained a vegetarian, and I didn’t smoke any weed, didn’t dare, afraid I might bounce back into the state, as, since it’d happened, I’d done some bouncing back down there, and I say down there because it’s like at the bottom of your consciousness, or the basis really, and everything, all objects, have been removed, why it’s described as raw, empty awareness, when everything in your consciousness is gone, and you’re left with only awareness. I cannot answer why, if that’s the case, I shook myself out of it when the kundalini begin to rise (I mean, who did that if there was no I?), but there’s a mystery to the state no one can describe; you’re not there but some memory or habit of you is, or something like that.

And it’s necessary to mention that, like each person has a unique experience of ego consciousness, so too it seems we have of enlightenment, and there are aspects of the state other than emptiness and peace, ananda (utter joy) and a compassionate identity with everything for example, and there is more in that store. I guess I was orientated to emptiness because that’s what I focused on in my practice, as that’s what was in the book, but the next time I was to experience it, in a lucid dream, where it’s easier to get into, it was the ananda that took the helm, and I can only say that it was more present to my experience than the world to try to give some picture of its intensity, but the emptiness and peace was still present, in the background, and the state ended upon awakening.

Anyway, immediately after my first experience of it, I only knew it as emptiness that robbed the world completely of meaning. I believe I was about to quit school, quit everything, when I returned to my efficiency apartment in the Montrose area of Houston and flopped down on my bed. Those apartments bear some description, as they were not exactly the most conducive to spiritual practice, although the manager had promised me that it would be a nice, quiet place. It’d been closed down because of the selling of drugs and prostitution, but, now under new management, things would be much different he told me. They were not at all. In the year I lived there, the cops raided apartments a few times, and twice dead bodies were taken out of it—overdose. The outside of the apartments had a front that kind of reminded you of the Alamo, except it didn’t come up to a rounded point. Hype Park Apartments they were called, and the manager, an older gentlemen that’d taken a fancy to me as a manager in the apartments on Old Galveston Road, where I’d experienced Supermind, talked me into going with him, as he’d been offered there in Montrose a job as manager. I went because the apartments were across the street from Half Price Books, where I was going as often as I could, I explain in other writings. He didn’t offer me the moon, and what he did offer me, that quiet place, didn’t happen, but I’ll be damned if the full moon didn’t happen. That means, of course, that it did.

I didn’t put anything on it.
I didn’t priori.
I just experienced it.
You would not would give me credit for a brush with the Silence.

I was there.
It rolled me over.
I almost crashed on myself.
It was so far beyond us it’s not even funny.
I’m scared of it today.
It just swallows you whole.

It’s incredibly difficult to bear,
reality after the experience.
You don’t know what to make of reality.
You don’t even know it’s there.
What an illusion you see in front of you,
convicted by the Silence.

I don’t know how to handle it
explaining it to you.
My God this is deep.
You’ll just shrug your shoulders
and pass it off as experience
with a big question mark on it,
or you’ll nod your head:
I know what he’s talkin’ about;
wow it sure is heavy;
I’ve had it my mind too.
Okay ego I’m sorry,
This is beyond your experience.
No you have not.
Oh no you have not.

This is beyond your ken.
It’s bigger than yourself.
You wouldn’t understand it.
It goes past the boundaries of physical thought.
It doesn’t fit into reality that has principle players.
It’s got wheels on it
so far blow you away.
The world has become a foreign planet.
You’re not thinking in there.
You’re wide open silence.

I don’t know how you’re lookin’ because there’s no you lookin’.
The intensity will wash away time.
You’re like a blanket slate,
and you know you’re enlightened.
Those are the shoes you wear,
and they hold fast.

Tell me I’m wrong.
I just had some raw experience.
Computation some,
and we’ll find the trigger for it in the brain,
and we’ll find the chemical goes in the brain,
that make this feel like happenin’.
We’re all over the place,
and we’re bound to get there too,
just give us some time.
We’ll find it.

And that’s how we rule life,
convincing you
science is right there behind you
about to discover somethin’.
We don’t know about this.
We’re afraid to admit it.
It doesn’t come up in our vocabulary a lot.
We don’t know how to say it.
We just throw it away.

And we’ve spoken existence in a bottle.
The bottle experience enlightenment.
My God it’s big.
You’re suddenly floatin’ in infinite space.
There are no boundaries
in the silence in your mind.
You’re just there
bigger than thought.

Now what do we do with people who experience it?
Obviously some do.
I think the numbers are growing.
It’s on the globe.
It will get noticed one day.
It will become a thing.
That’s where we’re goin’.
We’re headed there.

I don’t know who turns it off,
but it won’t be welcome received.
I think there’s plans against it
already.
I don’t know who oppose it
among our kind.
A cabal of snakes consider rule the world certainly do.
They’re on it,
makin’ everything so mundane,
our stories, our time.

No one every changes consciousness in the movies do they
to become an enlightened being?
Super strength,
mental power,
how come they don’t talk about enlightenment?
Why are the superheroes so human?
And you swallow it like a piece of cake.
Those kinds of ruptures in the field of consciousness,
Ben 10,
and you’d be a basket case.
Yah hear what I’m sayin’?

Those kinds of superpowers
are just for the movies.
They don’t show you real,
and yes we can walk on water,
above the enlightened mode,
and just be a walkin’ miracle.
I’m gettin’ ahead of myself.
You’re robbed of sleep.

Listen they won’t tell you enlightenment because it’s there,
and if they try to figure it,
it’s flat on the ground,
just another superhero with an attribute.
The others aren’t strivin’ for it.
Hey kids bring my chocolate.
Ain’t that special.

We’ve read enlightenment,
and you’ve just put it in your pocket.
I don’t know how to tell you it’s real,
the thing we strive for
in stages now.
How do you do this?

I’m workin’ on it today.
Can you clear your mind of everything
and walk around like that?
Focused and concentrated
on everything you do
so far so God.
That takes care of the representation,
and you’re not God.
You’re lookin’ at God,
so you stay out of head swells.
God’s everywhere you see.
Do you see ‘im?

Do you want to?
Okay just figure the Absolute,
bare, bottomless reality.
Just don’t sit there and think
with your hands on the world.
Try to get out of thought,
but don’t give up the ship.
Your tasks are important.
Make them the ultimate reality,
and the people in front of you,
and give that to your dog,
and don’t hold back.
They absolutely love it.
You’d have to list more than my words do.
It’s everything in the world you see,
focused and concentrated on it
as though it’s the world.

Are you understandin’ my science?
Put it there.
You’re bound to come around
to episodes of Silence eventually.
We want this permanently turned on.
How do we do that?
Can someone in the audience tell me?
I’m workin’ on that now.

I’m right here,
and I’m in a lot of places
in the rounds of my speak,
in the notions I present,
in the time I give you,
in the time I gave you.
This is my time on earth.
I’ve just mentioned enlightenment.

The presentation of a rocky road,
this is clearcut and easy,
and I’ll sell you some land in Iowa
on the beachfront.
Listen to me kids,
hard.
It’s your thesis for a doctorate in life.

I don’t know how it appears to you.
Wham! I’m enlightened with some people,
and I wasn’t even lookin’ for it.
Now that shows.
I think it’s the most published paper,
instant enlightenment.
If you’re studying for it it’s disappointing.
When’s it gonna come for you?
Just keep studying.
I think the problem’s the method and material.

I’ve solved some practical cuffs.
I hold it in front of my house.
I have to master the reality in front of my face
and quiet it down.
No monk is necessary.
I can be a businessman
or a factory worker
or a concierge
or a housewife,
a handyman.
I can be a soldier.
You study in your room
all day long,
all night long.

Your room is what holds you together.
It’s not necessarily a physical space.
It’s where you reside.
There’s the world out there.
I’m in my world in here.
You carry your room wherever you go,
even into our common room
I’ve been talking with you in.

Enlightenment closes doors.
You don’t always reach for somethin’ that makes you feel good.
You have to close some doors for good.
You learn silence in your mind
an unperturbed heart,
a colorful stomach
that won’t bother you,
and genitals that don’t cry.
Man, that’s hard.

You’re studyin’ enlightenment.
You just keep goin’ with it.
I’ve given you all these reflections.
I think the subject’s exhausting.
I don’t think we ever put it down.
Even drunk we study those effects
on your possibility to rise.
Gettin’ some,
the sexual delight of another person,
we put it there too.
Can I get out of this?
This must be union with God.
You do your treatment
no matter what vice has got you,
and you’ll learn to let it go.

Preferably you’re not caught by vice.
These are preliminaries.
I have to tell yah they’re not.
It takes so long to overcome the world,
more to overcome yourself,
and vice will just become your reaction table
to stimulus.
You get rid of it.
You really get picky fine tune.

Lost in it,
it’s not going to put it over there.
You’re on the outside.
You don’t get there easily from there.
Like you gave me a task,
the inner poise.
Can somebody just come up and kill it?
We’re a letter away,
and we get into that get rid of me field.
What ego,
what snakes have been put in it.
There’s somethin’ else.
I don’t count an accident.
I just keep going with enlightenment.

You see my ways and means?
They’re not usual.
You just keep goin’
until mastery finds you.
How can you be enlightened before enlightened?
I don’t get it.
Let’s not be too strict on ourselves.
The consciousness is the key.
Don’t be interrupted,
and don’t let interruptions stop you.

There are no moral tales here.
You wanna calm down,
make peace.
You’re listening to this in your mind
silence concentrated.
It goes to God,
the source behind silence,
intensity’s rainbow.

Dry your eyes.
You’ve found a friend.
Enlightenment can talk to you
from the minds of God,
talk to you every single day.
My muse is
almost constant.
Nice to meet you.
Learnin’ this has taken decades.
Wow, the fruit of the room.

Voices talkin’ to my head,
imagine,
doin’ that for me:
writing the world down on paper.
It’s hallelujah glory,
and it’s strong.
You don’t know the availabilities of time.
They’re on the inside, you know?
We can find them.

We can find that cartoon,
enlightenment.
The Eastern whatever it is
takes us on the road.
Beautiful, ain’t it?

I’m a thick soup.
I thought that was an accomplishment.
I have to ever let go I’m sorry.
I have to study reality.
It always throws a curve ball
that I have to negotiate,
I’m negotiating now.

First choice,
who do you have?
Some nice warm human being,
or a lop-eared dog.
Could be your television show.
Give it to me.
You can’t have it.
I hear a voice,
and it won’t leave me alone,
and it’s the proper entertainment.
They just tell me I’m sorry,
there’s so much to say.

I think we’re gonna go to a narrow canyon over there.
Challenge with love,
with this far,
and not
they’re not gonna make it.
It takes a let go.
I’m a friend
in the most unlikeliest places.
He never
this is just grab ahold.
Enlightenment has you for its supper.
வணக்கம்.

Nothing,
don’t kick it over.
All the interrogators,
like counting the walls session.
It was really peaked Bruno,
the sequence of enlightenment.
I was there.
I experienced it.
It showed me the world
fine tuned.
It was the sequence of enlightenment.

I don’t know how to do it.
The Earth Mother’s in love you too.
This extra high in this game,
they don’t falter.
We’ve got your street books,
and no one knows what they’re talkin’ about,
sellin’ inevitable rise we find ourselves in.

A purpose behind human existence, no—
so science says.
It’s hidden.
It’s not around us.
See.
You know where enlightenment is?
Where to find human existence?
There’s a purpose behind life.
It figures there,
and we’ve found human.
Come and see.

That’s the mirror,
one that takes us even higher.
that takes us to the end of the world,
and this is no cataclysm stop.
It’s an embodied being paradise
checking out of bodies
and where worlds stand,
and getting bigger than that.
What a lovely end
to terrestrial existence.
We will arrive there eventually
in huge distances of time.

We have enlightenment,
and we’ve evolved out of the animal.
There’s Supermind,
and we don’t stop there.
We get bigger all the time.
We really do.

As the first step out of the animal
see enlightenment.
See it plainly.
I’ve shown it to you.
A gathered garden in the fabric of reality,
went through a photograph.

Do you know what that means?
Cancel it
with your rough cherry picker.
Put spiderwebs all over the city,
and that draws the crowd,
some version of Spiderman.
Pani puri daddy,
bring us to the wall and let us adapt.
It’s not a big problem.
Throw off the yoke of science
and read your bored everyday
you’re looking for enlightenment.

Next post:

Chapter 11

Between Jerusalem I’m Sorry, Chapter 9

http://www.anijudaism.com/blog/vaera-the-zohar-and-three-pillars-of-sefirot

The Back of the Bus

Too old to be told they say, but that’s not true. I grew up hearing about the fights surrounding desegregation busing on the news, and when I got older and found out what busing actually was, because as a kid if I were told what it was, it just went into one ear and out the other, I thought it was such an imposition upon the White schools, so unnatural, so forced, echoing the opinion of my elders, which they voiced to the TV many times. As a young man in the army I thought all the fuss about equal opportunity was unnecessary (it was the 80s for God’s sake) and affirmative action outright reverse discrimination. So when I was a doorman at Four Leaf Towers and worked the west tower 7 to 3 shift, something I only did a few times, since I worked the east tower, I took the opportunity to ask the concierge about it, and I’m sorry I forget his name.

He was the most senior employee among the staff and was talkative and easy going but very vocal about discrimination in regards to being Black. He had a funny figure the way his hips stood out from the rest of his body, not a result of being fat but because this was the way he was built, which matched perfectly with his effeminate manner. He spoke with a ‘Black’ accent but not in ebonics, and he giggled a lot but could get dead serious when the situation called for it. He got that way when I asked him to explain why blacks felt they were being constantly discriminated against. He was not offended in the least, however, was happy to explain why, but instead of talking, he told me to wait a bit. What could that mean I thought? Little did I know it happened so much around there to him all we had to do was wait a few minutes.

It wasn’t long before we saw a well dressed, White man walking to the lobby from the outside. He told me to go and stand by the door on the opposite side of the lobby from where the man was coming, not to go and open the door for him because he wanted to show me something. He said to stand so the man could see me, and he stood up from inside his octagon desk, where he could be seen clearly from the waist up. The desk was very visible and in the center of the large lobby. We both wore a dark blue suit and red tie, the uniform of the doorman and concierge. He said to watch what the man does. The man walked in, looked at the concierge standing behind the desk smiling an inviting, ‘may I help you?’ smile, the one obviously in charge, and then he looked at me, the White person, the one obviously just the doorman, and he walked all the way across the lobby to speak to me. I referred him to the concierge.

After the man left, he asked me how I’d feel if something like that happened several times a day; how would that make me feel about myself he stressed. He said he knew the man didn’t mean to treat him of no account, and that he probably wasn’t even aware he was being racist, but that’s the way it usually is. He explained that discrimination wasn’t always of the outright variety, was most often not something people even knew they were doing, and it was that kind that got to you because, slight though a single instant of it was, it was constant enough to cut slowly but surely deeper and deeper into your self-image. He pointed out the same thing happened almost every time a White person came there for the first time. He asked me to imagine daily life among a White majority, going shopping, to restaurants, the movies, wherever, and then he brought the point home by bringing in employment, how many Whites would just naturally choose a White over a Black, without even thinking, without feeling the slightest bit of racism.

To solve the problem of unconscious, or even conscious, racism, however, we’ve done what we always do: enact laws that address specifics of the problem and punish individual violations of them, the hydra approach, because, as many instances of racism that we punish, more occur. The roots of the problem are hardly even seen let alone dug out and removed.

Many years later, living in India the only White person in the neighborhood and getting that same kind of treatment every time I turned around too, although I have the added baggage of being a foreigner to boot, I’ve come to understand the fundamental problem in a different light, one that concierge couldn’t see because he saw in terms of right and wrong, of morality, naturally because he was being treated badly. At first I too saw the people discriminating against me as bad, but then I began to realize how human it is to hate or fear people of a different race or culture, as I’ve said earlier, and, able to see it in that light, as the natural way the ego reacts to people not of its group, because it’s been conditioned to react that way, since it’s taught to identify first with its own group, I’ve come to realize the only way to heal that is by making integration a part of the transcription of every human ego so that the child, from the time they can distinguish differences in people, which is very young, learns to identify themselves with humanity first and foremost and with their particular group, be that a race, religion, nation, or what, second. If you think about it, there really is no other way, and that, in terms of good and evil, it’s for goodness’ sakes.

While it’s possible to try to teach some watered down version of this in the schools, of most democratic countries at least, where learning to see people of a different race, gender, religion or whatnot, are equal to you in terms of citizen rights, human rights and the right to self-determination, which would be taught right alongside the 3 R’s, the obstacles to implementing the humanity first ideal are insurmountable at this present time, nationwide being impossible enough, worldwide not even thinkable, as I think anyone can see. Imagine all evangelical Christians and patriotic Americans, or all Muslims, Jews, and Hindus for that matter, teaching their infants and children they are human beings first and Christians, Americans, Muslims, Jews, Hindus or whatever, second. The Devil you say.

Citywide, however, it’s possible to begin right this minute, with the kids being born now, but not in any regular city where the people have come to live for the usual reasons, to be safer, to live in a nicer place, to make a better or easier living, etc. It would have to be a city where the people have come as pioneers of human unity first and as creatures of comfort second, a city created and set aside for that purpose, to achieve that aim. There is such a city on our planet, Auroville, India, where this narrative is moving, slow, like the growth of trees upon the land.

At this moment in the narrative, however, we return to Safed, where the line between Jew and non is about to be drawn more definitively. As I’ve mentioned, I was sleeping outside, now out of the cemetery and in the little square Moshehiem’s apartment and Avraham’s gate opened onto, behind a little clump of bushes along a wall. I was perpetually hungry, and I think by this time I’d quit the back-breaking hauling stones out of old houses job. I really don’t remember how or what I was eating, only that on this particular Shabbis, my third or fourth one there, my last one actually, I was particularly hungry and was so looking forward to the Saturday feast. I was delighted when I got a special invite for the Friday evening meal from the expat American married couple that lived in an apartment next door to Avraham, the man one of the three men at the fountain who dressed me down about the Hitler poem. I figured with this invitation all was now well. It was at his apartment, and it was a modest meal I shared with he and his wife, her nephew, a little boy about nine, and his best friend from high school, who had come to visit from America, one of the people there exploring their Jewish identity, but that wasn’t the only identity of his he was exploring.

I remember him at the afternoon show and tell in the studio courtyard the day before. He appeared to be trying to make himself look much smaller than he was, and much younger than his 20 years, sitting in the chair the way a child would and holding onto a teddybear. The only thing missing was the thumb in his mouth. I forget what he said, only that it was all to make us think of him as a child and not as an adult, which was to get everyone to accept his love for little boys, but that didn’t become apparent to me until that dinner the next day when, as we were waiting to eat, he was rubbing the little nephew’s back as the boy lay on his stomach, running his fingers through his long payot (sidelocks), what he was doing when I came in, what it appeared he’d done all night, as he’d slept beside the boy there on the floor. I could smell the sexual desire, and when he suddenly goosed him between the legs, grabbing his package from behind, I could see it. The boy yelled, “Hey!” for his part, but I could tell this wasn’t the first goose, and the young man gave a faked devilish laugh and went back to safer territory the boy was more comfortable with, but I ascertained the boy had had a handful night.

I could sense the couple was not comfortable with all this, and he sensed it too, and as a way of trying to have them make some sense out of this, he got up and went up to the young woman and told her how wonderful it was he’d made such a deep bond with her nephew in so short of time. I about choked when he said that, thinking how immature and see through was his attempt at manipulating the people around so he could hook into the little boy. She didn’t say anything. When I left after dinner so did he, and I overheard his friend tell him he was to sleep at so and so’s house, not there, but there wasn’t any mention of why or any sound of disapproval or disgust in his voice. The separation was as much to protect the young man as it was the boy. I could sense the bewilderment of this man, who’d learned this unspeakable thing about his best friend, but I could also sense his concern for him.

The next day he was following the boys around as they played, looking very awkward doing so. I saw him standing on a thin concrete ledge above the now dry sewer that ran the length of the upper end of the square. He appeared very unsure of his footing. The group of boys had just ran over it without hesitation, and they didn’t wait for him, seemed not even to be aware he was there. The day before the boys had followed me being the Pied Piper as I ran the length of that ledge and expertly negotiated other obstacles around the square as though I were on an obstacle course, like a paratrooper. I’d been teaching a couple of boys who lived there the basics of meditation and pranayama, boys about ten who wanted to wake up in their dreams and such, lucid dreaming something I’d asked them about, if they did, and it happened that suddenly there was a number of boys in the square, and the Pied Piper thing just came about as I sat the two aforementioned boys down and began giving them their lesson. Curious, the visiting boys were not shy about interrupting us, and soon I’d abandoned the lesson and just played with them. With the young man on that ledge, Mr. Goose (let me call him), however, you didn’t have to use a crowbar to separate the men from the boys because the boys weren’t into him, but he so wanted them to be, as he’d seen me the day before too and wanted what they gave me, their undivided, unwavering attention.

The next day after Shabbis, he went to Jerusalem to stay at the house of the little boy who he’d made handfuls of, and I remember thinking what a wake up call that would be for that household, which had several boys, as the orthodox tend to have many kids, and what a day of reckoning it would probably be for young Mr.Goose. I doubted the father of the boy would be as concerned for his welfare as his best friend was. That the father was also the go to person for Americans who wanted to convert to Judaism, was I was told who I needed to go to if I did decide to convert, wasn’t the only connection that brought Mr. Goose’s story home to me. I sure didn’t want to arrive in that house after a nuke had gone off, the one strapped to my own back, well, that’s the thing see.

