We each checked avatar.
That was the history of us surprised
No one's came, [spoken in the voice of Mugu, a Tamil teenager]
Noticed anything of importance,
"Wow" no one's pressed
To the balcony.
"Is that a statement?"
It's a letter of approval
Look up here.
"Gimmie that good old time religion." [sung, a variant of the song of that name]
A people falter on this.
Can we say the yoga's asleep?
Tryin' to come up with somethin'.
How many people learn from the inside?
Come over here.
It's our press.
It's got to Auroville
How have rights
Fire protection.
You gotta go inside at the outside
So it's aided. [vision of writing this by hand having difficulty spelling aided]
We have images of our soul changing
In many golden moments of 4 hits. [vision of the word poem, small and typed near the bottom of a page, typed by an electric typewriter, which signaled me to end this one]
Table of Contents
An article on inner guidance
An essay on human unity
From First From Within
A column dedicated to exploring the role of dreams, voices, and visions in the integral yoga.
by Douglas M.
A column dedicated to exploring the role of dreams, voices, and visions in the integral yoga.
by Douglas M.
Vision of Alex Trebek (the host of the TV game show
Jeopardy) saying “Ay Carasha!” In the
vision I know this has something to do with the TV show South Park in the sense
that someone on that show uses that phrase the same way Bart Simpson says “Ay Caramba”. I also know its got something to do with
being Jewish.
I had this
vision in the early morning and didn’t think about it much during the day. That night though I recorded it in my dream
journal and decided to google the word Carasha, since I was unfamiliar with it,
to see if it was an actual word and what it might mean. I was pretty amazed at what I found within
the first ten Google hits and how it related to the vision as well as to things
in my own life. Though I will share what
I learned from this meeting of a vision and a search engine, my main reason for
writing this article is to try and present, through a startling chain of
synchronicities, evidence for a guiding intelligence both in the workings of
external events and also on the level of consciousness that fashions inner
phenomenon such as dreams, voices and visions.
I will also try to show that this guiding intelligence can use the most
diverse and seemingly unspiritual things such as pop culture TV, movies, even a
favorite flower and connect them together with an inner event (such as a vision
or dream) to communicate a message to us.
To start
things off the reader needs to know that “Ay Caramba” is an exclamation used to
denote surprise in Spanish and was made famous by the character Bart Simpson of
The Simpsons. As we will see “Ay
Carasha” is a play on this and on one level was a sort of foreshadowing of my
surprise at what I found when I googledCarasha.
The first thing I discovered was that Carasha is a name since two of the
top Google hits were the Twitter and Pinterest accounts of a young woman whose
first name was Carasha. Carasha was
also black and this was my first “Ay Caramba!” moment with this vision as I was
able to connect it with what had transpired the last two nights on Jeopardy
involving a young black woman contestant named Frederique. Over the course of these two games Frederique
had pulled out two unlikely come from behind wins in the final Jeopardy round. I’ve seen these kinds of unlikely wins many
times on Jeopardy but I couldn’t remember ever seeing it happen twice in a row
like that. I imagine other members of
the viewing audience found it noteworthy as well as perhaps the unflappable
Alex Trevek himself. Here we can see the
plastic way in which visions do things since it didn’t say “Ay Frederique” but
yet was still referring to her. If it
had I never would have googledCarasha and that was the whole point as we will
see.
So that was
the first synchronicity. The second
involves the Jewish element of the vision because the next interesting hit on
Google was a website called “Kabalarian Philosophy” which gave the significance
of the name Carasha(which we’ll look at in a moment). For those who may not know, Kabbalah is an
esoteric discipline that originated from Judaism. This website didn’t seem to be overtly Jewish
but was in fact about the meaning of names.
Regardless you can see the synchronicity with the vision though here the
connection was with something I just “knew” in the vision rather than something
specifically shown or stated.1Let’s look now at what the website had to
say about the name Carasha.
1. The name of Carasha creates a happy, versatile, and expressive nature, with good business judgment and a fine sense of responsibility, which should enable you to establish congenial relationships in positions of trust where you are dealing with the public.
2. You have a clever, quick mind, with the ability to accomplish a great deal in a short period of time, although it is not easy for you to systematize your efforts.
3. This name could allow expression along musical and artistic lines and gives you the desire to entertain and to meet and mix with people of refinement and culture.
4. It also brings out your love of home and family, and in close association you are able to show understanding and affection.