Er, ugh, so, like I said, I took the first meal Shabbis invitation on Friday evening to be a sign that all was well between me and the ‘gang’, but it wasn’t that at all but something more like a bone you’d throw to a dog so they’d not bother you begging for your food. It was an appeasement, I would be told on Saturday by Mr. Next Door (as in next door to the studio), so I’d be satisfied I’d been taken care of and not expect to come to the second meal Shabbis, which was that Saturday afternoon. Funny how his true intentions in inviting me to eat at his house, which weren’t good intentions, matched, in the weird way the universe matches this and that, the bad intentions of Mr. Goose, who’d been invited there with the best of intentions, but even if you believe things in this universe are put together consciously, it’d be hard for you to believe that bad intentions are bad intentions, whether that be to fondle a child over his trousers or invite someone to your house because you’re trying to ultimately exclude them. In other words, that all bad intentions are connected to one another and are the same in essence. You got that?

It was early Saturday afternoon, and I could tell something was up at the studio. The gate was closed and had been since I woke up. Three young British men were with me, having slept in a hostel nearby. Me? I slept in the bushes. They arrived the day before and were all beside themselves with a story of seeing a UFO in the Sinai desert. I say beside themselves, but maybe you don’t get the picture: they were unhinged. Their eyes shined with a fire of having seen something literally out of this world. I knew they were telling the truth by their unmistakable shaken look, like you know when someone’s terrified or hurt by the unmistakable note of such in their voice.

At once afraid and excited, they were people who’d had their worldview suddenly changed to include aliens upon earth and all the incredible things that suggests. They would not stop talking about it, but, lost in being Jewish or wanting to be included in being Jewish, we didn’t listen to their story, and it seems to me now the universe brought them to us to add emphasis to this story, to show us how narrow-minded we all were at that moment, myself included, although I did talk to the boys more about their encounter after hearing them tell the people in the studio who were there when they came in. I only remember it was a close encounter of the second kind, where a small glowing oddly shaped craft landed very close to them and then dashed off into the sky, leaving them stunned and unable to move for some minutes afterwards, but it was it close enough to remove any doubt of what they saw.

That afternoon, soon after the three British men arrived at the square, having spent the night in a hotel, Avraham, Mr. Next Door, and B Actor came out of the studio to talk to us, the same ones who spoke to me about the Hitler poem a couple of days earlier, although B Actor was a little behind the other two, appearing more like a tag along than who’d been elected to tell us what we were about to be told. Avraham did the talking, and it was obvious he wasn’t proud of what he had to say, and that he was struggling with it: “Hey look, we, uh, we just took a vote, and I’m sorry, but you guys can’t come to dinner this afternoon.”

“Why not? What’s going on?” I asked. I was so let down. I’d been looking forward to this meal all week watching everyone prepare for it. It was the first part of June, and the crowd of young Americans hanging out at the studio, who were mostly college kids on summer break, and a couple of recent graduates, had gotten pretty large. I knew this would be a feast.

“Like I said, we voted, and we only want Jewish people to come to the second meal this afternoon.”

As Avraham said this Mr. Next Door piped in, telling me what I’ve already explained above: “You got invited to my house last night for the first meal so that you’d be taken care of and not expect to come to the second meal too.” He said that like it was really rude of me to want to come to dinner that afternoon —the nerve of me.

Now there are times in life when you have a sense of saying things for the future, and you stand up and say them, and say them well, but here that didn’t happen. I only had the sense of saying such, not the well-spoken speech itself, but I did try. It’s always been that way with me. I’m a writer not a speaker. “What? Because we’re not Jewish? Do you know what you’re saying? Come on Avraham, you’re American. You’ve seen the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

Avraham was uneasy, and he looked quickly at the studio gate, where he wanted to be heading right about then. “I know how this looks, but we took a vote, and I have to abide by it. People are afraid that if you are there, well, they won’t feel comfortable to express their Jewishness.”

“And you have your own spirituality, and it’s strong, and we don’t want anything to get in the way of ours.” That was B Actor. That was the main reason, I surmised.

“What about these guys? Why them too?” I asked, motioning to the three Brits.

“We decided only Jews.” Avraham said. How everyone knew they weren’t Jewish I don’t know. That must’ve been a question, covert or otherwise, they got asked the night before, and the answer had gotten around. If you would ask me what’s wrong with that because this was Israel, I’d tell you that’s what wrong with Israel: the overriding importance placed on being Jewish, to the exclusion of others.

If I had been aligned with the cosmos at that moment, or, to sound less new agey, with what would be the most interesting dinner conversation around, I’d have pointed out that the three young gentlemen had a story to tell at the dinner table well worth hearing, and wasn’t it interesting they were there with it at the moment non-Jews were being excluded, like as if to say, “Hey, let’s not only exclude non-Jews, but let’s shut out the universe too while we’re at it?” But I was as lost in being excluded as they were in being Jews. I can, however, point that out now.

“What did you vote Avraham?”

“I agree with this, but not everybody does. The ones that don’t have made arrangements for you all to come after everyone has left and eat your fill.” I was surprised to hear he was among the people voting us out. I don’t think he was comfortable with his vote, but he’d opted to be part of the crowd and was going with it despite his reluctance.

“But you invited us last night, why we’re here now, to come to dinner,” one of the Brits threw in.

“Yeah I know, and I’m sorry, but this morning people objected to you guys coming, and there was a long argument, and so we took a vote,” Avraham said.

“Wait a minute. Something doesn’t fit because last night I got invited to the first meal Shabbis, as I’ve just been told, so I wouldn’t expect to come to the second meal, and so what’s the deal?” I was trying to point out that the exclusion had been pre-planned.

“We just don’t want any gentiles, and that’s that.” Avraham was obviously finished.

I argued more, but to no avail. We were told what time to come and told not to come before then, and the three walked back to the studio. Disappointed I’d have to wait until 10 p.m. to eat, but thankful I’d at least get to, I went to sit down at the fountain and just wait. Being excluded was par for the course for me there in Safed. The three Brits mumbled something about Jews being clannish and this being bullshit and walked off. When they’d arrived at the studio the night before, telling anyone who’d listen about their close encounter, they’d been invited to the second meal by not only Avraham, but others too, so to share their strange story. It got untold.

If anybody that voted that morning to exclude us because we weren’t Jews were to be asked today, it’s doubtful any one of them would own up to it, and I base that on virtually everybody’s reluctance to admit they are racist, even most neo-Nazis and White supremacists. When you combine that with our almost universal unwillingness to admit we’re wrong when we really are, and with our tendency to refuse to concede to an opposite point of view even when presented with concrete facts proving it, or tendency to become even more obstinate with our wrong view actually, you can bet the voters in this racist election won’t admit they cast votes to exclude us.

Whomever asked about it might use the reason I’ve just revealed to you about myself, that nuke on my back, but that wasn’t something they knew at the time, although I’m sure it entered the minds of the people watching me play so freely with the boys in the square on Thursday. In short, it wasn’t on the table with this crowd. And besides, Mr. Goose got not only to go to dinner but a place to sleep, and it was on the table with him. Yes, there was some controversy because of the Hitler poem, but there was no question of me being anti-Semitic or anything of the kind. This was about being someone with a spirituality stronger than their own, and I’m speaking about personal inner and mystical experience, and with a creativity flowing from that alive and kicking, those things more than I wasn’t a Jew, but the Brits would say it was because we weren’t Jewish, and that is the main thing on the table here, being excluded because we weren’t Jews.

At 10 p.m. we were waiting at the gate, and it opened for us. Avraham ushered us in but then made himself scarce. We ate the leftovers in the dark, as the lights had been turned off, but you could still see. And we ate in a relative silence, only speaking about how good the food was. No talk of the out of this world, unfortunately. The meal had been buffet style. There was one small table with dishes of food on it and a longer one where the people ate, and a couple of smaller empty tables behind. This had been a big dinner. I gathered about 20 or so people had eaten. We didn’t serve ourselves but were served by the three or four dissenters to the vote, served like we were important people they respected and admired, and in telling this story through the years I’ve said that’s the way it is with Jews: if some Jews do you wrong because you aren’t Jewish, other Jews will come along to try and make it right, and what’s different about that in the other peoples on this earth is that with Jews you’ll almost always have the ones trying to make it right right there within the same group that’s doing you wrong. That’s a generalization I know, maybe not even correct, but it’s become part of this story because that’s how I’ve told it since it happened. Let me just say thank you to the kind people that sacrificed to serve us.

I will tell you all the rules when outcasting these people.
Drop in
a sister’s pain.
It was deliberate and actual.
She threw him out the window,
and years he’s been sitting at the fire
tryin’ to make sense of it.
It’s mean.
She even has her daughter on the report.

It’s vocabulary for everybody.
It just hurts, you know?
No one cares.
They just reject you,
like you’re some changeling in their midst,
like you’re a monster.

Just stop a moment and think,
Gwen,
do you ride the world this way?
Are you taller than trees?
Is this the good in you?
And can you tell me why you’re doing it?
I don’t understand,
what’s society got to do with this?
That’s who you propose is true?
What’s it about you?
What are you doing?

Please tell me
I can lay my head on your shoulder.
Do you know the moon?
Show the world you’re not some redneck from Texas.
Be my friend.
Be good to me
Gwendolyn Gaye Duke.

No don’t brag about this,
but I think of you often.
I just don’t know how to include you in my life.
How can we be brother and sister?
How can you even like me?
I’ve done you wrong,
as hurtful as I can do that.
I’ve even threatened to put you behind bars,
if you should just try and talk to me.


Why did you have to go and be some security blanket for the world?
Why did you have to stand up and sing?
It makes me look so bad,
and I handle it with care.
No one talks about it around me.
Oh man I’m sorry.
What am I supposed to say?
That worms,
so I just sit here and count dimes till the end.

What do I do with you?
Of course you make my smile
when I,
when I practice childhood with you
in my mind’s eye.
How do you throw a brother away?
Worse,
how do you dig him out of the trash?

Okay people I’m responsible.
I did this to my brother and see
I will official him again.
I will be there for him when he needs me.
I will do what’s right.
These are starting on my lips.

I’m on my way.
Do you hear me Gwen?
It’s time to overcome now
the points you had with me taking over,
stealing your mother’s love,
being a boy in the room,
when sisters are not allowed
because they’re girls.
I blamed you for the failure
of being a girl instead of a boy.
This is quite animal.
Disappointed, stagnated, stand up.
We need to redeem girls, don’t we?
let them have the world in their hands like boys do.

I don’t know how to start this.
I don’t know how to make it right.
I just know we need it,
and it’s coming.
In the meantime,
Gwen,
don’t blame me for the war.
I am not the one who caused it.
I just sat there,
a little boy in my mother’s lap in love with her.
I just didn’t know it hurt you.
I couldn’t see you there.
I was just a kid.
That’s all I have to say.
Do you need me?
It’s on the way.
Let’s fight this thing.
I’m comin’.

Endure all these stabs in the heart
from my world and my family.
They don’t even hesitate.
I get rid of…
I don’t know what to do with these feelins’.
They hurt me.
They go round all the time.
They happen all the time.
They don’t even think about it.
It’s automatic for them,
the outcast mode.

Society allows this,
encourages it.
It’s what makes it mean.
I’ve Heard the Crawdads Sing doesn’t do it,
a Me Too statement
science made—
kill somebody
and don’t even feel a thing
what’s yah doin’?
No one knows the story of outcast.
They make movies they don’t believe in.
Write books they’re not sure of.
And they would outcast me too.

We shake up underdogs,
like they’re special,
talk about them all the time,
especially in children’s literature,
their movies and things,
and we go to town for them,
bring them into you,
make them heroes,
and we don’t believe a word of it,
are confused over what it means,
can’t quite grasp its concept,
don’t even know what to do with it.
We just put people down
when we meet them in real life,
the underdog, the outcast.
We can’t seem to understand
they wear different clothes each time,
and society is not true to itself:
outcast might mean somethin’ else tomorrow.

Do you even know what you’re doin
puttin’ us in the outcast pen’?
Do you even care?
I’m here to warn you:
you’re tearin’ society apart.
You’re being loyal to your animal rage.
You’re actually bein’ immoral.
How do we show you this?
You will not let us speak.
You’ve just shut us off.
It’s a crime, you know?

It’s equity, you know?
what’s missin’ with you.
You would be safe and sorry.
You will not risk a thing.
You don’t know what it means to love
someone you don’t have to.
You can’t grasp love—
a noble idea,
but you can’t seize it.
It’s not just something you declare,
like Ari says it is.
No, you feel it
in every situation,
because it’s how you encounter the world,
and you’ve done the work to evolve that.
It’s such hard work.
You find the shop there:
you have to put it on everything in your day.
Try it on for size,
and your shortcomings you study.
They reveal yourself.

This is not wide open to the world
to just take you for a ride.
You love.
It’s never let people harm you,
or take advantage of your things
to the point you lose.
You have to be wise.
You have to know how to play.
It comes and goes.
You get stronger at it,
and faced with someone like me,
whom everybody hates.
you love.

And that brings society together.
You’ve passed the test.
You are your brother’s keeper,
your sister’s righthand smile.
You’ve saved the world here.
Do you know love will solve the world?
That’s equity.
That’s how we deal each other.
That’s how we make it right.
And even the climate’s better.
And even nuclear disarmament’s happened.
And we have world peace,
everywhere.

I really hate these shoes.
They don’t fit my feet,
and they cause blisters,
everyday.
That’s society
in its lower parts.
We can do nothing about that.
Until you try.
We’ve have to give them the example
in the press
and on equity’s base.
We do have better parts, don’t we?
Can’t you even try?

You had to go and get the world by the tail,
you had to be a speaker for humanity,
to even bring this up,
to even bring this up.
To the bullpen,
I’m gettin’ there.
You’ll have to listen to me.
There’s we lose society
if you don’t.

I’m a wide speaker.
I can bring people together.
I know how that works.
I know how divine it is,
and I know its power.
Can I introduce it to you?
You think you have it.
You don’t know the sacrifice it means.
It’s got horns.
It puts you in the way with people,
makes you vulnerable,
tests your limits.
It’s not easy,
but we break apart without it,
I mean as a world,
a society.

You can see the fractures now.
Don’t trust anybody.
Kill anybody that laughs at you.
Make a mistake,
and the hounds are on you,
to the fullest extent of the law.
We just break here.
It’s time we got smart,
took love out of the cupboard
(oh those silly 60s)
and healed people with it,
applied it to society
in very practical terms.
We make it rule our hands and feet,
garden our minds,
have it control our mouths.
It’s the thing in the room
we constantly refer to.
It’s the basis of our acts,
and I’m not talking blind.

We do what needs to be done
to protect ourselves,
to protect our mistakes.
We can’t go there.
Imaginary self-defense
invaded Russia,
and the vast majority of a great and powerful nation,
so sophisticated,
charged that into invading Ukraine.
Unbelievable the size of it,
the lack of love.
Do you see that?
Can you see that?
I’m talking to Russia.
Scapegoats one and all,
Ukrainians.

I’ll be back in a minute.
I’ve got to hang out some clothes
and other speedy deliveries for my family.
That’s what I’m doin’ doin’ poetry,
publishin’ a book,
a lot of housework,
where I take care of people and their things,
It’s a large house,
full of people and dogs,
and they call me daddy around here,
and I have a large family,
so loveful, at times so uneasy. [heard sung]
She went to say watch
she was Heavenly pulled.
Oh by the way,
I clean my own bathroom.
So this is founded on stuff,
the nitty gritty of life’s room,
and I am sorry,
but the stuff comes first
around here.

Every shirt I could breathe,
my chores,
you know Douglas.
He’s my friend,
like a…
like we’re married.
It makes the day go by kind,
and we sure do love each other,
no gay involved.
He’s the actor in the room
the friend,
the incredible, amazing friend.

And I’m giving you the facts straight.
There’s the welcome:
dial 9.
It’s got some kidney power.
Bring the dog along.
Contrary to doctrine
that doesn’t like children,
if you get distracted,
there’s the Messiah there.
He’s nice and warm.
That’s your fingers on ice
not bein’ a mean to people,
and you’re the Messiah.
How powerful that is
when applied to everyday life.
The Messiah settings,
I don’t see here the crawdads and the frienddogs sing.
Wait counsel.
Eventually everyone will be the Messiah,
although you are free to go.
I did this
in my own yard.
I was wide open.

How much gas is in my car?
No it is not illegal.
I got free spoken of her so much.
Why didn’t you go with him?
I don’t know how to make it right,
not to mention,
that notion
is whimsically laid out.
It’s the Messiah man.
You can’t finish it
and apply it
on a cold and grey Chicago morn
another little baby child is born
in the ghetto,
and his momma cries. [this and above three lines sung by Elvis]
Do you have teeth?
Just throw this off the bus.
It’s Rembrandt.
We believe its existence.
We know it’s there.
We can’t get under it.
I’m right behind you.
I stand on wheels.
I’m the end of racism.
I’m love, you understand?
I’m really here.
Just ask your heart.
It’s got school in it,
and there it is on your table.
Well let’s get goin’.

Let’s splash down in this water once more
and look at the victim in the room.
They’re there as originally supposed:
they’ve been hurt.
The question of the ages:
what do we do on their behalf?
We don’t get revenge.
This is horrible on society.
It destroys us,
keeps us mean and hateful people,
is barbaric.
We have to help them.
We have to take their hand.
We need to protect them.
We need to validate their experience.
We need to give them room to breathe.

The only way to heal is through the victim
fall in this hole on the ground,
and take the victimizer in their arms and pray.
No, not that Europe.
They’d have to learn a lesson.
They’d have to learn
that victimizer is in trouble.
Do you see it?
They don’t let him off scot-free,
but we have institutions now to heal them,
and they’d come together Norway,
put in jail in lovely places
and fellowed,
brought back into the fold
with gentle hands and loving eyes.
We have angels for this,
people put through soul force to get there.

Wait a minute,
they are certainly greased,
made to feel their wrong,
put in positions to see that
in the time they are cuffed,
Positions that do not harm them,
but show them their weakness,
why they kill,
why they rape,
why they bring harm to people.
Maybe that’s out of doors in wilderness brought back to bear,
if we understand the institution’s
not a building housed.
Why would he have roles if he didn’t have a victim?

This is not a boneyard.
It’s not a rub your nose in it please.
I feel so guilty
I’ll do it again.
But they need to see the pain.
They need to see it plainly,
how it hits their lives and hurts them too.
That’s the connection made.
That’s what we get them to see.
Not with the mask
of they are jailed for that,
put in nice prisons.
This is in their very lives.
They’ve caused harm to someone-themselves.
This is an inner journey,
soul searching.
They need to see they hurt themselves.
Who knows the function of dreams?
They’re there for the taking,
and here they bring a lot.
That man,
that woman,
begins to investigate themselves.
We have time.
They’re in prison,
some beautiful square walls
that make inner learning easy.
Beauty surrounds them
and people who are not offended by them.
They’re there to help.
The factor involved is not a stretch,
a time term.
It’s their record of healing.

Okay how do we do that
in a society of hate and mean?
The world’s gonna change you know.
We will become a nation
of lovers of other nations,
until we lose that political boundary,
and people’s populate the planet
into one another.
You, see the direction.
What government might there be wrong?
This will evolve to show,
so wrong doesn’t come.
We’re lookin’ at the future.
We hug these ideas today.

We’ve come a long ways,
haven’t we,
from the victim’s needs?
No, we’ve brought them home.
They’ve been vindicated,
given their due,
put in the right place:
now I understand school.
I really do.
Time teaches them this
without the victimizer.
They need to heal.
Left to themselves
they crumble,
they falter,
they stumble.
We can help them,
and it’s part of society’s plan
communicate
with the perpetrator in the room.

You wouldn’t see them at first.
You would have be prepared for that.
You would go through your trauma.
You would see it.
You would learn it’s not you.
They soul is inviolate.
Don’t hit the lady,
force ‘em to hear it.
How do you explain movies to children?
And that’s the star of our role:
we are actors on a stage the poets have told us.
This is how we heal.
Seein’ that reality
we come along fine.

I’m writing in a tactical attitude that has a historical basis,
and we look at books now,
the one I’m writing now.
I can write on and on and on
to get you in the breeze so you can hear me.
I’ve touched your most precious subjects,
and I will continue.

I’m spanking you hard, aren’t I?
This is not the ideal’s lair.
I’m putting practicality in your hands.
That’s why it smarts so.
I touch bottom.
Can you gather the sound of music?
It’s military, ain’t it?
I have some points to get across,
a world to change,
and let’s just get down to business, shall we?

Went higher than where our pen works,
and try it on for size.
But this is too high to raise:
supramental,
and we just slag there.
That’s the seer
on his divine ground,
where we’re goin’.
I want you to tell the truth.
On 27th
you stay here
a butterfly.
I don’t bring zero down to Earth.
I have no notion with the Antichrist.
You mean the prophet here.
The seer.

I’ve got such a sofa.
I don’t know how to write it.,
but you’re hearin’ me speak.
I will protect you
from the end of the Earth.
You can see my bargain card.
I’m an outcast wants in.
Why do you do that,
chop me in half when I ask?
You just listen to Steve,
my step-brother Steve Abbott,
who turns me away.
I think he’s read my material.
He can’t deal with it.
He doesn’t know what to say,
and I’m his brother.
This is ridiculous.
Every one of you out there
does the same thing.
Why is that?
Do I pee?
Okay let’s give racism a chance,
Is that what you’re saying?

We’re really into vegetables.
I think I should hang up the phone now,
and let you get me some sleep.
There’s enough to say
in the whole book.
I love you.
I’m not pullin’ any punches, you know?

What a surprise,
I hear from Steve.
Oh thank you Steve.
Throw any rock at me?
Okay Gwen,
this isn’t good.
I don’t understand it:
never speak to me again?
I’m Gwen,
do my M.O.
That’s stubbornness alerted itself.
Look at your
aspirations.
You want to…
You’re hurting me.
Stop racism.
You want to stop it.
I’m finished.
Do you understand?

You aren’t finished.
What have you got separations to say?
Just let me shoot yah,
put you out of your misery.
A dual piece of property
the owner
was mine—
a victim’s statement.
And I’ve told you there’s teacher.
But I think I told you this was a dream.
I’m a hustler.
I’m just tryin’ to get you to see reality.
Something more than a movie,
but can you call it?
Victims square one.
They have teeth.
We’re not allowed to brush them aside.
You have responsibility in the movie.
We’ve got things to do here.
This is not a nightclub.
It’s a representative reality school involved.
We’ve got so much to learn.
We’ve got a world to learn,
and we are here for that,
every one of us,
including you.

We’re here to learn
the notions of the universe
that have us learn God.
See here
how God sees through our eyes,
God what we’re lookin’ at.
And I’ve explained myself
and put you in the right place.
And we put this helmet on
and go to work.
Now put up with society,
everybody,
so we can get the right music.
Brother, brother, brother,
what’s goin’ on? [this and above line heard sung voice of Marvin Gaye]
A love notion.

Next post:

Chapter 10
You Can Gimmie my Car

Between Jerusalem I’m Sorry, Chapter 8

The flyer I made for the first Garberville poetry reading

A Small Open

The day of the poetry reading at Avraham’s studio arrived. It had taken some talking let me tell you, but Avraham and the core group of American young people hanging out at his studio, about three or four individuals, finally agreed to it. Shortly after meeting Avraham, I’d given him the small stapled packet of poems I carried around and made copies of periodically, which contained around 20 poems or so. I’d taped each on the wall next to our hunger strike camp in Jerusalem, and with their strange, typed shapes they made quite a backdrop to the camp, and I taped several of them around the old city in the first ‘official’ posting, which I did with Lars, which is covered in the Tongues series. I also read a couple in that daily afternoon show and tell at the studio when I first arrived. Now I was just stupid about these poems and being a poet, had to be seen as a poet by other people. I still have the same poetic symptoms but at a higher order; I think now it’s the natural order. But still, I don’t understand what my fuss was all about, as if the ability to put words together that play with language and meaning well enough they don’t disagree makes you some degree of human out of the animal, and there’s some question at my ability in those poems to write poetry where language didn’t quarrel with meaning in the first place, but, if nothing else, they are striking.

At that moment in Safed there was a controversy going on over the use of non-Jewish religious figures, the mere mention of their names, almost a crisis really. David (I forget his last name unfortunately), was the most prominent artist in Safed, internationally recognized for his paintings of the Sefirot. I first saw him at Avraham’s studio, where a couple of his works were on display. He dressed neither orthodox nor non-orthodox if you can picture something other than either or, but you can say he dressed conservatively. What struck you was that didn’t upstage the fact there was a very unconventional person wearing the clothes. His face said it all: “My God would you look at that interesting thing over there in the world, would you look at everything by God,” what it said when you looked into his face. The keys to his shul in Safed had been taken away by its owners because he allowed the God-enthusiastic young people there to use the names of Buddha, Jesus, and others in their praises, prayers and such. When the rabbis around there heard rumors such idolatry was going on, they sent other God-enthusiatic young people, who limited God to Judaism, to infiltrate the shul. They reported back to their rabbis it indeed was happening, who had contacted the New York owners, who were appalled and took away his keys. It all had just happened before my arrival, and Avraham and the others there were worried some slip of the tongue at the studio would get them into trouble, as it was believed there were spies everywhere.

It’s a credit to Avraham and his friends that in such a climate of fear I was allowed to do a “Noise From the Innerwho” there in the first place, what, if you remember, I called my (now on the road) poetry reading I’d started in Gaberville, where I was the MC and invited anyone from the audience to read their poetry. The Safed crowd did regret it afterwards though. Avraham, who had read my poems, or so I figured, really had only read a couple or so, the above one, one of those. He asked me not to read that one or any one that used the name of non-Jewish Gods or prophets. We had a little debate over Jesus, who I argued was after all a Jew and, if nothing else, was at least a Jewish prophet, but we finally settled on a compromise. I could read The Dangle, which I really had a fancy to read, if I substituted the word mashiach for Christ.

It might interest you to know that the poem’s a gatha, what I thought at the time was what Buddhists call poems that describe momentary experiences of enlightenment, what they call ‘a glimpse of reality’, but which I’ve sense learned is a poem that describes basically anything as long as it’s mindful. That my Dangle also describes a nuclear explosion can be attributed to both the incredible intensity of such an enlightenment experience and the ability of poetry to talk about two or more things at the same time, in this case talk about too the intensity of playing around with nukes, even in practice. That the verses are in the shape of flying saucers, well, that’s a whole other thing, isn’t it? I don’t know what to tell you.

The courtyard was set up nicely for the reading, what the regulars pitched in to put together, with rows of folding chairs in front of a sort of makeshift but adequate stage, and I do believe there was a mike. I forget what advertising we’d done, other than invitation and word of mouth, but in every other Noise, making the creative flier was always a big thing for me, and so it probably was here too, only it might’ve been what was taped on the gate and not posted around because of the current controversy. We did it at night, and the stage wasn’t lit, although there were lights around the courtyard, enough so that you could see both the person on stage and the audience. I was in my element, and I was excited. I honestly don’t remember how many or who read anything of theirs, and that shows what I was showing: “Look everybody, this came outta me!” What I most remember is looking out over the audience, just after finishing the poem “The Reincarnation of Adolf Hitler”, and a young man in orthodox dress, looking like he’d gotten much more than the scoop he’d come there for, jumping up out of his seat and running out of the courtyard, obviously to report to whom sent him what was being read—“They’re bringing Hitler back to life for God’s sake!” I had a moment of nervousness but quickly recovered and continued the show, but I knew I’d hear about it after it was all over.

I’m 15, living in the suburbs of Houston with my mom and step-dad, and I’m a Jesus freak, Jesus person to you buddy. I’m at my friend’s house, eating dinner with one of the few black families in Sagemont at that time—it wasn’t fried chicken. I’m there because the father of the family is my good friend, one of the few adults who will take me seriously and not treat me like a child when I talk about the Lord and scripture. I want to be preacher, not when I grow up, but now. He’s the pastor of a church in one of the wards of Houston, ward a nicer name than ghetto for those poor, predominantly Black neighborhoods, and next Sunday he’s going to let me preach a sermon in his church, not the morning service, but the night service, but I’m so thrilled that makes no difference. I visit his house often and talk with him, and the attention he pays me, the respect, that’s what makes me come back. At my smart aleck, pimply-faced age you don’t get a lot of that. He has a son a little older than I, who’s a nerd and is into Star Trek and is building a laser for his school science project. I sit with him often on the bus in those days, and he talks about what a laser is and how hard it is to make one do more than simply shoot a straight beam of light. He wants to slice a fruit in half, an apple I think. Talking to him about it I realize he’s probably smarter than I am, despite the fact that, if I remember right, all he achieves is the beam of light. He gets off first and always gives me the Spock farewell, putting his palm up with the fingers split and saying “Live long and prosper.” As time goes on, I forget I’m sitting by the only African American on the bus, forget he’s even Black. I am sorry, but I did see he was Black when I looked at him until that indeterminable point he became my friend. Another way to say that is we notice differences between us, the bigger the difference the more we notice it, until we get to know someone and begin to care for them, and then the difference is no longer even a thing. You don’t see it anymore.

What brought that integration to my page? That 9-year-old boy who wouldn’t eat ‘nigger food’ had undergone a transformation in his intolerance of Black people. It’d come about from an inner process I can hardly guess at from this distance in time, but I’m sure my step-father Bucky had something to do with it. He’d been in my life since he became my mom’s boyfriend when I was 7, but it wasn’t until he married her, and I went to live with them in their new house in the suburbs when I was 11, that he became my dad and took the time and trouble to educate me some. I’d come from the backwoods of East Texas, and when I moved in he began to work on my ignorance.

He was from California and had a college education, really knew how to make children laugh, didn’t hit a kid or a woman, did housework, was slow to anger, a peacemaker even, and that’s odd considering he was built like a tank, 6 foot 4 or thereabouts, who played semi-pro football in the position of fullback in the army in Europe during the Korean War. Do I list his faults here too? He was also quite smart, smart enough to get out of going to Korea, which took both his brains and bronze. He went with a buddy equally as good as he was at football to where an army team was practicing on base. They got close enough so the coach could see them throwing passes and kicking punts. Bucky said he never put so much onto a football. It’s no wonder; they both had orders shipping them out to the war. The coach saw them and put them on the team.

First, Bucky got me reading more, what I’d gotten interested in doing in Jewett when the new school librarian, fresh out of college, called me, me and me alone, to the library one day to give me first chance to read a new book: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I guess she must’ve saw something in me no one else did at the time. That was my first book book, but I didn’t start reading another one after that, and then another one, didn’t do that mind-altering thing whereby you have the constant companion of books friending each day of your life. That’s the fire Bucky wanted to start, and to help do that, he gave me a copy of The Call of the Wild and a lot of encouragement, and then I was hooked, and from then on I had a book I was reading. The next thing he did was make a big deal every time I used a word of more than two syllables. He’d clap and carry on such that I began to make an effort to improve my vocabulary, for that validation, but it didn’t take long before I no longer wanted to sound ignorant, and I not only made an effort to use bigger words but also to get rid of the East Texas accent.

It wasn’t long before he began to work on my racism. He’d correct me when I used the word nigger, and he’d challenge my stereotypes regarding the differences between Blacks and Whites. He didn’t stop at race but defended gays as well when, as boys my age often do, I bashed fags, and he even had sympathy for pedophiles, who at that time were just becoming the undefendable monsters they are today. What he wanted me to see, or feel rather, was someone’s humanity, but he never put it in those terms, was not actually an intellectual or very sophisticated thinker, wasn’t even very sensitive, could be quite the macho male at times, especially when I ceased being a little boy and became an arrogant teenager. But Bucky’s humanity wasn’t coming from his mind, or even his heart; it was coming from his developed soul, and it had gotten to just the point of maturity where it could influence his behavior, have him respond to everyone’s humanity with his own. It wasn’t big enough yet to set his world on fire, but he helped light the fire of humanity in me.

That day after the poetry reading I was quite apprehensive, and, in the morning, when Avraham and two guys from the studio crowd came walking up to the fountain I was sitting on, which was in the center of the square in front of the studio, I figured the studio had already been visited by whomever sent the young man to the reading. They sat down around me on the circular bench it formed, the fountain dry. To my surprise no one had come but Avraham and the two men who were upset about the Hitler poem. That’s when I found out Avraham had only read a couple of the poems I gave him to read before the reading. It seemed he hadn’t even gone over the titles. The other two men lived there in Safed, but I forget their names. One lived with his wife right next door to Avraham’s in a small apartment, and I never learned where the other one lived, but he was the most vocal and conservative of the crowd there, although he wasn’t listened to much because he was a B Actor, the kind of person always in the center of things trying their best to be a mover and shaker but was never able to move or shake anything very much, that I saw at least. Give him a A for trying, and for being willing to engage me about the particulars of Judaism, and also for being a lover of God.

B Actor did most of the talking. He kept repeating that I was hurting people by reading that poem, because there were many Holocaust survivors living there. The other two agreed but said little, although Avraham piped in, in a disapproving voice, “but you did it anyway,” when the subject of not using the word Christ but mashiach came up. My defense wasn’t explaining what the poem was really about, which wasn’t Hitler. He was just the example of the most evil man in the whole world, or at least the Western world, that I was using as a stand in for me and the process of repentance I went through after being run out of Gaberville. I had this feeling I’d hit a well of world pain, and the Hitler poem just flowed effortlessly out of that. I thought at the time that was the epitome of inspiration, but I had no idea just how inspired one can be in the writing of a poem. This was before I heard the muse. The poem is about the denial of pain and deals with Holocaust denial as a result of the denial of the pain of the people who did the evil, represented in the poem as Hitler. It shows the process whereby Hitler (or me) comes to recognize that the pain he feels is the same he caused, and in that recognition, he redeems himself.

The Reincarnation of Adolf Hitler

The look of cruelty moves
from off my face
as Hitler repeats itself.
Born again of the Human Race
of which I was before,
I show you now my secret self,
the one you know as Thor.

I am quite really a made-up man,
with a hammer, and a hatchet,
and the whole damn clan,
or was, was I, way back when?
Here it is I reveal
the secret which
will make me real.

I suffer.

The pain I feel I confess
is the same within your breast.
Now sitting in the dead center
of the very cyclone
of pain itself,
I’m not mad anymore,
at anyone,
not even me.

The quiet lightening looks of blame
move from off my face
as darkness redeems itself
and lights up the whole damn sky.

B Actor and I had been having an ongoing argument about anger. It was my adamant view, expressed in the poem, that it fits into the formula of being the way we shield ourselves from pain, every single instance of anger. While he agreed we used anger to protect ourselves from pain, he was equally adamant there was a such thing as righteous anger, such as what God feels towards the wicked. As this was before I encountered the thought of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, I didn’t have a very good sense of just how mind-boggling, multi-leveled, how infinitely varied within each level, nature is, and therefore how impossible it is to pin down to any given formula, the vast complexities of God nature especially.

There are, of course, other causes of anger and instances where it’s the right thing to feel, such as when we’re being blocked from doing something we genuinely need to do, and we use the force of anger to remove the obstacle, but it’s not my aim here to list the possibilities of anger. What is, however, is to hon in on B Actor’s example of righteous anger, that it’s what God feels towards sinners, or, more specifically, the Jewish God feels, and it’s quite the can of worms and cuts into the quick of the nature of the divine house represented by Judaism, at least in Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation, and not only Judaism, but Christianity and Islam as well.

First I should say that Sri Aurobindo differentiates divine anger from human anger, calling the former the rudra energy, or wrath, and says it’s something a human feels extremely rarely, despite how often people claim to be expressing what they call righteous anger, because it’s of a very different nature than human anger, which carries a person away and has them say and do things they’ll regret later. For the divine it’s a force they use that does not use them. So when he says the divine aspect or ideal of the Jewish God is wrath, it’s not human anger he’s talking about but divine, although he explains Jehovah, or whatever name is used, is not the highest form of the divine or of that attribute but the lowest, in divine terms, and closest to us, since it’s that lowest tier of Overmind we’ve contacted and what’s made our world’s religions, what’s constituted civilization, thus far.

Put in illustrative terms, the Jewish God (the God of every religion on earth) has his abode on the lowest plain of Overmind, where the attributes, or ideals, of God are the most separated one from another and the most primitive in expression, meaning the least integrated into oneness among the tiers of Overmind. That it’s also the tier we first made contact with, naturally because it’s the lowest one and easiest to contact, and it’s the one from which comes the world religions, even the ones not housing the divine attribute wrath, or even any personality God, as its world expanding ideal, means we are in for staggering change in our interpretations of God when we begin contacting the higher plains of Overmind, which, well uh, you see happening here in this book, peace be upon you.

The change that concerned me at the time, and when I wrote the Hitler poem, was in how we deal with wrongdoing and those who do wrong, because I’d done wrong, and even when I identified with the worst man in the world, or who was shown to me as that growing up, I could see that something more was going on than an evildoer is just bad and everyone else good, and the only thing to do with us was get rid of us, either by running us out of town, locking us away, or outright killing us, with as much hatred and anger as righteous people could sum up. It seemed to me that all the anger and hatred in the world heaped on someone who did wrong didn’t do any good, did the very opposite, didn’t stop wrong in the world but made it worse. That means all the Hitler bashing wasn’t stopping strong men from arising and having their people do horrible things to other peoples. It was time, I felt, we looked at people like Hitler, and people like myself, differently.

Sitting there with them at that fountain, I had a real sense of what I’m writing here now, and that’s why I was posting my poems in the powerful places I was, to help bring about this monumental healing change in the fundamental way we deal with human evil and wrongdoing, for myself of course, but also for the world, for you too. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the change we need to undergo goes all the way to God, how we see God and in what terms.

I didn’t feel I was hurting people by reading the poem, although I knew I was offending some. B Actor and the others seemed so illegitimate to me for using the word hurt instead of offend, which was for emotional effect, and when they said it, they lowered their voices and painted their eyes with being hurt, for effect. I felt the same way about substituting the word Christ for mashiach, that it was illegitimate. This wasn’t a shul but an art studio, but I didn’t substitute words because I was just stubborn. I didn’t because I just forgot to, caught up in the rush and thrill of reading my poems. I wasn’t remorseful though, since it changed the meaning of the line: Christ meant the Christ in everyone, but the Mashiach meant the Messiah only for Jews. Besides, it didn’t alliterate.

Surprised at their lack of understanding at what the poem meant, which I thought was as clear as day, and surprised that they were acting like the very people they were afraid of, the ones that got David’s shul keys taken away, I came at them from the perspective of oneness and healing, and argued that, even if it ‘hurt’ a concentration camp survivor to hear the poem, it wouldn’t be harmful to them but healing, since they would never be healed completely until they let go of their anger and hatred at Hitler and his henchmen and recognized they were those people too, shared identity with them, because oneness was our underlying reality, and when they recognized that, they would be in a better position to understand why they were hurt by them, which was because those people were in denial of their pain, and so projected it, not because they’re the inhuman monsters they’re being made out to be, but because they are so human, and we as individuals and as a race are not yet the ticket.

Of course what I said sounds so much better said here. I couldn’t articulate the ideas that well at the time, but I wasn’t talking about forgiveness as we consider it, which is what we simply pronounce we give that to someone because it’s what we think or have been taught we should do, not something we give because we understand why they hurt us, which inevitably has more to do with their being in the role of the one being hurt, in a past pronouncement, at a time they were most vulnerable, than with us, which means it really isn’t personal. When we understand that we do what forgiveness means at heart and in our hearts; we let the hurt go.

But not every evildoer hurts others because they were hurt, since nature doesn’t rigidly follow any single formula in her works, what I didn’t understand yet in my argument with B Actor and the others. And that would mean there are people walking around who just like to do evil and inflict pain and have had nothing evil directly done to them their entire lives, or nothing that would even remotely resemble the harm they’re inflicting. I’d imagine they’d be a rare exception to the rule, and what can you do but chalk it up to the genes?

I think we can do better than that, although genes probably are a factor, as are other factors in the equation of human evil, namely two: the work of the will of the Hostile Powers upon that person, who are the origin of evil to begin with (stomp, stomp, stomp), and, because of our underlying oneness and shared field of consciousness, the work of the will of humanity upon them, which thinks and wills the worst ills upon its fellows at any given moment, the will of ‘good’ people with their righteous anger included as the bad will acting on the bad person, the actor, the manifester, what such a person would be picking up on to pick up a gun and go try and kill everybody, or a bomb to blow everyone up, or a knife or a penis to cut people with or whatever. When we understand those hidden forces prompting the will of the wrongdoer, we are well on the road to healing human evil, but until we do, even if we understand the cycle of pain, or of abuse as it’s called, we haven’t even left our street.

Why it seemed the melody plunged there:
Nurchia never showed up.
You’re not grating this right.
Room with locking. [heard in a loud, official female voice]
He has little boy with him.
He nurtures that little boy.

This is special circumstances.
No problems here.
It only seems so.
A good couch,
it makes you feel warm and fuzzy.
It’s got keys on it.
It’s refreshing.
They did it together;
they brought the world down
to it means something more
than a parent-child relationship.
This was were the world breathe.
This had moon in it.
It carried you toward the Sun.
It was Excalibur.

They just lay there
so softly intertwined,
a love that grows both knows.
He kept that kid all night.
They slept together.
Wonderful how much room.
They keep the years together.
It’s happenin’.

They know how to deal with each other
in all our moods.
This is closeness knows boundaries.
They get along together.
I don’t see any reason to keep them apart.
Now, wash your face.
I don’t think you know mountains,
or understand science
in your living room.
You go there,
and I take you your shorts.

How many people say cheese here?
How many people want to molest the child they live with?
Can you count how many do?
Come on now, see science.
Let’s give an example that works.
Let’s show the world how to do it.
Let’s make them know they’re okay
and give them means to get okay if they’re not,
show the way.
You know you can’t control them.
They’re anonymous figures.
Now experience
group panic
because you can’t count these figures.
I’m destination.
I’m where you breathe.

I’ve got the world by the gun.
You can see my horn.
I’m a figure in time that knows what’s best
where intimacy and I meet the world.
You give the world this.
They need to know it can be done.
They need to know it’s possible
when they affection that child right.
Careful,
there’s worms here.
You have to control yourself,
and it’s very hard to do
if you’ve gone down there a few times.
One thousand dollars,
the will it takes
to control yourself.
This tempts you,
puts you in harm’s way.
You need to know how to stop.

The spreading feelings generate
a permissive attitude.
You just what the fuck.
No, you just maintain control
in those spaces
generate permissiveness.
We’ll show you a gun.
There’s jack-in-the-box.
Just shoot the fucker right there.
Don’t let him linger,
grinnin’ at you.
There’s where you’re in trouble.
Don’t entertain thoughts
that have sex with that child.
Don’t get drunk or be high
when you try this at home folks.
Substances weaken will.
Now are we clear on that?
LSD enhances the effects of the abstinence
in the long of its yard,
if you’re there for that.
That’s the yard:
you don’t trip with the kid on your knee.
These are aftereffects.

And I must warn you,
stay away from fantasies that masturbate
when that child’s not there.
You’re makin’ it happen.
I think the teacher stomps their foot
to say this is on the test.

You can manage this.
You love that child.
They are like a warm springtime,
children,
that know no boundaries,
or if they do they can be easily crossed.
Just bask there
in their warm sun,
a protector of their vulnerability,
a champion for them,
what they need.
Oh they trust you so much,
are so eager to learn the world
and think you give it to them
on golden shoes.
They want the best from you.

They can’t seem to see themselves
in the larger world.
They play with mice,
unaware the social stare.
They can’t get hurt so easily.
They can be bruised.
They know the score
in the sexual in the room,
and society doesn’t believe that.
They can feel your need.
They get into it,
and it’s not because they’re bad.
It’s a human need sex,
but you don’t recognize that yet.
We just appropriate it.
I don’t think we just let ‘em at it.
Can you understand my science?

I’m really showin’ you the world.
I’m tough on stuff.
I’m sorry if that offends you.
Your blindness just costs us so much.
Child to child
is where we draw lines.
That’s their explore time,
and they need it,
boys and girls,
or how it mixes most times,
those boys do it together,
and those girls do it together.
It’s such a joy of childhood, you know?

I think we give them space to do it,
away from us.
If you’re inclined to children,
seeing this kills yah.
Can you understand?
They have their rights.
It’s all on the table.
It’s so loud in there.
They do everything,
just clumsy and fun.
They can’t reach inside with the military equipment,
if you know what I mean,
but they do try.
Society blocks this.
Society don’t know what it’s doin’.
This is dangerous to block.
You’ve never seen so many sexual diseases.
This is awful.
I’m countin’ you some.
Do you just hate me for it?
Why?

Am I sleazy?
I might be cleaner than you.
I might be here
to give you a hand,
and I’m really here,
just ask my Rottweiler.
Now that’s a kid I love,
so helpful in things like this.
Who knows a dog’s use?
Who can see their pride?
They’ll help you with children.
They really will,
just by being themselves.
They get in-between everything.
They want the lovin’.
They can back you up,
and they are so sweet doing that.
A child substitute they can be,
a big dog especially,
and genitals never even come up.
You learn how to love.
Wow, what they can teach you about good affection.
I don’t think we know them for that.
They’ll get between you and that kid,
and you just let them,
and you and that kid have a love feast on that dog.
Everybody’s happy.
Giggle laughs come from all sides.
You know the laughter of healing.

I’ve shown you my dog,
and I think we have five.
All on the bed it’s a pile.
And I’ve shown you how to get out of trouble,
shown you how to be human.
Don’t get mad at me.
Employ me.
I’m here for that,
and you know,
this is a one man operation.
No one’s advising me
except the stars
and my own soul.
Can you hear that?
I give ground guidance
peanut butter.
Please take it.

What’s you gonna do,
take me out of the picture,
put me down,
put me behind bars,
kill me even?
I am so vulnerable you know.
Who’s protecting me?
Gauge that.
You think men protect me?
I’ve been here a long time
singin’ on the web,
a boy in my lap.
What’s keepin’ the authorities from me?
It’s a tight squeeze you know.
They can knock on my door at any time.
Live with that,
and hear me calm with that,
doin’ my duty.

What’s keeping them at bay,
or has up until this moment?
Is that your fingers?
Come on,
why aren’t you pressin’ buttons of alarm?
Granted some do,
or at least I would think so.
I’m givin’ you somethin’, aren’t I?
I have a voice from beyond.
I’ve got a love voice.
I’m really putting myself out there.
I’m an educated man.
I show you the world.
I make you question yourself.
I’m not out to punish people,
only make them see their hypocrisy,
and I do that with kid gloves.
You hear my voice.
It’s got ways in it.
I’m sweet aren’t I?
I know what’s up.
I can tell you about it,
and I’m not a laborious bore, am I?
I’m just heavy,
a deep, long read.
Hear I am
lookin’ for it,
the world hears my tale.
Will you be my friend?

9 o’clock,
it’s the Earth Mom,
liftin’ the world out of its mire,
putting people in their right places.
We score that here,
and that’s the tide.
It’s normal.
It’s the position God has for us.
It’s where the stars are.
It’s right here in your pocket.
Let’s see it.

NItish on his way to school, photo by me

Next post:

Chapter 9
The Back of the Bus

Between Jerusalem I’m Sorry, Chapter 7

Astronaut Charlie Duke left his family photo on the moon, 1972. NASA (public domain)

Some Inner Life

We normally don’t remember much of anything of being a child before the age of reason, which is when the ego becomes rock solid so to speak, around 6 or 7 for most kids, or when the front teeth fall out and grow back, because our center of identity isn’t formed enough to organize memories around. While exceptions may abound in the form of memory snapshots, ‘me’ moments where we are ‘I’ enough to take a selfie, a sequence of events would be rare to remember. Yet I have always had that memory, isolated like an island in space, until the island joined its continent when I saw the devil again face to face. It’s the memory of that dragon-thing tricking me to the Void (I was 4), mostly of its shit eating grin as it slammed the storm cellar door on me, but also its trickery to get me there, over the course of time, each time leading me further and further down through the lower worlds, which I’ve since learned are what we call the hells, to that cut off from existence called by many names because it really is there and has been experienced by more than just I.

Driven by a strange will down ever down,
The sky above a communique of Doom,
He strove to shield his spirit from despair,
But felt the horror of the growing Night
And the Abyss rising to claim his soul.
Then ceased the abodes of creatures and their forms
And solitude wrapped him in its voiceless folds.
All vanished suddenly like a thought expunged;
His spirit became an empty listening gulf
Void of the dead illusion of a world:
Nothing was left, not even an evil face.
He was alone with the grey python Night.
A dense and nameless Nothing conscious, mute,
Which seemed alive but without body or mind,
Lusted all beings to annihilate
That it might be for ever nude and sole.
As in a shapeless beast’s intangible jaws,
Gripped, strangled by that lusting viscous blot,
Attracted to some black and giant mouth
And swallowing throat and a huge belly of doom,
His being from its own vision disappeared
Drawn towards depths that hungered for its fall.
A formless void oppressed his struggling brain,
A darkness grim and cold benumbed his flesh,
A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart;
Haled by a serpent-force from its warm home
And dragged to extinction in bleak vacancy
Life clung to its seat with cords of gasping breath;
Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue.
Existence smothered travailed to survive;
Hope strangled perished in his empty soul,
Belief and memory abolished died
And all that helps the spirit in its course.
There crawled through every tense and aching nerve
Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail
A nameless and unutterable fear.
As a sea nears a victim bound and still,
The approach alarmed his mind for ever dumb
Of an implacable eternity
Of pain inhuman and intolerable.
This he must bear, his hope of heaven estranged;
He must ever exist without extinction’s peace
In a slow suffering Time and tortured Space,
An anguished nothingness his endless state.

from Savitri by Sri Aurobindo
(Courtesy of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press)

I don’t know when the inner journeys down to the hells began, but it stands to reason that they began soon after birth in the journey towards orgasm my mom gave me and then, once established, moved more to sleep and dream where there was more playtime available. We really have no idea how open a baby is to changing channels if you get the picture here, having come so recently from someplace else that I can most easily describe as the inner world, and babies are as much in the inner as in the outer and mix the two together. A demon can take advantage of that inner creature that they are. My mom wasn’t the monster; it was. Already inclined to that because of being sexually abused as a very little girl herself, which it had probably engineered as well, as these creatures curse a family for generations, the demon was an invisible but powerful influence on her will, the Hostiles Powers major prompters on human will in general, which we are all but ignorant of.

She didn’t just start sexually abusing me, however. It probably wasn’t an accident I was born with an anus too small, as the Hostile Powers do have some degree of power to cause the body to become ill or have an accident, and so they may also have some power to affect our bodies in the womb, especially the organs of sex and elimination, which are interestingly one and the same, the area of our body that concerns them the most, the erogenous zones. The family doctor, who delivered me, instructed her to open my anus wider using her lubricated finger, and that made me cry, and so to sooth me afterwards she’d rub and kiss me down there, my penis coming erect and, to make a long story short, she sucked it, surprised to find I’d have an orgasm. Soon it was “orgasm change that diaper,” as my muse describes it. When I was an adult, and my mom was describing it to me, a sketchy, non-detailed description, she said it wasn’t sexual but beautiful, and that she had no sexual desire when she did it, denial of course, but these details are unnecessary at this moment. Now I must deal with your disgust.

You probably feel you’re feeling it because you’re such a good person, and such abuse by a mother upon her child is so rare, an abomination of nature, and you, being so normal and moral, just feel like throwing up when hearing about it. There is an Eastern spiritual notion that suggests that revulsion is just the flip side of attraction, and if you really are superior to something, like have no strings attached to it, you are neither attracted nor repulsed but are unmoved when confronted with it, meaning you don’t have a moral reaction, which, when you think about it, is the only attitude to have to deal with something like this properly.

My yoga adheres to this notion, teaches the practice of equanimity, but adds the soul’s say on the matter, or its feelings when confronted with the world’s pain rather, which isn’t a reaction but a conscious response aimed at healing. A non-despondant sorrow the soul feels, for all parties, the abuser, the abused child, and the world that’s been abused. It’s universal, and therefore it heals. You do not know yet that healing involves both the abuser and the abused, or the criminal and their community, as I keep saying, and that in order for one to be healed so must the other be also, or at least the heart-felt attempt made. It’s because we are souls, not bodies, and we are united, not separate as it seems. If you were truly moral and ethical, it’s with this healing sorrow you’d confront this page in our book.

What if I told you that such abuse by a mother isn’t so rare as you might think, not as common as the cold and not always outright fellatio to orgasm, but a mother sexually stimulating their baby nonetheless? If you’re a mother maybe your hand has seen at least the possibility? How many mothers do you think were sexually abused by men when they were little girls? How many of those mothers only bring that up when they have their hand on their baby boy’s penis?

Now what if I told you that, in the scenario with my mother, I’ve basically described our fall from paradise, showed you who the snake was, what the apple was, and who was Eve, or, Pandora opening that box, or, in non-representative terms, I’ve described how we separated from the animal kingdom and became the painfully self-aware creatures that we are, where the human condition came from?

Even today, a mother being her baby’s lover, to the n^th degree my mother was with me, with the combination of the environing romantic focus of her consciousness, her worship of me, the demon’s interfering hand, and the at once expanding, at once dispersing, effects of orgasm upon a baby’s consciousness, you’d get a different kind of kid. Don’t try this at home folks. The kid you’d get a demon would love to play with, a kid who knew the difference between good and evil because evil had him by the balls, literally and figuratively, a kid who’d wind up doing evil despite wanting to do good, a kid, if the divine didn’t intervene, as it did with humanity long ago and as it has with me, that would suffer so and bring suffering to others, and last of all you’d get a kid that’ll bring you to ruin with the way today we reach back in time to punish sexual sin, and not even in death are you safe. Do you know my mom’s good name?

I remember reality getting bleaker and dimmer the further down through the lower worlds the demon and I went, in my travels with it as an infant and toddler, and there being a pressure down deep hard to bear, what gave me the feeling of claustrophobia, but the demon soothed me through those patches, although many times I went back up, ignoring his pleas and coaxes. This journey took years actually, started sometime after birth and ended when I was four. I don’t know if it were his intention all along, to get me into the Void, or if it occurred to him as he slid me down towards it, him taking me down to the hells just part of the process of his game of really having his way with me. The same question comes up with the Nazis and the hell they took several million Jews through. Whatever the case, the Hostile Powers were behind that too.

You’d want to hear about the hells, but I don’t remember much of anything except a general sense of weirdness way past anything the world under the sun gets weird about. During those three years of inner exploration, I retraced some of those steps down and can describe a hell or two, but the map I’d recommend is not mine but Savitri’s, but here I will say they are not just places to punish man in the afterlife, although we might find ourselves in one for however long it takes us to grasp ourselves by the neck up and out of it, but they are worlds or realms unto themselves that the people of hell are born into. Finally he got me all the way down to that storm cellar door, which is how my mind represented the entrance to the Void. I remember all manner of things and pieces of things whirling around there, houses, trees, patches of ground, whatever, like reality was just barely able to sustain itself, not enough to give a ground to anything, just to the things themselves, not stable enough to sit anything still, except that storm cellar door, which sat there stone-like defying all groundlessness around. We were at the edge of existence, and I knew it. To get me down that far he’d really put on a show to make me laugh, and before I knew it, we were there. He opened the storm cellar and told me to jump in, and even though I was only a toddler, I knew the gravity of going down in there. The look of nothing is like nothing you’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t budge, no matter what, and he finally gave up, and, however it happened, I came back to myself awake in the world of daylight, most probably in my bed, as I don’t think in was in one of those episodes of my mom administering to me orgasm.

How long before he got me again to that no-realm of everything whirling around in a groundless chaos I can’t recall, to that storm cellar door, but he got me there the same way, by getting me to laughing with his antics. I sobered up though seeing him open the cellar door. “Look,” he said, “I’ll jump in and jump out to show you how easy it is, and then you do it.” You’ve heard the Superman joke of him jumping out a high rise window and coming back in it so to convince a hapless person, who didn’t know he was Superman, to do the same? It has some basis in fact. Chevy jumped in and jumped right back out. You can fool a toddler so easily. I went to the hole and jumped in without so much as a stand there and hesitate, the same way I’d jump out of airplanes when I’d become a paratrooper, why I’d usually be first in the stick, the line of paratroopers in the plane. I turned around once I was in to climb back out, but blocking my exit was the shit eating, grinning face of that damn demon, who’d gotten what he wanted, and he slammed the storm cellar door down shut. If the look of nothing is like nothing you ever seen, the feel of it is like nothing you ever want to feel, like being an island on freezing fire outside of existence, how I wrote about it as an adult more fully remembering it, years before I encountered Sri Aurobindo’s description in Savitri. His captures it well, and I can do no better except to add the following effect: if you figure the pain of circumcision early in life gives your penis a message of pain so to program it all life long from too much pleasure, can you imagine what the pain of having your existence cut off would program in you at four?

Once the storm cellar door was closed there was no hint of any exit, of anything at all actually, not even space if you do understand what nothing is, or that there would ever be anything, since I had the sense this was for eternity, and a toddler can know there’s a forever when faced with it, and never again would I be anything more than a blot completely and utterly alone and feeling a claustrophobic terror my self could not sustain, and I screamed and I screamed, but in hopelessness no one can hear you scream. An insanity raging panic is the picture I’m painting here. I vividly remember losing my mind but nothing after that moment. We can only take so much, thank God.

What would a demon want with putting a human child into the Void? The question might not even come up because it’s, well, a demon, and they are just monsters, have very little self-control when it comes to being diabolical, and they will take things, and us, as far as they can, and that’s how you catch them, as my muse says, “catch them in the noose of the fury of their acts,” but they also eat. What he wants is life force, the tainted kind that has ill will at its roots, what Robert Monroe calls loosh, whose Journey’s Out of the Body and Far Journeys were big influences upon me, as Castaneda’s books were, only Monroe’s more trustworthy, at least as far as Far Journeys, which was a far as I read him, but again, the main map I’d recommend here is Savitri. Our Earth is their feeding ground, all half-conscious worlds are Savitri points out, and we are basically their cattle, the conspiracy of conspiracies that gives rise to all the many unfounded ones that claim some human group, Jews for example, secretly control the world, but they are not an organized ‘Illuminati’, although they are more intelligent than we are, but are a pell-mell mixture of different kinds and groups of demons competing for feeding space. There is, however, a Satan, not the head of all demons but simply the most powerful. The demon in my life, the family daemon as the Greeks called these things, isn’t Satan but a minion, what the term Rakshasa comes close to describing. What’s eating you?

I’ve always had a memory running parallel to being tricked into the Void, one where fantastic beings that had stars for heads carried me to someplace of beyond the world, a place of perfection and beauty, and they put me before a being seated up high in a building that an ancient Greek temple might give some small hint of, but it wasn’t something built, came up out of the ground itself like it a part of it. I could not see the being it gave off such a bright light, but it gave off no heat, only pure love, and I was bathed in that. The feelings there, they washed the worst hell off you.

Sri Aurobindo’s character in Savitri faces the Void and subdues it with the look of his immortal soul, but I was rescued, and the isolated memory above, always coming hand in hand with the other, is an example of the divine coming and intervening when the monsters have gone too far. I mean, you can only do so much to a kid before God steps in, but, my God, you can do a whole hell of a lot. In any event, this put the divine into my life, and the two have lived side by side all my life, the divine and hostile powers, and even the broadest-minded reader would have trouble with me. I’m sorry.

Castaneda also says that, if you do call up an ally, expect it to communicate with you in some way soon after, which happened with me immediately upon arriving at work right after conjuring the damn thing, or what I couldn’t help but think was a communication so intensely coincided it was with the conjuring. It unfolded over the course of two weeks, but that first day was the most intense and hardest to live through. It had started with Kevin, and it’s so interestingly connected to demons that we need to talk about him, to make an allusion to a movie that has no idea. When I got to work everyone was asking me, “Did you hear about Kevin?”

He was a young co-worker of mine, quite interested in my inner experiences and study of Castaneda. Our unusual conversations were the talk of the 3 to 11 shift. Unbeknownst to me, the night before the conjuring, on his day off, he’d called up the Towers looking for me. He was in search of LSD and made that known to at least one person he talked to. He figured I might have some, but I only smoked grass, scared to death of acid for aforementioned reasons. Soon after getting into my station in the driveway of the east tower, as the doorman, I was called to the office, told about Kevin and questioned about distributing LSD, not by the police but by the personal director, Mike Marchant, a very likable, tolerant guy who had that rare gift of being able to successfully juggle the needs of management with the human condition of the employees, but, as great the guy as was, you knew he’d side with management in a pinch.

Sometime after making those phone calls, Kevin took his wife and baby son hostage, according to the police report, and fired at the patrol car that’d been called, and so the Houston police S.W.A.T. team had been called out. He was arrested without anyone being harmed, and jailed. This news, combined with the growing exclamation point in my consciousness of having just conjured a demon, those goddamn exclamation points, which had flooded me with unremembered things, was more than my reality could cope with, but I held my cool and didn’t run out of that office screaming and waving my hands in the air like I wanted to. No, I told Mike, I didn’t offer to sell Kevin LSD nor anyone else, was not involved in that, and didn’t know why he’d go off, although I had a strong suspicion, that I dared not voice, it somehow had to do with that demon, the time difference notwithstanding. Mike believed me, and that was it, or at least with being questioned about it, but it was far from over.

My apartment block was a welcomed sight that night as I came home from work. The railroad tracks right behind it always gave me a sense of living at some boundary more significant than just where the tracks ran, but I could never put my finger on it, although the entire building shaking every time a train came by made me think on it often. It was almost midnight, as it took more than half an hour to drive home from downtown Houston. I lived on the second floor, and as I walked up the stairs I could see something was wrong with my door. It was slightly ajar, and that jolted me back to fear. I was sure I’d locked it when I went to work. Walking in, I could feel something. Yes, the environment had definitely changed. I telephoned Randy (no cellphones then), my best friend, the only regular visitor to my apartment, actually the only visitor, who I’d given a key to so he could come in while I was at work when he got off work in the evenings, so he could smoke some grass and listen to my strange music, which I had on cassette tapes and played on a tape recorder. My whole apartment was strange, and I cultivated that vibe. Even the plants in it grew weirdly, not in the normal way the plant would grow, stalks turning at odd angles, leaves reaching out in different directions. I had no pets.

His voice shook as he spoke. He told me he wouldn’t be coming to my house for awhile, maybe not for a long while. I asked him what happened, and he told me that he’d come in as usual to smoke some grass and listen to music. He turned the recorder on and got high, seating himself on the sofa. Within a minute or so he said he heard my voice on the tape saying, “Randy, help me I’m trapped, help me.” He said that, although I was pleading with him and using a terrified voice, one he’d never heard me use before, he thought it was a practical joke I was playing on him, so he got up and rewound the tape. My voice wasn’t there the second time. He said as soon as that sunk in, every hair on his body stood on end. Then he heard what seemed like every dog in the neighborhood barking nearby, and so he looked out the window, and the dogs were barking up at it, how dogs sound when they’ve cornered something unnatural, a monster , simply beside themselves with frenzy. They were barking up where he stood. He said he just dropped everything and ran out of the apartment as fast as he could, too scared to even stop and close the door. He said he slept with a Bible for some days after that, and his wife, Denetta, said he woke up a couple of times speaking in another language. That’s what she said. He didn’t come back to my house for a month or more, and he gave me back my key and never came again when I wasn’t there.

The next two weeks were hell, in the sense that I now had something of hell in my living room, meaning literally and in the center of the living space of my thinking. I didn’t go to see some religious ‘expert’, like a priest or something, because I felt no affinity with any divine house, Christian or otherwise, and I highly doubted anyone I spoke to would have actual knowledge of demons and could help me. I would just be told to pray and go to church, stop trying to gain knowledge and just be a good religious person. I was not even tempted to go that route.

Instead, I went to my Greek professor, Dora Posi, and told her all. I didn’t go and see my thesis prof because I felt that he, being an official historian of NASA, and I forget his name, would scoff at the story. I did, however, write my midterm paper on the events in question, and he gave me a B for insight. I dropped his class and idea to do a thesis, not because of the grade, but because my mind had been blown, and I saw science hadn’t yet any real clue of what was going on here on earth with us. He told me when he had to sign my drop form that he had been waiting for me to come and see him. I asked him then why didn’t he say that. It seems his position of authority, the one he held in his head, wouldn’t allow him to take that hat off a moment, be my friend, and invite me in.

My Greek prof was able to do that. Although she was an agnostic, really an atheist if you got right down to it, didn’t believe in ‘spirits’, she had heard the story of Kevin going off and the S.W.A.T. being called out on television news and said she believed that I believed what I was telling her. She said it was odd that the story seemed to have been taken off the air, as she only heard it once and that was it. That’s because some very rich and influential people lived in Four Leaf Towers, including the pastor and friends of the then President George H. W. Bush. Interesting that Interfin, the management company of the Towers, had the power to take a story off the air, just so residents wouldn’t be alarmed, but that’s another story that I can’t tell you because I don’t know the facts of.

Dora advised me to stop thinking about the events for the time being, to stop going over and over them in my mind, to come back to them when I was more stable, and to use Greek to ground myself, as she saw I was dangerously close to becoming mentally unbalanced such was the degree of fear I lived in. She said just bury myself in studying Greek, and bury myself I did (although I continued inner exploration, using Greek, and my job, to keep me focused enough on the outer world not to lose the ability to function in it), becoming proficient in translating Greek, even scoring in the top 10% of the nation on the national Greek proficiency exam by the time my studies came to an end three years or so later. This was an instance advice really helped. She told me her door would always be open to me, for anything, and it always was.

Two weeks after the conjuring, Kevin called me at home. I was surprised to hear he was out of jail, surprised he was even still alive, after he told me, giving his account of his going off, he shot the windshield out of the cop car when it drove up. He was chipper and said he was ready to be taught. I was suspicious, and now I think I must’ve told the story of the conjuring to someone at work, but I actually don’t remember doing that. In any event, he described, on being jailed, how he was lying on a cot next to a dirty tile wall, which was a reflective surface. He looked into it absently, and low and behold silver animal shapes began to appear, and something seemed to want to materialize, but before it could, he went berserk, and they put him in the psych ward. Now he was out and wanted me to be his teacher.

It sounded all too arranged, and so I told him that, if he was going to go off and hold his wife and kid hostage with a shotgun, and shoot at the police, then obviously he needed to see a psychiatrist, not me, and not to call me again, ever. That sounds mean, but, like I said, it sounded like he’d been put up to it. It might be that’s what happened to him in jail, as it does seem the demon had something to do with him going off, but I tend to think in calling me he was being coached by someone, and I especially suspected that three years later when I discovered Interfin had bugged my apartment, but it was a different apartment complex, one in the museum district of Houston, and someone from security lived right next door. I say discovered, but a mind game was played on me at work when I went to sleep and wasn’t supposed to be sleeping, a game that showed me someone had been listening to me in my apartment that day trying to remember out loud the complete “to be or not to be” Shakespeare quote. When I woke up I found the complete quote written on my notepad. Maybe the guy next door was just listening through the wall with a cup or something, and maybe it was a one time thing, but I doubt it. They played other mind games with me over the years, once to show they heard me in my truck too, or maybe it was just a one time thing too to make me think they heard everything, but, whatever the case, they were sneaky, and I wouldn’t put it past them to have had something to do with Kevin calling me. That’s the trouble with surveillance; even when it’s telling the truth it’s a hidden lie.

The man I sat across from at that table in Ascent Institute in Safed was obviously all ears, although he got nothing of the greater measure of the story I’m giving you, but he pretended not to be impressed in the least. It was an act I could see right through. He wanted to hear more, but instead, he feigned to be put off by me, told me to take off the keppah, stop pretending to be a Jew, get rid of any thoughts about converting, and go. That’s the trouble with orthodoxy; it’s more into itself than truth. Moshehiem had told me a saying among the orthodox, told it with such pride in his eyes: “God Himself can tell me to change the law, and I’d obey the law.” I think that says it all.

I’d had a lucid dream sometime not long after the conjuring where I lived in a country house, and Randy came from the city in a station wagon loaded with food and supplies. The driveway bordered a barbed wire fence on the other side of which was a very large field that sloped up a ways off and to the left into a high hill on which were tall pine trees, the kind that had long, bare trunks and short branches that began about two-thirds up the tree, just that small patch of trees near the top, the rest of the hill and field cropped grassland. On the other side of the driveway was the house, a large, one-story, wooden, country house. Randy and I were unloading sacks of groceries from the back of the station wagon, the kind that had a large back door that flung up instead of out. As he was in the house with his current load, I noticed sacks were missing, and with a start I realized they were being stolen right under our noses. I saw a well-worn trail that went to that patch of trees, a hole in the fence where it passed there. As I followed the trail with my eyes from the driveway to the hill, a heavy sleep came over me, and it was all I could do to keep myself awake and look. I knew that Randy would never see what was happening because of that sleep, and with a start I realized no one can, because that sleep prevented us, and I became lucid, realizing the thieving creatures were demons, and they came from that patch of trees. I looked at the house and felt them call me to come to them, as they were in the den, what I just knew looking at the house. Even though I was lucid, I was still scared, because I knew I was dealing with more than just dream characters; I was dealing with demons.

I girded up my loins, meaning I gathered myself in courage, and walked into the house, into the dimly lit den in which, seated on chairs, sofas and such that lined the walls of the room, were a number of small dog-dragons, all making a chanting-like humming sound. One of the creatures got up and rushed towards me, and I could barely stand there without turning tail and running. He stopped in front of me and sort of slithered up my body, breathing heavily against my neck, panting and growling at the same time, as though in both lust and rage. It had a wolf’s teeth, and being lucid in no way eased my fear of what they could do to me, but although shaking with fear, utterly terrified, I was also drawn to it, attracted even, and I marveled at how I could betray myself with such feelings for the thing, and I understood at that moment that’s what demons were made of, those intensities of contraries, lust and rage side by side, and that’s how they hooked us, fascinated with death and sex as we are. I didn’t know if it were going to kiss me or tear my neck to shreds. Then it whispered in my ear, “This, this is what it’s like to meet the Weirdings.” Upon him saying that, they all began to chant “Weirdings,” like dogs panting out the word. Before he kissed me or tore my throat out, before I knew which he’d do, I woke up in my bed in my apartment there next to the railroad tracks.

The dream wasn’t a nightmare, as it would surely be labeled today with our propensity to play the victim card on anything hard and scary life confronts us with. It wasn’t one because it gave me just what I needed to begin to understand what was going on, not only with me, but with us humans here on earth. It all depends on how you look at it, and that determines what you get out of it. I knew I was being introduced to these creatures, as they knew I knew they are here.

They hide from us until we see them, and when they see they can’t hide any longer, then they try and get us to focus on them, try to determine our view of them, or even to win us over to their side if we are so inclined, or they hook us into them by hoodwinking us into thinking they are here to quicken our evolution. In the contrary way the world meets us, because there’s a basis of truth at the bottom of every lie, since nothing can exist without an element of truth, they are here for that but unwittingly, not as beings who want to be here for that, since they are here to do everything they can to keep us from evolving so they can keep eating, want us to remain half-conscious, not become fully so, but I’m putting intention on beings that really have none, as one has told me, “Our aim is no aim.”

Unwillingly they fit into God’s will by testing our metal, are guardians of the threshold for enlightenment, the journey to the soul center, the rise to Supermind, for any spiritual movement that reaches beyond the world, as we see it as animals anyway, which is at face value. So you can see them as monsters to fight, or as creatures that unwittingly test you to see if you’re ready to evolve, and it’s when you see them as the latter that you can just let them go until such time as you have to face them because they are right in front of you blocking your way, and then it’s not them you’re fighting but that part in you that responds to them. Again, it’s all in how you look at it.

I did not have this look then. My yoga gave me this attitude, but it would be years before I’d become a disciple of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Now, I mean then in that apartment in Houston waking up from their introduction, they didn’t interest me because I’d been so burned so early on, and here I’d been burned again. I knew they only wanted to cause me and others harm. But how to put the genie back into the bottle? It seemed to me it was loose in my apartment, but that really wasn’t the case, since it’d always been near me, behind me and under my feet actually. It was my shadow as Jung would say, and I’d read a lot of him and had a Jungian perspective on things, which made it easier to assimilate the knowledge of this demon attached to me. At the time though, it felt like the thing had come out of the woodwork, and I had to put it back in.

Sitting on my sofa one night, afraid it was going to materialize right in front of me, because I was watching these flashes of a small arc of angry, red, auric light jumping around the room, first here, then there, it struck me that, since there was the Darkness, there was also the Light, what I’d learned in a big way in that divine experience but hadn’t yet come to terms with, but here it seemed a very viable option to investigate further, and that was the turning point for me from a path of knowledge to the spiritual path. I just begin to think on and investigate God and the Light.

It didn’t take long before I began meditating and doing pranayama, yogic breathing exercises, opting not for the worship side of things but for the practice. Having been an atheist and come back to divinity, I didn’t return to the old man in the sky the monotheism of the West and Near East believe in. Seeing with your own eyes replaces belief, and you can just get down to business, the business of knowing God. It just took awhile before I put the knowledge I’d gained in that divine experience into head, heart, hands and feet.

Within a few weeks, maybe it was a couple of months, I’d make the journey to the well of soul and to my higher self overhead, what just happened unplanned as a result of an all out, no holds barred, inner exploration, but one now turning to God and not to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Although to reach my soul center I had to confront the Hostile Powers again as guardians of the threshold, in a story I’ve put on our blog Harm’s End, called “A Hidden Resource Guide”, the urgency of dealing with them faded away. It would not be until my arrival in Auroville years later, right after leaving Israel, that I’d see that dog-dragon again face to face, its true form, and, despite our many attempts to give a picture of one, you’ve never seen an alien from outer space from a dimension other than the physical, believe me.

To the well of soul: I was reading Hesiod’s Theogony (an English translation), reading it part of the syllabus of a Greek Mythology class taught by professor Posi that I was taking. I came across a verse that talked about how it took a hammer nine days to reach Tartarus. Something clicked, and I saw ancient knowledge, disguised, as the ancients most often presented it. I realized that the ‘falling place’ I’d been finding myself in had a destination. My visual field is a blank, and I’m in twilight, that place between waking and sleeping that if you just open your eyes you’re awake in bed, and I have a sensation of falling or simply of travel, what direction unknown. I saw it would actually take me somewhere if I can go the distance. I decided to try to get to it, wherever it was. This had no similarity to going down through the hells to the Void, although it’s like you’re falling in a void, since this is a straight travel and going down through the hells is, well going down through hell worlds. I think you get some kind of picture here. Just know there’s a down there and an in here, the latter I’ll explain shortly as the well of soul.

Lucidity was coming almost nightly back then, and so I made an intention, what to do when I awoke within a dream. I’d been doing that a lot, asking questions, that sort of thing. I thought I’d just get back into that chute, what I’d come to call the falling place, and to do that I’d meditate and do pranayama in the dream. The first night I became lucid near the football field of Thompson Intermediate, where I played football as a child. I was on the street next to the field. I began to sit down in a cross-legged position, and as I did a monster came jumping over the cyclone fence from the field, eyes rolling in a spiral, completely mad and berserk. I woke myself up before it could get me.

I don’t remember how many nights went by, maybe a couple, when I became lucid and remembered the intention, and the two don’t always happen together, your dreambody being actually not your surface self, but closely aligned as they are. It was nighttime, and I was in a very large motor pool, and off in the distance the buildings in it were changing colors, and the anomaly triggered lucidity, as anomalies often do. I began to sit down to meditate, and a big mac truck suddenly appeared headed straight for me, horn blaring. I just closed my eyes, unperturbed, and as it got to me it just melted over me, and I began to do deep breathing and entered the chute. I don’t know how long it was I was falling, and it’s not exactly a fall, but what it is I can’t rightly tell, when I got scared that I’d been falling much longer than was safe. In my inner exploration I greatly feared going into a coma and not being able to wake up, and I was claustrophobic, and although the chute isn’t a tight place, it feels like a tunnel, a well you’re falling down into. I panicked and opened my eyes, and I was awake in bed.

I had another go some nights later. I determined to count this time to keep track of how long I fell. I don’t remember the dream from which I entered the chute, but enter it I did, by meditating and doing pranayama. That I do remember. It happened that I lost count it seemed I’d been falling so long, and I got scared again but this time didn’t panic. Then I heard my mother’s voice and my sister Gwen’s, pleading with me, each with that tone of voice that reached me, that tone of voice I knew, knowing them so well, when I knew it was an emergency. They were saying, together, “Donny wake up. You’re in a coma. You’re in the hospital. You’re being tricked. Wake up. Wake up!” What is a body to do? I opened my eyes, immediately realizing I’d been tricked by them, because I wasn’t in the hospital, obviously, but in my bed in my apartment there by the railroad tracks. You see what I mean by calling them, the Hostile Powers, guardians of the threshold. It’s not that they want to be. They’re just trying to keep us in a little coral of limited and cramped experience. So they try and stop us, but if we keep going, if we persist, we get out of that coral. They can’t actually stop us.

The arrival only I remember, not what dream put me in the chute or even the being in the chute, only that I just kept going no matter what. I’m afraid I can’t really describe it very well it’s so different from the material realm. I went through a boundary unlike any I’d ever experienced, and I splashed down into, suddenly entered and was engulfed by, a blue ocean made of space, not outer space, but Spirit space. It took my entire being, not just my body as water does, and it was wonderful, so very light, no heaviness to it at all, so very safe and warm, not in temperature but in feeling. In it were floating things that looked like little arches or quarter notes, the only objects I saw there. All else was formlessness, but saying that seems it was nothing. This something seemed greater than the world. I was just drifting there, and, although I tried not to, I drifted right through one of those arches, and I had the feeling it was a being, but I didn’t harm it by passing through it. There was music there, but not what we know as music. It was the fabric of the atmosphere. Can I say it felt a bit like home, as other as it was? It was certainly very familiar, like I’d been there so many times. I don’t know how it happened, and I was only drifting there for a short time, some minutes maybe, but I found myself awake in bed in that apartment on the 2nd floor. There seems to have been some rush of movement to come back, colors and forms flashing around me, but in any event, it was a short trip back to the world under the sun.

There were no signposts or anything to tell me where I’d been. I only knew I’d been to some place fundamental of Spirit. It didn’t change my life, turn anything around, and it took my many years before I really know where I went and what that accomplished. But it did make possible an ascension in a couple of weeks that I will fill in later on in this story’s spiral. I went down into the well of soul, the inmost place inside myself, not down really, but in. Let me explain. I think we go there sometimes, all of us, and when we were children we went there often. We recharge our batteries there, as we are spirits that have put on deep diving suits so to live down here in the worlds, where our movie’s taking place. You know when you wake up and have had the most refreshing sleep that you have gone into the well of soul and bathed in its energies. We never remember it because it happens in dreamless sleep, where we don’t bring any memories back, but if you make the journey consciously, you take your conscious down there and make a hardwire connection to the soul. It takes years, or has taken me, for that connection to flower into surfacing things of soul, but there’s no mistaking when it does. You know deeper than a man is speaking. And I continue.

Rottweiler attitude
I reach out.
I’m not sayin’ on phones.
I’m just reaching out to you in the darkness:
give me back my keys.
You took them long ago,
and I’m just a lady pawn in your scheme.
I’m not vocabulary.
You are society and I am man.

You seem so much bigger than me.
You break open jars.
I am not a kingdom to myself.
I can’t test limits.
I have to conform to your idea.
That’s the only way I can live.
You’re impossible to live with.
You treat me like a serf.
You don’t know my gold.
You just military me.

How do I get out of this?
You won’t allow me to breathe
if you’re not there to say how much and when.
Can this be right?
What do you use me for?
To set things right?
That’s not allowed.
I think we’re prohibited from speaking
if we give a truth a back name,
show what’s going on underneath things.
You’re scared of that.
You chop people’s heads off.
Now you socially ostracize them
to shut them up.
I’m not talking to power but to you
common citizen,
your power.

Okay Rottweiler,
give us a load of your voice.
We’re listenin’ all ears.
Has this ever been said to a man like me?
That would overturn the applecart,
if society heard him.
Look I know how we was made,
and I can show you.
You don’t want to hear that.
It’s too upside down,
pulls insanity on our teeth,
questions reality,
challenges you in the very notions of yourself,
changes society.

I’m here to do that.
Will you pray with me?
We are a temple of reality.
We can get in there with God,
go ups and downs.
We can arrange our ship
to match reality.
Are you game?

Are you just a notion that plays safe?
Where is your bold and daring move
listing reality at its source?
Can you see there?
Are you happy where you’re at?
Is this freedom?
What can you say to time?
You’re in the bullpen
to pitch a world series?
How do you count yourself,
a figure or not,
where you captain your own ship?
Come and see me.

I pin you to the world
an adventurer’s worth.
I show you reality stares back at you.
I play with fire.
I stand up and sing my name,
an actor in a field that knows that.
Can I show you figures of time,
the parenthesis within a parenthesis within a parenthesis within a parenthesis we are? /
And there’s no end to the parenthesis.
We are some little ship
sailing on time
in its minuscule range.
We barely front reality.

We are all there is
we have been told all our lives.
Break out of that shell.
We are foot soldiers
where reality meets the world.
Have I you tantalized you yet?
I question reality,
everything.
I’m down to music.
I’m a butterfly.
Can we wave at each other,
and you not crush me?

Leave your time spirit at the house.
It’s not fair to human beings.
It needs some nail cutters.
It’ll scratch your eyes out
crossin’ the street,
puttin’ somethin’ different on your life.
You are not a well of soul
time spirit.
Let’s get away from you.
Let’s meet each other in peace.
Let’s be brothers and sisters.
Let’s give individuals a chance to be themselves
and like them for it.

I’ll keep rubbin’ music
until you hear me.
I’m a plan,
and I’m situated right here:
where you meet reality,
and I’m not goin’ anywhere
in a larger reality.
I’ll keep personifying time,
show you the Supreme,
give you your own set of keys.
I know how theys made,
between a rock and a hard place.

Okay we’ve spoken this out:
my need for a refuge from you,
my need to change you,
my need to let’s be friends.
Come on,
hear time,
hear the storybook,
hear what I have to show you.
It’s a whole other look,
and I’ll give it to you for free.
Wow, that’s a load off my mind.

Now please, the door to time,
can we see beyond its integer?
It’s a position in on itself.
It sped along.
The universe gave it lore.
You’re sideways.
You can even see the chapters of the book.
I admonish you to read them.
That’s five minutes help me;
I’m gonna get to the bottom of things.
I’m gonna see how we tick.
I’m gonna see the nature of the universe.
Can I come to your house,
mule?
There’s the dog.
Hi honey.

You have some room I finish?
If it’s in her house,
got stuff
on her daughter’s liberal.
The control there,
so it’s biopsy.
You have an extra couple of minutes?
Call the police.
It’s your only number
when faced with what bothers you.

Why daddy did you come to Pondicherry?
Telling my history.
It’s solved.
It’s the light of green.
You think it’s worthless.
You ignore me so completely because of it.
You got it on your sleeve.
You’ve got it under wraps.
I mean to tell yah
this is a lie:
how you hate it.
You guys
took my photo.
I would even say you like to hear me speak.
No one says anything about it.
Keeping silent is their job with me.
They block me.

And you look good.
Look at this:
I’ll just put it on ‘im,
a huge idealism,
and then I tip you over
for bad stuff.
Referring to an incident,
all these unlovely moods.
I could get over the counter detail.
Judge me.
Hit me.
I’m in your pants.

Is that a school?
It’s a wide open space
I think you gather the world.
Hear somethin’
that doesn’t introduce kids in the wrong way.
I will show you their time with us.
Send a piano.

Zip it,
my fondness for them
in that big snake in my pants.
I wouldn’t throw it away.
I’ve integrated care.
As I said,
harmonize the demon.
He’s there,
but you don’t feed ‘im
the harm that child.
He’s stays aloof with you,
and the child stays safe.

I’ve integrated childcare
with your attraction for them.
You’ll tell me I’m wrong,
but why else are you so scared of their disease:
the feelins’ they house in the body with genitals?
You run from that.
You think it’s ugly.
You even punish them for it,
a touch touch with themselves and other children.
What is that?

Society you’re mean.
You’re scared of that.
I can scapegoat all day,
but I will never see the problem.
I love my children dearly.
I just pour over them
one ounce of sweetheart.
I’m a for use platform.
I can’t get over it.

I think that was the parent that doesn’t cross lines.
Many, many, do,
and you don’t want to see that.
Where have we come right here?
To the stranger in the room.
Look I’m being honest with you.
I’ve got my pants off
right here in public.
Oh my God society and its genitals,
you would think they’re monstrous baby guns.
They are so loud, you know?
All hands on deck.
We’ve gotten to the bottom of gun,
just right there.
I’m existential tired.
We’ll fill this in another day.

Made a lot of references to soul.
That’s what we stand by.
We can’t stop playing.
That’s the soul puts on time.
Your morality is made from it.
It’s your true sense of right and wrong.
It’s where you’re at.
I’ve found my soul.
I see people
that doesn’t form itself.
They’re ignorant of soul,
and they can’t take it out and study it
how you see life,
how you see that God is not
under the dominion of soul.

The soul challenge:
that’s not wearin’ to Western socks
or your notions of life.
The course of history
has evolved a world soul.
We bring it up in dream.
It shows us our time marks,
where we are good,
where we are bad.
You investigate it,
and put morality in its place:
soul finds it.
Can you come see that?

Do you see it?
We find our soul.
It’s there
all over the world.
That’s Seattle
to know there is a soul.
That’s somethin’ you gotta do:
understand soul in terms of you.
You have the guiding lamp of your life,
and you stay true to it,
and you manage to become
great the players play all night.
You are no longer a hazard to people.
You’ve heard science in its more mature shoes,
and you’re ready to evolve,
and you’ve cleared history,
really got that outcast thing
where people take you in again,
and you become the soul in time.
That’s the story.

Next post:

Chapter 8
A Small Open

Between Jerusalem I’m Sorry, Chapter 6

La distruzione del Tempio di Gerusalemme by Francesco Hayez 1867, public domain

Legends of School

“Donny, come here, come, come.” It was my classmate, and he was eagerly motioning me to follow him. This was very odd because he was Black and I was White, and this was third grade in East Texas in 1970, and, although Leon County School was officially desegregated, that didn’t mean the different races mixed socially, not by any means. It was like there were two different worlds sharing the world, only no one shared anything with the other race unless they had to. I tried to ignore him, but he was persistent, standing there under the awning near our classroom putting all his will into his hand pulling me towards him.

I regretted again that day, some two weeks before, when, bored to have no boys my age to play with because we lived so far from town, I finally gave in to my sinful desire to go and play with the Black boys who lived on the same dirt road as I, sinful because I knew my daddy would not like me to do that and might whip me for it. We lived on Old Durant Road four miles from the town of Jewett, a road littered with the houses and trailer houses of both poor Whites and Blacks. We were different my daddy often said. We were Dukes and White, and they were just a bunch of niggers. I believed him, never challenged his racism, but I always wanted to point out we lived on the same road as they and were poor too, but I never did. We lived in the woods almost a football field from the road, woods I roamed in, where I became a thinker, because I spent most of my playtime alone in those woods. My two step-sisters told on me too much to play with. That scrubby secondary forest, punctuated with tall old trees, was where I put my thinking cap on, as a habit I mean, kippah-like, although I already thought a lot, and so the solitude helped me to grow, was something I actually enjoyed sometimes, but it did get boring, like on that day.

Anyway, I knew the boys lived a mile or so further down the road, and so I rode Dolly, my Welch pony, to see them. I rode her bareback and with reins of rope, Indian style we called it then, as we couldn’t afford proper horse tack. Boy were they surprised. They lived in a cluster of houses on both sides of the road, and all the boys came out to play. They were a lot rougher than I was used to, and poor Dolly got the brunt of it, but it was wonderful. I spent almost the whole day there and regretted it after because I thought I’d done wrong. I never went back and, although the boys, like this one now, held my one-day friendship still in their eyes, I didn’t talk to them at school other than what you have to say when you live side by side, and I didn’t want the White boys to know I’d made friends with them. My daddy never found out, but it’s doubtful he’d have whipped me. Kids have this way of taking the prejudices of their adults as something they wear at all times and in all circumstances, and that if they don’t do the same, they’re in big trouble.

An image of that day has stood out in my mind and heart ever since, my heart also because I feel the sadness of it in my bones, and I’ve wanted so many times to tell that little White boy I was back them to just eat and enjoy it. The mothers made a feast for us, happy to have me there, and they went all out, cooking fried chicken with all the trimmings, mashed potatoes and gravy and greens with bacon bits and other tasty things. It’s pained me so many times to realize they must’ve sacrificed for that meal, and I just refused to eat it, but I wasn’t trying to be mean. It was so clear to me that here was line I mustn’t cross, to be loyal to my daddy I said in my mind, and looking at that nice meal I had to repeat that a few times. I’d play with them boys but not eat their food. You’d think the women would be put off, but they knew what was up. They sat me down—I think there were three of them —and, smiling with the patience of the ages, waved a drumstick under my nose until I couldn’t resist it, knowing as they did the hands of little boys when it came to being offered what they liked, and I grabbed that leg and ate it, but that was all I’d eat I thought to myself, the chicken, but I wanted to plow into the rest like who would’ve thought it. I didn’t though.

Returning to that little Black boy motioning me at school, I followed him to where he was leading me, a place near the end of the row of classrooms where we wouldn’t be easily seen by anybody. He stopped and put a crayon to his arm, a black one, and said, “Look, I’m not black.” And then he put a white one to mine and said, “And you ain’t White.” I stood there and agreed with him, never having looked at it like that before. He was being painfully earnest, like he was showing me something extremely important, a discovery of his that would change, if not everything, then at least things between us. For just a moment I felt his pain at being Black in a White only world, as much of all that a nine-year-old can grasp, but then I quickly walked off back to the playground, eager to get away from his pain and the dawning sense, which I wanted to nip in the bud, that I was a cause of it. I felt really uncomfortable as I was walking away, as these weren’t feelings that fit into my kid-self (more grown up they were ), and like a kid I just wanted to lose myself in play, which meant in those third grade recesses get back to bulldogging it on the merry-go-round (grab its sidebars with both hands when it was at full speed and let it fly you through the air), and I was king of the bulldogs.

I was Donny Duke, a recent addition to that ‘been together since kindergarten’ ascending class of that one classroom per grade country school, and I was from Houston, the big city, and I was girl-crazy, girls in the class as crazy about me (Carla even dug up her dead cat to give me the skull, a prize for boy like me, a woods roamer), and walking to and fro under those tin awnings, my class going somewhere in single file, snaking this way and that, high school girls would come and run their fingers through my hair and fuss over me and say how cute I was and didn’t do that for any of the other boys. You would not believe what took that normalcy from me, religion believe it or not, but the spiral will fill that out later.

There was another reason I was making a hasty retreat from that boy’s pain, one deeper than a narrative of a lifetime can go without sounding like it’s gone off the deep end so far have we gone from the narrative of soul, a secret, awful reason steeped in my own unremembered murder at the hands of the KKK when my soul had donned the body of an African American man of the South in a former life, which was somewhere around the turn of the 19^th century. It was a haunting really, and the memory hunted me in dream as a little kid, although in this moment it was a stirring awake enough to run from, dreams where I’d either be or be watching a Black boy growing up, and that day with the Black boys on Old Durant Road, playing among their smiling mommas and dilapidated old houses, was a sort of an unrecognized homecoming, why it felt so good but why also I really never went back: it really hit a nerve.

Getting back to the setting of this story, Safed, Israel, it’s occasion for being told, I don’t remember when I put on the kippah, before or after my night at Mosheheim’s, or if I had the dream of putting one on before, but I know I had it on after, when I attended a couple of classes at the Ascent Institute of Safed, where the crowd at Avraham’s was taking night classes. I wore a white kippah, which was for ceremonial purposes, not for everyday use, why probably I got pegged as a non-Jew so easily. I was and am a person that listens to synchronicities, and I found that kippah on the ground a day or so after the lucid dream about putting on a kippah, where I found it I don’t remember, but most likely in the cemetery where I was sleeping. Of course I put that one on. My whole time in Israel it was the only kippah I found. It appears the universe that put it on me didn’t want me to convert to Judaism, since it didn’t aid at all in that process, made sure I’d look like a Jew wannabe Jesus look alike and nothing more.

I went to Ascent in the late afternoon and asked if I could takes classes there, explaining I was a non-Jew but was thinking about conversion, and that I wanted to study Kabbalah. I was sent to talk to the director, or whatever he was called, who gave me permission. He told me, and it was literally the talk of town, that it was the time of the Revelation, not in the Christian sense of that word, but in the Jewish sense, when the Kabbalah would be disseminated throughout Judaism. Tradition has it that only when you turn 50 can you turn to it, after having learned the whole of the Law and having put it in practice for a lifetime more or less, so you won’t get sidetracked or go off the deep end obviously. In any event, their disseminating it to all Jews who wanted to learn it, regardless of age, was a breach of tradition, but they thought it was justified because they believed it was the time just before the end times and the time of Revelation. I left there with a small pamphlet I’d picked out to read among several, because the title caught my eye, which was something like The New World Order and the Coming of the Mashiach.

It spoke of the Mashiach as a political leader, not a miracle worker, and stressed that. He’d be the leader of the nations, and Jerusalem would be the capital of the world. That was basically the gist of it. I don’t remember much else of the pamphlet other than my thoughts while reading it, which that it seemed to me the writers of the pamphlet were trying to upstage the use of that phrase, new world order, by the former U.S. president George H. W. Bush. I didn’t know at the time it was or would become, with the advent of the Internet, a phrase linked to the conspiracy theory that claims Jews secretly rule the world and so forth. I didn’t buy into that theory then and don’t now (my awareness of the unlimited power Israel has to oppress the Palestinians and to influence especially the American government in its favor notwithstanding). I do, however, see that some sects or groups of religious Jews believe Jews should be the leaders of humanity and have prophecies that play that out, such as the pamphlet I read was doing. While it isn’t a whole lot different from the Christians or Muslims who desire the same, or, from a national perspective, the Chinese or Russians, and I can keep adding groups all day long, as it’s probably a desire among some in every human group on the planet, I think it’s quite prevalent among orthodox Jews in Israel.

I had an encounter with a young orthodox man on the streets of Jerusalem, the new part, not far from the central bus station, a month or so after leaving Safed, who gave me a very revealing picture of what it looks like to Jews (who believe it) to have the Jewish people as the leader of the humanity. He came walking up from the opposite direction and was putting leather bands on people’s arms, on anyone’s arm who let him, and it was a kind of complicated procedure with the knot he had to tie. He wasn’t wearing the Hasidic getup but was wearing the black clothes of the orthodox, with the 40’s style man’s hat. He appeared to be in his mid-20’s, and he looked determined. He was tall and rather slender, and when he bent over it was as though paper was being folded in half, was not a fluid flow. He had a handsome face but one not open and smiling. Watching him put the band on a man’s arm in front of me, I asked him what he was doing. He explained, telling me it was called tefillin, and that on it, or folded in it rather, was a verse from the Torah. It seems to me he gave me a rough translation of it, and I knew it from my Bible days (I’ve since learned there are four verses). I asked him to put one on me too. I no longer wore a kippah, was wearing my colorful hippie clothes. He looked me up and down a moment and asked if I were Jewish. I said no. He said no band then.

Therein ensued a conversation wherein he gave me that revealing picture. He likened humanity to a body and said that Jews were the head of the body. I asked then what people were the anus. He didn’t see my point. I went on the say that his idea was religious racism, although bigotry is the word normally used to describe his religion’s superior attitude. We’d need to see it as racism to change it, give it the charge it needs to see it. I explained that, inherent in that view, was Jewish superiority over everyone else. He denied that it was racism of any kind, laughed at the idea. He said humanity had to have a head, and Jews were it. What would humanity be without a head? I couldn’t make him see that the image was only that, an image for illustration, and that you couldn’t make it fit reality. Who would be the arms then, the hands, the feet and so forth, returning to the anus so he might see now what I meant. He didn’t, and he didn’t put a band on my arm. What struck me though, was how sure he was, dead certain. I realized I was talking to a brick wall, one that had been built by bricks of indoctrination that had been put carefully in place over the entire course of his young life, from birth onwards. It’s the idea of the chosen people pictured how it would look in practice: the head would look down on the rest of the body and order it around.

While I was with Lars camping on the Mount of Olives with our small Jerusalem Peace Group, some days after finishing the hunger strike, we heard a story about a Catholic priest that had been publicly asking the question: what’s the difference between the chosen people and the master race? The story goes that he got quickly transferred out of the country. Maybe that’s a folk story that’s been floating around Jerusalem for years, or maybe it’s a true story, but it’s a good question nonetheless and one that needs asking. Of course the ideas of the chosen people and master race are not the same ideas either in theory or in practice. There are big differences between the Jewish belief and the Nazi one, but the thing to ask is if there are similarities, and, if you’re honest in your assessment, whoever you are, you’d have to admit there are. It’s the same with the comparison of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians with the Apartheid of South Africa. It’s not the same thing, but you can draw a comparison between them, and that’s what needs to be admitted.

The world cannot, neither the Palestinians being oppressed nor the people wanting it to stop, expect either the Jews who are doing the oppressing or the ones unequivocally supporting Israel despite it to admit to that Apartheid-like oppression unless humanity admits that the Jewish people not only has a right to exist (as my muse has said in poetry) but also that we need them and always have, at least in this latest stage of being human, because they have something to do with who we are, with our becoming the modern ego us, but that’s a story filled out on the spiral later on.

But that pamphlet about the new world order and the questions it brought up were not the main things on my mind. At that moment in Safed, I wanted to attend Ascent to explore the possibility of becoming a Jew myself and to see what the Kabbalah was about. Constantly being discriminated against because I wasn’t Jewish just baffled me, as it was wholly unexpected and didn’t fit into my picture of how I thought Jews treated non-Jews, ones who weren’t trying to kill them or wanted them dead at any rate. Somehow I expected the best from them, which I know now you can’t expect from anyone, myself included.

The first class I attended, one late afternoon, was an introductory one in the main lobby, where there was a long table at the head of which sat the teacher, a man in orthodox clothes. On the sides near him we students sat, only two women and I, both of them married and wearing the hair net married women wore. We watched a short film on a television monitor about Hasidic Judaism, one full of enthusiasm like it was just the coolest thing, and then he talked about what it meant to be Hasidic, which was, as he explained it, to be on fire for God, and where, for example, you were by the Law required to put your cut fingernails and toenails into the trash, the Hasidic would burn them so to go that one step further in obeying God’s laws, and they would do that with everything. It gave me no desire to convert let me tell you, and I began to suspect that the teaching and study of the Kabbalah had been taken over by the orthodoxy, and I couldn’t see how the two could mix without the latter becoming so watered down it became only an outer observance and inner moral attitude and not the unbound and unpredictable opening of the inner consciousness whereby mystical experiences steeped you in knowledge of God. I didn’t know at the time that the Hasidic movement had been centered on Kabbalistic teaching since it began, or, to put it differently, that the orthodoxy had taken it over long before. It’s that way with any mystical tradition really; it’s too dangerous to the doctrines and practices of any religion to not be controlled by the orthodoxy of that religion, or banned altogether as it is in many cases. Mystical experience, which means both metaphysical and spiritual experience, has this habit of taking off habits and changing a religion.

The second class was my last. It was in the evening, and several Americans from Avraham’s were there, including he, people I knew and talked to on a daily basis, at least for the past two weeks or so, people I considered my friends, as much as you can in that amount of time, which, when you’re traveling, when time is or seems more compressed, is quite some time. It was a regular-type classroom, with student desks, the teacher’s, and a blackboard. The teacher looked like a regular collage professor, wasn’t dressed in the black of the orthodox or in the heavy getup of the ultra. I remember he was writing on the board the Hebrew word for charity and explaining that, according to the Law, whatever fell onto the ground in a farmer’s field could be gathered by the poorer Jews and was to be left for them, but they couldn’t take anything off the crop themselves, as that would be stealing. I think I must’ve asked a question, but I don’t actually remember why he suddenly centered his attention on me.

“Are you Jewish?!” It was a typical ‘who, me?’ moment as I tried to evade his pointed stare.

I just looked at him a moment, feeling like a Jew in Nazi occupied Europe being spotted in a crowd or whatnot. I’ve probably just offended a million people, because the consequences were so lopsided. Here I’d only be thrown out of class, while there I’d be sent to a concentration camp and probably killed, but I’m showing you the spirit of the thing, hatred, and you don’t know how interconnected we really are, or I doubt you do, connected in our very deeps, how we are not divided in groups or even as ego individuals as it appears on the surface, and how it’s these small ‘you are not in my group get out’ that add up to the big ones where you are killed for being in the wrong group. After some hesitation, I finally said, “I, I uh, no, but I got permission to take this class from the director, and I’m thinking about converting.…” I’ve always said too much in a pinch.

“I don’t believe this.” The transformation that he then quickly underwent was something to behold. “This is impossible. I can’t teach this class with you in it. Leave!”

“I’ll just sit here and not ask any questions.” I looked around at my friends for some support, but, like as happened before but with different Jews, they looked away or looked down, looked anywhere but at what was happening, although I think I caught a whiff in the room of a couple being happy about it, the ones who had wanted to tell me that same thing but couldn’t do it because of social constraints.

“You have no idea. Your very presence will disrupt the class. You don’t have the background, don’t know anything about the Jewish tradition, what these people have been learning their whole lives. You, you know nothing of it!” He was silent a second and declared, “I will not teach this class until you leave! Is that understood? He said the last part to the class, and now what was happening was being looked at, but not from my side. I decided to go, but what really got me was his hatred, and I didn’t’ t want to just leave without addressing it. He wasn’t just annoyed I was there. He was seething with anger, shaking with it. I really wanted to ask him why he hated me, and did he hate all non-Jews, or, for that matter, what had all that tradition taught him if, at the drop of a hat, he would just lose it and throw a fit, but I said nothing and just left, the room’s silence a thunder helping to throw me out.

I’d imagine the reader would be split 50/50 on this. Don’t people have the right to the privacy of their group? There’s a humanity involved. Maybe in matters of security privacy is needed if the secrets being told save lives, and even then a humanity witness would not be out of line if they know to keep the secrets that really do save lives, and they are there for humanity and not just the group telling the secrets, but things like a humanity witness in human groups won’t appear until we are quite a bit more mature as a humanity. I’m not talking about surveillance devices, electronic spying, but of living breathing human beings, and not ones necessarily appointed for that purpose but people, like myself in this instance, an outsider, that, as part of the mind-boggling all things connected movement of world process, just showed up. When you let them in it’s a process of soul. It could be too that a group needs their privacy if they’re teaching or telling things too deep, things that could harm the uninitiated, but that wasn’t the case here. The case here was the racist and exclusive attitude, which had superiority as its basis, that the uninitiated would harm the group just by being there.

I went to the office the next day to complain. I talked to a different man than the director, or the person I thought was that I spoke to the first time. This one was impudent but not so much so you couldn’t talk to him. He wore orthodox clothes, not Hasidic, and I think they didn’t dress as the Hasidic Jews they were because they didn’t want to scare prospective converts off. The whole place was a front to convert Jews to Hasidism more than anything else. He told me that the teacher was in his right not to teach the class with me in it, and, to sum it up, that I was no longer allowed to take classes there. I tried to talk about the hatred and anger, but to no avail. Finally, I did what I always did when being devalued. I bragged. God save me.

This meeting with him has played over and over in my mind since then, since it was here I began to realize I was only bragging when talking about my spiritual and metaphysical experiences (but realizing is not the same as stopping), my over the top outer ones too for that matter, like being a Green Beret on a tactical nuclear mission for example, not bragging every time, but most times, and that, usually, the person or people I was bragging to would not appreciate my experiences and were not ready to even hear them, as was the case here at Ascent. What is the case here? You not ready?

We were sitting at a small table in the large lobby near the entrance, in front of one of the windows, he with his back to it and me looking out it from time to time. I’d never just listed my experiences like I did with him, but the topic of our conversation had gotten to the Kabbalah, and I was expressing my thoughts on what I thought their thought was in regards to it, which wasn’t to either teach or encourage mystical experience other than surface phenomenon such as slight ecstasies, the seeing of visions, auras, the future, and the curing of sickness, and other things that had to do more with magic than spirituality. I figured, however, that he’d be interested in deeper things, and I figured correctly, only he wasn’t about to show that. As I went through my list I could see him try to hide his peaked curiosity and interest, which is how a little boy looks driving a motorbike on the roadways here in India, so serious and matter of fact, so to look like he’s not driving illegally most likely without his parents’ permission, when you know in reality he’s jumping up and down inside with excitement.

I don’t remember either the order or the exact manner I listed the experiences, not anywhere near as neat as I do here for you, but this is the basic gist of the list. I asked him did he want to hear about driving my truck and going several meters over my head and being for a moment who I am beyond all the lives I’ve had, my Godself, or did he want to hear about driving that same truck a year later and not only my thoughts stopping but my breathing and heartbeat, and down the road I drove still, in a sort of suspended animation, or about the time I found myself inside my grandfather’s body as he died of a heart attack two weeks before he did in the way and in the place I experienced it beforehand, or about the inner journey I took to someplace deep inside me, which was all the way through dream to what was beyond it, an ocean or realm of Spirit, or about the time in university I conjured a demon? I didn’t include the divine experience because I was on acid, and so I didn’t think he’d think it was real, and I only included the biggest experiences, the ones I knew that would impress him the most.

He wanted to hear about the demon, and I remember I thought at the time that showed me how mundane he was, unspiritual, since a God lover just wants to hear about God, any and every idea of God, to see how it stacks up to theirs, to see if they might be missing some possible way to get closer to God. I was surprised at his choice, and he knew it. A look passed between us that put the conversation on a different footing, a look where he no longer held the look of holier-than-thou, a footing where he no longer held the higher ground.

He got a very abbreviated version of the story of conjuring the demon, which happened soon after I returned to Houston to study the History of Science, returning there from Seattle, where I’d been washing dishes so to try and forget about thinking deeply, if you remember. The detailed story I put on the web some years back with the title, “Breaking Silence, Careful to Stay an Apparition”, but maybe I was too detailed, or too careful, because only a handful have heard that silence broke. It’s the silence in regards to being molested by the Hostile Powers, whom my muse has described in poetry at the end of the last chapter.

Even though I was no longer an atheist before the conjuring event, I hadn’t become interested in knowing God or in spirituality, wanted only knowledge and returned to college for that, as I mentioned earlier. I as yet had no idea where to put or what to do with what I’d seen in that divine experience. Returning to Houston after that experience, it took some three months to settle down enough to begin classes at the university, and because I had a dual focus, inner exploration and university study, I had to find a full time job that would support me but wouldn’t rob me of any thinking time or shake me up out of myself and my inner focus. That’s why I kept the job as a doorman, valet and concierge I’ve mentioned earlier, at Four Leaf Towers near downtown Houston. They preferred college students and allowed us to study at work, and it was a calm, quiet environment conducive to an inner focus. I should mention that, other than with my mom and high school best friend Randy, I didn’t socialize with anyone (no net then). My life was concentrated on gaining knowledge, not of the material world but of the unseen, to a degree that all else took second place, because I’d seen it exists and knew there was knowledge to gain. And so begin those three exceptional years or so of mystical experience I’ve referred to.

I don’t think you ever write a university thesis on really what exactly interests you the most. Other than having a small brush with a tactical nuclear device in the army and becoming interested in atomic science, I don’t know why I decided to write a Master’s thesis on the origin of atomic theory in Greek science when what interested me more was how we came to be different from other animals in the first place and how we become the ego-organized human beings that we are, ego transcription, mainly because I wanted to know where our sexual preference comes from, but that’s a story for later on. I wanted to show that their atomic theory came more from intuition than empirical observation, perhaps wholly so. I suspected the early Greek scientists were mystics, and that they did as much if not more inner exploration than outer observation. That tactical nuclear weapon mission in SF had made a deep impression on me, and I basically wanted to know why, being so much more civilized than other animals, we were at the same time hell-bent it seemed in destroying the whole human world, and much if not most of the natural world, with nuclear bombs. The Cold War was still going on remember, as this was 1989. Also, I didn’t want to come from the standpoint of religion but of science, what I still held as the most reliable means to investigate reality, if it would but admit the results of inner exploration and modify its method for that. If it would but admit it was wrong. Fat chance.

As it turned out, I didn’t get past the initial idea stage of the thesis, didn’t even complete the undergrad History of Science class I’d enrolled in at the request of the professor who’d oversee my studies, who also taught the class. What happened was this: I’d begun to wonder if, like Socrates from his daemon, some early Greek scientists got ‘help’ from non-material entities in their investigations. The divine experience had opened the door in me to such possibilities. My question concerning them took the form of a more general question concerning us: are such beings involved in human life now? My life was arranged to answer such a question, and so when the writings of Carlos Castaneda gave me the knowledge and a drawing of M.C. Escher suddenly the how-to, I used them.

I remember sitting on my sofa in my small, rundown apartment on Old Galveston Road near Pasadena, Texas, looking at an Escher drawing on my wall, the one where he’s looking at his reflection in a small glass crystal ball, and then looking at my own glass ball of the same size on my coffee table, which I’d rubbed my blood, spit, and semen on in the weeks before in order to ‘program’ it to me, things I just did on the spur of the moment looking at the thing, having heard you have to program crystals. It was a Christmas gift from my mom, made in India, and I do think those things add to the whole thing. Anyway, I snatched it off the table and got it to how he had it in his drawing looking at himself in it sitting there on my sofa looking at myself in it. Putting the two and two together had not occurred to me before, believe it or not.

I didn’t just look, but looked with that knowing Castaneda talks about in The Fire From Within (or maybe it was The Eagle’s Gift?). You have to look into a reflective surface so to call up what he calls an ally, his name for the disembodied beings that help him with his exploration of dream and magic in his books. It’s hard to know what I mean; it’s not believing you’ll see one but knowing you will with a certainty, the same kind of certainty you use in lucid dream to supersede the laws of matter. It certainly helped that I’d just smoked some skunk my sister had given me that’d been grown on Spyrock Mountain.

With that certainty, I was not surprised when clouds began to form in the crystal ball, but I was very excited. After a few seconds they took animal shapes, each with the same silvery, mirror color, a donkey, monkey, and then the shape of my surprise: looking at me with his pure red eyes was Chevy, the dog-dragon, the imaginary playmate from my early childhood. He was standing in the reflection as if behind me and had one furry paw over my shoulder, like he was posing for a family portrait, the fur on his body standing straight up like it’d been electrocuted, which really added to the atmosphere of hysteria let me tell you. That devil wore the same shit eating grin he wore the last time I’d seen him, when he’d shut the storm cellar door down on me after having tricked me into the Void, that cellar door how my four-year-old mind represented the entrance to the Nothing, or nonexistence, or bottom-most hell, or whatever you want to call the sum total of all our fears. We were looking eye to eye the demon and me.

The eyes of a demon are the damndest things, holding awful knowledge you really don’t want to know, knowledge you gain in the Biblical sense of to know, being fucked, but it’s not consensual intercourse; it’s like you’re being raped, ravaged. And it wasn’t just any demon. The hell of the whole thing was that it was the imaginary playmate I knew I had but didn’t remember how it looked exactly, until now, when I saw it wasn’t imaginary but very real, what it wanted me to see. It was looking into those calamitous eyes that I realized, among many things in that terrifying moment, that Castaneda did not have the reader’s best interests at heart, had the worst intentions in fact, and I had been snared in his intricate, tantalizing web of lies lighting every truth. He says two very contrary things to do, several pages apart, if you find yourself looking into the eyes of an ‘ally’: if you keep looking in its eyes you’ll bring it out into your outer reality; if you look away it’ll kill you. What is a Faust to do?

I tore the thing from in front of my face and held it at arm’s length, stood up like a jack-in-the-box, shaking like a leaf, and ran to the window to fling the thing as far as I could from me, then thought better of it, since I realized it was now an object of power, something those books also explained, went back to the sofa and plopped down into it in that state of terror that visits a man when he’s come face to face with something really and truly to be afraid of, something from the jaws of hell, a devil. Fortunately, terror of the unknown and I were very acquainted, as you have seen, and it didn’t unseat me, just scared the shit out of me. Hastily I put the crystal ball back on its stand and sat there trying to calm myself down. I had to be at work within the hour.

In our talk we miss somethin’:
God simply is.
And that’s a whole other business,
like the mountaintop.
The mountaintop
came into my arms so easily.
I did not know what it said.
I ignored its wisdom.

I looked on the floor and found God.
This was a world away.
God became the center of my attention
in long slow leaps.
It’s where I put my feet today,
and I’m not crying.

I don’t think so,
I don’t think I will be here tomorrow.
Do you have another one?
Of course.
I will guide tomorrow
all levers to enlightenment.
My body will be here but my mind will not,
not the mind you know,
not the one called Donny.
We’re picking it up now,
and I don’t know how long it’s going to take,
but here I am in the room with you.
Field with me.

Let’s bring this to enlightenment,
the village in our room,
the city we sit at.
It’s what’s going to take tomorrow
in human consciousness,
in long slow years,
as the years open up.
We gather it today.
And here we are.

You ever seen it?
And this book will show it to you
in the course of its pages.
So it’s here before me
in my mind’s eye,
completing the world.
Do you hear it?

We’ve listed it,
put it where aim bothers you.
How would you grasp life?
You’re reaching for enlightenment.
But know this:
it’s not the end of the world.

Supermind comes down
in your ascension,
and you fulfill the world
with your consciousness.
You become That who you are,
and we are here for that.
Great the days play towards that end:
a new Jerusalem,
in the symbol paradise of man’s mind
Heaven on earth you see.
And there we are.

Let’s talk about the soul.
We did.
The Supermind
is where your soul sits above time,
and there it is inside you
a piece of itself
evolving in its ways.
It’s what we are becoming
if you want to know the truth,
our soul self.

That meets enlightenment.
That gets ascended
in the supramental transformation,
an enlightened being soul.
That ascends with soul force.
Ace ascension,
it’s a hard part,
the ascension of the soul
into everyday life
from the depths within.

Where the soul meets life,
it’s not an automatic process.
Can you grasp your soul?
Can you bring it on?
Touch it and it will come.
Be ever present with it.
Soul involvement
to open your life
to an involvement with God.
This is ascension.

Really come ascension.
It probably goes to me right now
provide you the milk.
Deal with it.
Deal with it plainly.
You have the news.

The burning of Jerusalem,
I’m just really well on the water.
Someone with an advanced degree
has just barked at you,
read you the riot act.
No I haven’t done that.
Enter your community
someone who reach people with ears.

I’m listenin’ to my world.
I write it down for you
a world need.
You’ll just lock me up
if I get unprotected.
You hate prophets and seers.
You will just get rid of us
to get out of that word.

I think I saw it a short film
and ah
notion you ride in your head:
my path lays straight the ways of the Lord.
Read my path that way.
No need to divorce.
We’re not gettin’ a divorce.
I’m right here at book.
That cannot be;
that can’t happen:
and the God who was in the book dies,
and we’ll never hear it.
Just look at me please.
You’re gonna have to sooner or later.
Now that’s the stuff
build us a better world.
Let’s get this show on the road.

Next post:

Chapter 7
Some Inner Life

Between Jerusalem I’m Sorry, Chapter 5

Painting by Alex Levin, “Colors of Jerusalem”
www.ArtLevin.com (used with permission)

A New Car, a New Character, a New Interpretation

The first thing to go when David gave me that Charles Manson look was the memory of past lives, and afterwards I couldn’t remember a single one, but that wasn’t the half of it. I was brought back immediately to the mundane world of everyday survival, as here was a man I hardly knew, God knows what kind, in my acid accentuated head obviously the leader of some cult my sister had gotten herself into, trying to steal everything I had, which was my truck and a little less than $500, obviously to bring me into the cult and make it so I couldn’t escape. Who were these people?

In the drop of a hat I went from joyous excitement to feeling very much afraid, or really, repeated the hat drop I’d undergone flying over those divine houses and seeing the Antichrist vacancy. The fear was quickly mounting to terror, so fresh was the antecedent terror in my heart, and in a state of just wanting to burst into tears I found myself in a struggle with his will, and he was really putting it on me. I looked around for Joelle, but she was elsewhere in the trailer. It was just me and the leader of this mountain hippie cult, or so the acid was picturing him. “I’ll, I’ll give you half.” I regretted it as soon as I said it, but I thought if I could give him half my money, I’d have enough to escape.

I don’t remember his reply or the remainder of our conversation/contest of wills. I do remember he was really enjoying himself at my expense. Whatever the case, I lost it and  crumbled into a frightened little child just fighting to hold back their tears. I didn’t continue the conversation or to consider his demand, I just begged him to take me to my sister. Joelle came into the room to see what was the matter, as I think I was begging loudly, and he took off the glasses and sat up. I think he told her about the act he put on, but I’m not sure. Anyway, they both, on seeing me having a ‘bad trip’, smiled that knowing smile, the kind you give to a kid that’s sure there’s a monster under the bed or in the closet, the kind that doesn’t take you seriously and is tickled at your silliness because there is no monster under the bed, or so it’s said. I, however, believe in monsters. At any rate, they tried to talk me down, Joelle explaining the bad mushroom trip that brought her to David’s trailer, telling me I just had to realize it was all in my head, and there was nothing to be scared of. I just kept begging them to take me to my big sister, her familiar presence the only thing in the world I wanted at that moment. They finally walked me to her cabin when they realized it was useless to try and console me. Gwen met us at the door, and they explained I was having a bad trip, and they all three laughed that knowing laugh, and David and Joelle walked off, leaving me with my big sis Gwen.

I remember watching them walk away hand in hand, laughing and still enjoying their trip. It was like watching people from another world so distant they appeared from me, although they were only meters away. The whole world before my eyes, in fact, was a great distance from me, although I was standing right there in it. It was like the world had been drained of substance, as though all color in it was gone despite the presence of color, and these are just images to try and describe the movement of my conscious awareness inside me to a place where the world was perceived at a great distance from me, but, because they body was still there in it, I was still picking up the world’s signal and not, for example, the divine world I’d just visited, or the inner world of dream. This distance from the world was not only in my vision. The sound of their laughter and swish, swish as they walked away I heard like I was underwater, and my touch upon the cabin’s things, as my feet upon its wooden floor, seemed as though other hands and other feet than my own were doing the touching, although I felt the contact, or my body up there in the world did, as strange as all this sounds.

What made it unbearable was the terror, which seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, as my ego, loosened from its earthen moorings but still very much alive and kicking, had lost the thing most dear to it, what had formed it and what it was wrapped around like an infant child its mother’s milk-laden breast, had lost its raison d’être, but it existed still, in some vacuum of terror, the world, its lover, too far away to even feel. I’ve described the dissociation state, known as a disorder in psychiatry, as the pit of the void in Buddhism, but the Mother, my teacher, describes it as the infinite in the finite, and from that perspective it can be managed better, since, when the consciousness is changing by degrees towards realization, as opposed to it just happening all in one go, that hard to bear state is a stage along the way, at least for some minutes or hours at a time. I don’t think it’s a necessity to be caught in it permanently. I think the many people today claiming to be enlightened are really in the pit of the void. If the ego wasn’t there they would be realized, but that’s the very thing you’re so terrified of: the ego disappearing and hence you, the world, and whatever else might there be, all in one great big swoosh that swallows you whole into the pit of nothingness.

Gwen didn’t console me or try to talk me down, saying she was tired and just wanted to go to bed. I asked her if I could sleep with her, as I did when we were little, as she did with me when we were teens, her knowing I wasn’t attracted to her or any woman, and my room was cooler than hers. She became angry and told me to sleep in the loft. Several times, as I fought to escape those lethal jaws of nonexistence, I begged her to let me in her bed, like a child begs their parents for the same, but she was adamant in her refusal, like that child’s parents, who aren’t into the kid at that moment and just want some time off. After some hours, tired of holding onto the world so it wouldn’t escape from my grasp altogether, I must’ve drifted off to sleep, but I honestly don’t remember if I did or didn’t. I just remember it being dawn, and, although I could still feel the rush of tripping and was yet under the bombardment of representative thinking tripping sends you on, I was back in the world in my body senses first, and it was wonderful.

Speaking in a mini-recorder beside Gwen’s cabin, which has since been lost, the day not yet having settled itself on the land, I described what I was experiencing. I had this odd and overwhelming sense of oneness, a concept up to that time I’d not considered much, other than as monism in a philosophy textbook, nor did I believe in it. The retreating shadows, the tall trees coming to light, the many brown hues of the leaf-dirt-pine needle mix blanketing the ground becoming distinguishable, and the long, steep, dirt driveway, the forest road kind with two parallel tire-wide tracks running side by side, showing more and more of itself, gave me a sense of edibility to the oneness starring in my mind. In my growing vision I saw the whole being revealed. I tried to see from where it came, the sense of oneness, and, although while there I did not feel it, I saw it came from that divine experience, saw with the connection I still had with it, and, as I spoke a mile a minute into my recorder, out there popped a naked thought of healing that quickly clothed itself in words that pointed me onwards: “the personal growth process towards wholeness and healing.”

It had come as the first aftergrowth of the feeling of oneness, a shoot springing up from that stalk. At that moment I entered the spiritual path, consciously set my feet upon it, which, in my mind, was one of healing and becoming whole more than it was anything else, and I needed healing, but I hadn’t seen that, seen in the sense of know beyond all doubt, until that LSD trip, but now that I did it took central place. I wasn’t sick in body, nor in soul, but the malady effected everything else, from the mind down to the subconscious. I had a social disorder of the third kind. Looking back, I see it was that practicality that made the spiritual path real to me, something walkable, that hands on ‘look at my hands is it working’ (or it wasn’t) vision of it, where the search for God and enlightenment, the finding of those things even, were not the goal, being healed and becoming whole were, or rather, as it would come home to me in time, the finding of those things (and more) were what it meant to be healed and made whole.

This wasn’t just processing that acid trip, which I was yet feeling the effects of. It felt like I had been born anew, remade, and I had this living sense a fundamental change had occurred deep inside me, a change in the direction of my life’s movement, and chasing after what attracted me, satisfying my animal wants and cravings, was not longer my ticket to ride, what I wanted out of life; I wanted to be whole and healed. This was not a decision I made that I would heretofore try and carry out. I saw this paved path my feet now stood upon, felt in the marrows of myself I was now on the Way, and it wasn’t a matter of straying off the path or sticking to it, not a matter of success or failure, because the Path simply was wherever I was, and at the same time, in the bright mysteries of spiritual paradox, it was a not yet arrived place I needed to get to.

Soon, in the settled firmness of the light of morning, I pocketed my recorder and walked to David’s trailer, which was half a kilometer or so from Gwen’s cabin and on the other side of the mountain’s main road, the one the Native American stone sits beside some kilometers down the mountain. Her cabin was nestled behind a small wood above the main road. Jake met me not long after I’d gotten on the main road, and quickly several others dogs joined us. Still somewhat tripping, I felt a part of the pack, its leader as a matter of fact. David’s trailer was down a long driveway that curved to the left and lower than the road, and you couldn’t see it or the other buildings on his property, on account of the many trees standing between the road and his compound. A locked gate met you at the entrance, locked gates the greeter of guests on that mountain. I climbed it and walked down the driveway to the house, Jake and the other dogs at my heels. I knocked on the door, and David came out, explaining that Joelle was still sleeping, and he didn’t want to disturb her.

We sat outside and talked. He wasn’t happy that Jake had formed a pack again, something he explained had gotten the dog into a lot of trouble with the neighbors, on account of chickens and such being eaten, and my pride at being the leader of the pack vanished, leaving me feeling silly to ever have had it. The first thing I said was that I’d realized that something about myself was in shadow, not calling it wrong because it wasn’t a moral sense I had. I saw it as an obstacle, to myself and the people it affected. Gwen had told everyone about it before I arrived, and so it wasn’t like I was revealing anything private about myself. He told me that I’d reminded him of what’s possible in tripping, something he’d forgotten so accustomed he was to dropping acid now. He was reminded he said of his first couple of trips. When I asked why he’d put on the sunglasses and demanded my keys and money, he answered that I was ego tripping, and he thought he should snap me out of it, but he didn’t expect it to take me into a bad trip. One thing’s for certain; he was ego tripping. He didn’t apologize though, and I didn’t linger on the issue. It’s obvious to me now he had no idea of my experience, its depth, its reality; I’d just had an acid trip. We didn’t talk very long, and soon I returned to Gwen’s, leaving a scolded Jake with his master, the other dogs having run off seeing Jake in trouble.

It was now midmorning, and I was still feeling the effects of the acid, the echoes of representations each thought brought, the sense of implied meaning behind the this’s and the that’s I looked at that trailed off into infinity, although my senses weren’t noticeably effected, and I wasn’t seeing trailers of motion or that intense vividness in regards to each and everything you see on acid that makes objects seem almost alive. This was in my head, and it was getting rather scary. I wanted it to stop.

The radio was on in Gwen’s cabin when I went in, and with a shock I heard it say what was in my mind, but I don’t remember what that was, only that, in some strange way there is no way I can explain, it pointed to me being the Antichrist. I seem to remember asking her to turn it off, but it was too late. I had stepped into what’s known as a psychotic state, although one could argue I’d stepped into it the night before, but one can also argue that such a thing, as psychiatry describes it anyway, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s really, as I’ve called it, a spiritual emergency. Maybe if I’d have stayed on the mountain and away from any electronic media I could’ve managed it, or it would’ve abated, the mountain my place to work it out, but I was seized with the need to leave and leave immediately. I was scared shitless.

Gwen, in the hate me one minute love me the next manner in which she had always been my big sister, until hate finally won out altogether (she won’t even speak to me now), tried to get me to stay. Her hate minutes were understandable, although love/hate isn’t the best manner in which to have a relationship with someone, understandable because it’s so human and because she was my mom’s whole world when she was a baby, in that I am your God and you are my only begotten son/daughter way my mom had with her babies. She was that, that is, until I was born, when she was only two. I don’t think the term sibling rivalry can capture it, although it’s supposed to. What Gwen could never understand was that it wasn’t personal, wasn’t about love; it was about attraction, and my mom was more attracted to me because I was a boy, another thing that made Gwen have her hate moments: boys got to do so many things girls weren’t allowed to.

At any rate, she was suddenly sweet and kind, and I could see she really wanted me to stay, not only because it would be better for me if I did, but also because she was lonely there by herself and wanted my familiar presence. I didn’t leave in order to get her back for the night before. I left because I felt I had no choice. I mean, I could not stay there under any circumstances whatsoever. I had to go and go I did, down that mountain and back into the normal mainstream world, as if its normality would bring me back to normal, as I was basically still tripping, would be for the next eight weeks, would never really return to normal where a tree is only a tree, a mountain only a mountain, or the world only the world, again. I had become a representative thinker, mind you, and here at the beginning, unaccustomed to the intensity of that, it was all a bit much.

Returning to Moshehiem’s apartment in Israel, so fast I’m sorry if it’s making your head swim, after telling you the story I tried to tell him, what might’ve turned those mental wheels of his towards ideas of God big enough to fit the world into, non-Jews included, a world that flings things together that are mutually exclusive, or seem so, and that doesn’t conform to any idea that we have about it, I should return to that book I’ve mentioned that I was reading, the only reading I was doing, the only media I was putting my attention to while in Israel, with one very notable exception explained later, other than the songs and such that just came in because they were playing in the air or passing before my eyes, the book I’d ordered right before leaving Houston for Israel, the one I finished upon arriving in Auroville, India six months later: The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo.

Moshehiem had trouble with that book. It was over a 1000 pages thick and featured a large photo of an Indian guru on the cover, staring straight at you, and I carried it almost everywhere I went. Why, he asked more than once, would I have my nose so stuck in a book by an Indian guru when I wanted to become a Jew? I obviously didn’t see The Jew in the Lotus, to make a literary allusion to a book I hadn’t read but who’s title says a lot (I’m reading it now). I should begin my study of the Torah he told me. On my end, there was no way I was putting that book down. That wasn’t even on the table. He said I’d have to if I converted. I remember thinking they’d have to pry the book out of my hands. Never had I had a book participate with me on so many levels while reading it, and I’d danced with many a book, my thought and feeling in sync with its pages. This book took that to a whole other level, and some of the synchronicities were astounding, one in particular while on the hunger strike in Jerusalem, which was the reason I went to Auroville, but that’s another story lost here but told later.

I should explain that, until finishing that book, I did not follow any path or religion, did not have a teacher and did not think I needed those things, was adamant in that opinion and declared it left and right, along with the one about belief, telling people not to believe in anything you haven’t experienced yourself. There is great truth in the popular saying on the spiritual path: when the student is ready the teacher will come. I would add to it that the teacher comes unexpectedly and often from a whole other direction than you’d imagine. I can see now the entertaining of my Jewish identity there in Safed was coming from my unconscious need to belong to a particular spiritual path, not just from feeling a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people, and that I was searching for a path even though I didn’t know it. I can also see now that Sri Aurobindo, and the Mother, a Jew, who I would be introduced to later in Israel, as where there’s one there will be the other, meaning the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, who guided my steps through that need there to my steps here in India, where I now live.

I should say that my teachers have advised me not to flash their names unnecessarily, not to advertise their path to the public or seek converts to it. I’m speaking of them and their path because it’s in the need of the narrative to do so. Their path might be compared to Judaism in that, you’ll be discouraged from joining their yoga by their followers if you express interest, until it’s very clear you have the inner calling, the soul need, and even then it will take you years of both inner and outer study to get a grasp of what their yoga is and entails so immense is the body of their written (and spoken) works and so demanding on your concentration is the opening of the inner consciousness and the keeping of it open in order to have inner contact with them, your soul, and the divine, so demanding you have to learn to concentrate on nothing else, which becomes possible once you begin to see all is the divine, or yoga, or soul process, or however you figure it, that thing or work in front of you just an overlay on God, the fact that it’s God is what you’re looking at while involved with it, which enables you to give it the justice it needs or deserves. And therein lies the whole of Jewish law. It aims to make life holy. Beyond itself, it calls for a life divine.

Afar they seemed a symbol imagery,
Illumined originals of the shadowy script
In which our sight transcribes the ideal Ray,
Or icons figuring a mystic Truth,
But, nearer, Gods and living Presences.
A march of friezes marked the lowest steps;
Fantastically ornate and richly small,
They had room for the whole meaning of a world,
Symbols minute of its perfection’s joy,
Strange beasts that were Nature’s forces made alive
And, wakened to the wonder of his role,
Man grown an image undefaced of God
And objects the fine coin of Beauty’s reign;
But wide the terrains were those levels serve.

from Savitri by Sri Aurobindo
(Courtesy of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press)

Sri Aurobindo is the someone I mentioned earlier who’d had the divine experience I’ve described, and in this passage from his almost 24,000 line epic poem, which I could best sum up as a map of existence, he pictures it differently than I do but paints the same basic picture. He’s speaking of Overmind, the plane of the cosmic Gods, the highest plane in the universe, the summit of Mind, and in the passage he’s describing the lowest tier of Overmind, the one we’ve made contact with, as he explains earlier, because it’s not too steep for our mortal tread, and from where comes the world’s religions.

They do not come a complete formation from Overmind however, are the result of only partial seeings and momentary glimpses, and in some if not many cases the resulting religion is not even close to Overmind’s original intent, the religion we have down here an interpretation of ideals from up there, in many if not in most cases a bad one, especially when a manmade tradition has taken the ball and ran with it for centuries, the tradition becoming the law to live by more than the thing-in-itself, the original divine intent. The tradition will do things like put veils on women’s faces, cover their whole body as well, when only being modestly dressed was originally called for, things like make a man not only divine but the God of all gods, when in the beginning he was only believed to be the son of God, and things like give Jews a soul above and apart from the rest of humanity, when originally only a distinct group within humanity, a people, had been created. The tendency in the interpretation is to take things as far as they can possibly go, and in doing so, they grow farther and farther from the truth of things.

Of those who believe in God, the tendency is to feel that either one religion is true and all the others false, or that each one expresses something different about the same God. In the more inclusive view of the latter we can also go to Buddhism, where they have replaced the one God with a transformation of enlightenment. In a broader vision of that view, all religions are seen as incomplete attempts to capture the same Whole, be that God or the Absolute. The view I’m presenting would agree with that last but be more specific than that and see that each religion down here comes from its own divine house up there, up there being in the upper reaches of our own minds, albeit there being a gulf separating those regions from us so tenacious is the lid between our minds and there. There wouldn’t be a one to one correspondence either, one house to each religion, how I’m presenting it for simplicity’s sake, but a hardly imaginable variety of the blending of houses and the repetition of houses housing the same ideal, with minor variations, multiplicities our one thing at a time bound mind can’t fathom, what the blending of two houses in Sikhdom and the striking similarities between houses, such as that between Judaism and Islam, give us some picture of that.

Each house houses, as I’ve mentioned, a divine ideal or ideals, which we can also call attributes of God, since, as the light or ray of God enters the universe, to use an understandable image for illustration’s sake, it’s filtered through Overmind, which acts like a prism, and God’s ray is separated into His attributes, they becoming divine beings unto themselves, the cosmic Gods, and, again, I’ve greatly over simplified a process too multifarious for our hold one image at time mind, as no house would be bereft of the other ideals or attributes or be mutually exclusive to the others, what can be glimpsed in the Christian house, where the seeming opposites of compassion and wrath commingle and express a world. The thing here to see is that, because it’s a personified attribute of God or the Absolute, the Supreme an image and term that might capture both, any and every house sees itself as the Supreme, meaning the central divinity in a house, identifies itself as That, and here’s the tricky part: it doesn’t see itself as the Supreme in its entirety, holds a simultaneous view of identity incompatible with the ego’s singular grasp of itself, the very center of its see you might say, and so this nuance in identity gets lost in translation, and each religion sees itself as mutually exclusive to all the others, resulting in such divisive formulas as: there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet; Jesus is God, either believe that or go to hell forever; there is no Self or soul and to see such is to be deluded; and we can continue.

Of course my view of the origins of the religions of the world has been greatly informed by my teachers the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, so much so the word ‘infinitely’ would not be totally out of line, but it has its base in what I’ve seen with my own eyes, while on acid notwithstanding, and it’s also based on inner seeing not influenced by any substances, inner contact with individual houses, many of the ones involved with earth, over the course of many years, which is a story for later on, lost now because it just sounds too fantastically impossible at this point with only one divine experience under my belt in this book so far.

There in that apartment in Safed with Mosheheim, however, my view had not reached such sophistication of detail, but it was there in a more basic form, but he would hear none of it, was not interested in my experiences or even me really. I was for him a test of his theory of the main difference between Jews and gentiles: inherent in the former was the capacity to get close to God, in the latter no.

I saw this quite clearly when, near the closing of that Shabbot, I was overcome with a feeling of devotion, with bhakti, for the Supreme, and I stood there awhile and just basked in it, tears rolling down my cheeks. It just suddenly came upon me with the song “Secure Yourself” by the Indigo Girls. In the morning he had put on what he called his Shabbot tapes, all the songs that made him feel bhakti or something of the Supreme, which wasn’t religious music but American pop music and rock and roll. As I stood there in that rather emotional attitude of worship, he was intently watching me from the kitchen, I in the dinning part of the living room. I could feel him watching me and hadn’t lose myself in God as much as it seemed I had, but there was some genuine feeling there. When I returned to myself after the song was over, he said he had a special capacity to judge if people were sincere or not in their love of God. I asked him if I had passed his test. Obviously disappointed, he said yes I had.

All this, however, was based on a misunderstanding of what constitutes real devotion, on the part of Moshehiem, on the part of me, on the part of the whole world of religion. Today, except in very extraordinary and rare moments, I wouldn’t pass the real test, although I spend the majority of my time in the reality of my immediate environment, in the relative quiet of that, and do that out of preference, because I know it’s there and not in whatever media that I’m in a better position to get a glimpse of God strolling by in the whirl of things, or witnessing up out at me from the crux of my inner life. When you need external stimuli, such as a book, or a song, or a fiery sermon, when you need yourself drummed up to feel it, you are very far from what it means to have contact with the Supreme, inside or outside, although God is right there right now everything you experience, the presence of the Hostile Powers and everything ugly and mean notwithstanding. You see what I’m saying? Put the book down and look.

Say, just for the purposes of demonstration, a religion would be built upon the preceding paragraph. It wouldn’t take long before that would be interpreted to mean not to read any books, magazines or newspapers, listen to any music or what have you, and TVs, radios and media players would be destroyed, the internet banned, computers blown up, smart phones smashed, and on and on. That’s not what I’m saying, although we’d do well to destroy all television sets and smart phones if we had a choice of what to destroy—I’m just saying.

The thing is, what is most misunderstood about us, we’re each at a different level of development and therefore need different things at different times. Some people need their nose in books (or whatever) for hours on end, but not all of their lives, only for a stage in it—another misunderstood thing: development happens. You don’t just force yourself to suddenly go media-free either, or force someone else to for that matter. That’s a violence that will certainly be too rigid a stance that makes you unable to tell when you do actually need media, and you always will to a certain degree such is the nature of being human. Weaning yourself off media has to be a natural movement that comes about from your inner development calling for it.

It has taken me many years to prefer unaugmented reality over all the media I can put between me and it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t read the news, surf the net, read or write a book, escape in a movie, or rock out to a song. It just means that most of my time is spent without media, and I prefer it that way. That began happening during those three years of intense inner experience I’ve repeatedly referred to, although at the onset I got rid of TV. My spiritual/metaphysical experiences became more interesting than anything manmade. When you begin to see God in the hours, God in your inner life, the world’s media is pale by comparison, and boring, although in the absence of God it’ll do. I predict the next big world-shaking revolution, the developmental one we’ve been waiting for, won’t come about because of technology but by the absence of it.

But don’t misunderstand me. I’ll fast forward three or four months in time, from this moment in Safed, to when I was working day labor in Eilat. The dust, the heat, the dryness, was more than we could bear. For days we’d been moving an old warehouse into a new building across the street, ten hours a day without any breaks except some minutes to eat the lunch we’d brought, if we’d brought one, any official breaks that is. You can really milk drinking water when you have to. It was a building supply warehouse, and you know how much stuff that is? It was awful. We’d hitch-hiked almost the whole length of the Dead Sea to get there to Eilat, where we’d heard there was work, myself and the three friends I would team up with soon after leaving Safed for Tel Aviv. Demoralized, I just wanted to quit and go jump in the Red Sea. We were clearing out stuff near the old checkout counters, when, all of a sudden, a Tracy Chapman song rang out clear and strong. I think it was “Fast Car”. As soon as her voice sounded, I saw blue auric light come out of the radio, which I hadn’t noticed until it was turned on, wide streaks of blue light that disappeared as soon as I saw them, and I hadn’t seen auras in days. Someone had noticed the radio and turned it on. It was like feeling a sea breeze ride a rainbow through our despair, and it was good. We all just stood there for some minutes and let the song carry us far away. Later that day I got everybody to stop working long enough to get the boss to agree to give us regular breaks, and it was that song that gave me the nerve.

Of all the things you make for me, you the whole human sense of you, what you make and create as a matter of course, without even having me in mind, like the food I eat, the clothes I wear, the chair I sit in, the book I read or movie I watch, and on and on, it’s music I’m most grateful for, even though I’d die without some of the other things. It so sounds sometimes feelings in my soul.

It wouldn’t be fair to leave Moshehiem’s apartment on the note of my discovery of his ethnocentric aim in inviting me there, as if any of us are entirely singular in our aims. There was some genuine charity there. And there was also something else, not separate from his ethnocentricity, but nonetheless it was something I needed to see and something only a Jewish person could properly show me, one that had worn the black of the ultra-orthodox, the Hasidic, Jew. I told him of an encounter I’d had with a young man on the street the day before. He was yet too young to have any kind of beard to speak of, but his attitude of orthodoxy was there plain as day on his face and in his eyes as he, running in the other direction, stopped, turned to me, giving a condescending look, and said, “Why?” referring to my long hair, which was well past my shoulders and at that moment I was wearing down, it parted in the middle sandy blond and slightly wavy, bouncing this way and that as I walked. I also had a long untrimmed beard. People often said I looked like the historical Jesus. Funny I didn’t appear to be Jewish to many Jews when they looked at me. Anyway, I gave him an equally disdainful look and, pointing with my eyes to his black attire and so out of touch with the climate clothes, said, “You, why?” He tottered a moment wondering at me and then sped off. I was left with this feeling of pity for the boy, realizing he’d probably spend the rest of his life in, how I saw it then, his religious prison without walls.

Some believe reality is just weird, and that there isn’t any truth to it, in the spiritual sense of truth that is, and it’ll show you whatever truth you believe in, as if your belief will arrange reality to conform to it, at least to the degree it seems your truth gets validated by circumstances often enough it’s kept alive. Spend time with the believers of any faith, and you’ll begin to suspect reality is quite weird in that way. But there’s another way to see it. The Supreme will fill any container made for it regardless of its shape and size, happy to have one to fill, a universe for example, a divine house within the cosmos, or even an atheistic system of philosophy, the Supreme in itself too big for any container, and it’ll back up our belief system with fortuitous circumstance and synchronicity, with many reasons to believe or not to. The thing is, you always have to be open to what’s bigger than your belief, since the Supreme always will be, and that’s really hard when you’re content with your microscopic world (in comparison to That) and the scraps the Supreme sends from time to time.

Back then I didn’t know the Supreme fills any and every container that entertains it, even those that speculate that It isn’t, and I was surprised to hear Hasidic Jews had their little corner on God. Mosheheim explained to me and made me see that the boy who questioned my hair wasn’t wearing a prison uniform; he was being humble. They wore the same clothes so to minimize the ego, did many things for that reason, and, if you can get past the black, hoary clothes and all the hair, that’s no different from Buddhist robes and shaved heads, and you can begin to appreciate their effort to quiet the same animal we all live with, although most of us aren’t trying to minimize it. It’s also part of their practice to learn to not allow sensation, such as heat, cold, hunger, taste, thirst, etc. to come before them and their God, and so they weren’t wearing such a hot getup because they were just rigid as all getout. It was a constant practice helping them to put God before their comfort, although there in Safed, because of its higher elevation, it wasn’t often very hot. You might imagine though, in places such as Jerusalem and the desert settlements, what a sweat you worked up just walking down the street. The Hasidic movement started in Eastern Europe in the 18^th  century, where their dress matched the climate, and they didn’t adapt it to the hotter environment. Of course there are better ways to minimize the ego, namely I’d say by not giving into its need to do something one way and one way only and its stubborn habit to be inflexible when faced with change, but theirs, despite its drawbacks, is a way. I didn’t appreciate that before Moshehiem.

These are normal meditation hunters—ah the bubbles of God. They aren’t seeking enlightenment, and the change of consciousness they want is one of degree, not kind, where the ego is minimized so God is put first as much as possible, not where the ego is surpassed altogether and they enter the next higher mode of consciousness called by many names: realization, no-self, consciousness without an object, liberation, Silent Mind, and others. Even still, I would imagine some very few slip through and make it, but it’s not a stated goal or even central to their teachings. I’d also imagine those that do either hide it or leave Hasidism, since it’s not a state of consciousness compatible with orthodoxy or with strict obedience to rules and laws, and neither is it a state easily accessible by those things, as much as the religious or spiritual-minded seem to think it is or should be, even in Buddhism, which has that as its aim. If it were, millions and millions would be enlightened.

It’s the spiritual paradox of enlightenment, which I might come close to somewhat capturing by the phrase we quoted to each other often in Green Beret school, The Special Forces Qualification Course: if you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’, and if you get caught you ain’t SF. It’s only a sideways resemblance, but it’s still an apt analogy. I’ll explain. We lost half the class on the land navigation week during phase 1 at Camp Mackall. At the end of a week of training, using a map and compass, we had 24 hours to find four metal stakes in the day and at least one in the night (four for a perfect score) at given sets of coordinates, carrying a rucksack, an M-16 and an outdated map, the stakes in the worst places, in swamps, thickets and such, and placed to take full advantage of the confusion an outdated map would bring, such as a stake shown on the map to be on one side of road, but since the map had been made the road had moved, and now the stake was on the other side, and so forth. The rules were: you could not follow a road or even be near one, unless you were near a stake near a road (FTR—follow the road, was another refrain of ours); you couldn’t be within a 20 meters of another student, unless you were at a stake, and even then you couldn’t talk to one another; you could only use your flashlight within ten meters of a stake. If you got caught breaking the rules you failed the test and hence the whole course. The problem was, unless you broke the rules you couldn’t pass the test.

You see now the paradox of realization? We have to use the ego to overcome the ego, but the ego’s way of doing things can’t be the only way, which I might partly sum up by listing its preference for assured footing, its wish to take simple ordered steps, its love of rule and law, its aptness to be strict and inflexible, its will for everyone to be the same, and its principle of exclusion. Even to minimize the ego, much less to become realized, you face the paradox.

That thing has touched the wall.
It’s horrible.
It’s not in your history books.
It’s around us all the time.
It’s powerful.
It’s got a way with words.
It’s from another dimension,
another world.

There are monsters in our midsts,
and they’re all around us.
You can’t see them.
I have visions they’re here.
I see them all the time.
I know they’re here.

They’re demons,
hostile forces attached to the universe
that seem to destroy it,
are against God’s plan,
against the Light.
They are unreservedly unholy,
vicious and mean,
and they’re here for a reason.
They test God’s plan,
test it thoroughly.

They get by without it.
They’re just demons.
They’re monstrous.
They came out of Nowhere.
They will be converted in time’s end.
They are a huge mistake,
unwilling and dim.

You can’t stop them.
Their food you can stop giving them.
Their food is us.
They are the cosmic grazers
of horrible energies.
They destroy the world,
or they give it a good go
testing God’s plan by contrarying it,
and on this point they’re lost.
They can only see their feeding space,
and their utter hatred of goodness and light.

Their maniacalness
doesn’t know how to defend itself.
They go too far.
They grandly fuck up.
I am a product of that
I’m here to tell you.
It’s the story of the wall.
It’s nonexistence,
the very limits of human existence.
And stay tuned.

They eat our goodwill.
It’s not what they want.
You’ll have to view the laws of discrimination.
This has brought them along.
Lookin’ for dog,
horrible creature
in every human business.
They are the communiqué of doom that rules the world,
and how long it’s gonna take you to learn that.
This is the conspiracy,
and they are not human,
savvy?

And we’ve put all goodness aside.
They’re lying.
They are just the level we are at.
They don’t control the cosmos.
They are not Gods.
They can’t even control themselves.
All the particulars let’s leave down to a science
buy ice cream.

A hell of a way to pay for the world,
they get you with your delight,
right where it rubs the world wrong,
whatever it is.
Throw off that fun yoke, will yah?
My God these are clever creatures.
Can you find them?

And it’s here we rob the world.
You’re just not gonna see us,
and we’ve spoken today
of how you rule us.
It’s in our acts you see.
I think we’ve got a demon by the horns.
That looks like
how to control them.
They’re there
you know.
Don’t give them what they want,
harm to yourself or your world.
I think that’s the duty of humankind.
It’s also how we end evil
once and for all:
don’t give them what they want.
Don’t even try.

And you’ve harmonized them,
an integral harmony
that puts them in their right place:
the testers of our degree of God.
That’s what they’re there for,
despite themselves,
and they just hate it.
See them?

The individual series
comin’ up next.
The long and short of it is
you’ve got to see it to believe it.
You can’t get over how it crows,
and that’s hands down
the shit eating grin.

I’m gonna flip
and tell you
a star in knowin’ things could hardly know Nothin’,
but you don’t give the Devil’s worth.
You know I’m talkin’ Supermind,
the Station beyond this universe.
Get it right,
and that’s a tadpole,
and I give you the frog later on.

Lose your temper.
He’s not gonna do it,
tell you
little human shapes
justify God’s expression in time.
Beat on those
a whole universe worth of seeing.
Just three verses:
taking more to movie to;
we are bystanders;
that really belongs to the Earth,
Heaven’s gate,
with all due respects.

What have we done?
Brought the inviolate Supermind to Earth,
the Truth Consciousness on our home planet.
And there it is.
It’s a box warning.
A box is not your life.

Next post:

Chapter 6
Legends of School