5. Others are attracted by your generosity and your consideration of their interests.2
Now most
people who know me well would probably agree that this is a good description of
some of my more positive characteristics and talents though by no means a
perfect description. For example I’m not
inclined to meet and mix with people of refinement and culture nor do I place
the importance on family that many people do. It was close enough though for me
to be impressed by the synchronicity. And there’s one more synchronic Google
hit to share.
For this
one the reader needs to know that for all of my childhood and a good portion of
my adult life I have been a big Star Wars fan. Given this it was quite natural that a Google
hit with both Carasha and Star Wars in it would catch my eye, so I
clicked through. The website was a wiki
for an online multiplayer role-playing game called Star Wars Galaxies. The game is set during the time of the
rebellion between Star Wars IV: A New Hope and Star Wars V: The
Empire Strikes Back. Now the exact
page I was on was a user profile under the name Carasha and the profile picture
was a white Plumeria with a yellow center.
Now this is very synchronic because this is my favorite flower not just
because I find it beautiful but also because I love its scent. When you combine that with the fact that a
picture of a Plumeria isn’t exactly what you’d expect to find on a user profile
for a Star Wars video game, it’s hard to chalk it up to chance. It also bears mentioning that the Mother
while she was alive stated spiritual significances for an enormous number of
flowers. The significance she gave for
this particular shade of Plumeria is Perfect Psychological Perfection.
Hopefully I
have been able to make a case for the existence of this guiding intelligence
that not only set all this up on the level of external events but which also on
the level of internal events (i.e. the vision) possesses an omniscience that
knew all of this and also knew I would google Carasha and encounter all this
synchronicity. But what was the
message? Here I can only state what I
took from it while at the same time stating that readers may see something more
or different in it that is equally valid.
So in terms of sadhana I see a message of encouragement, one that
addresses both where I am and where the Divine is trying to take me. Right now I’m in the midst of a rebellion to
overcome the “Empire” of defects, wrong movements etc. in me. Or to put it another way the one could say a
rebellion to throw off the yoke of the Empire of Ignorance. The goal is Perfect Psychological
Perfection and I’m even shown the elements of mine in the Carasha name
description which just happens to be on a website named after a spiritual
tradition.3
But what
about the connection with Frederique on Jeopardy and her two unlikely
wins? Here I really feel the message of
encouragement since I imagine most people who are attempting the sort of
changes sadhana entails can become disheartened at times by how unlikely
victory seems.
Now this
message has in no way wrought an irrevocable change in me in terms of
eliminating doubt, fear, discouragement etc.
Neither did it come at a particularly low point in my life, but it did
give me a boost at the time and I’ve found it helpful to reflect on this
experience from time to time since then.
That I think is its continuing purpose in my life.
In closing
there is one last piece of the message I have waited to share since I think it
sums up the message as a whole and is a nice way to end this article. It’s the description Miss Carasha put for
herself on her twitter account. It
reads:
Fabulous
me. But still in progress.
References
1.
I think its
important to point our here that like in dreams our awareness in visions seems
to be more open and intuitive and what you just “know” in regards to content
(or as an overlay of the entire vision) can be significant, at least in my
experience.
3.
Now the reader may
be wondering, as have I, if I’m being directed to look into Kabbalah. At the time of this writing I have not done
so because I have become a bit wary of spending much time on things other than
Sri Aurobindo and The Mother since they’re my gurus and its their influence (as
well as some of their disciples’) that I want going into me. If the universe gives me another push though
I think I’ll have a look one of the principle Kabbalah texts.
Looks
Like This is the Place
(This is one of two essays on human unity that I wrote and
anonymously sent to various places and people in Auroville, but to my knowledge
it didn’t get around much, and so I post it here and will post the second one
next time)
by Donny
Duke
Have you ever sat down and
tried to pinpoint just exactly where it is we go wrong, what, in the most basic
sense, gives rise to such an explosive and turbulent world? Though it’s really
no different today than at any other period in our history in terms of the
turbulence, the tendency of the world to explode in any given place at any
given time, our little moment in the sun, the life of us here and now on the
planet, has so many witnessing it and can do so almost instantly, like, over
half of the world’s population at any given moment, and that’s being
conservative. It’s really more in the fallout of some catastrophe, though, in
the incessant chatter after a tragedy, either online in forums or in the form
of comments, or on the air of radio or TV, or about town or in the privacies of
your more intimate encounters, that you hear the fundamental problem and hence,
if your ears have also eyes, and it’s the mind’s eye I’m talking about, see it
in all its ugly glory. And I’m talking about all the ill will.
But seeing it’s only the
half of it; you have to be able to take that insight, that wordless grokking of
idea, and bring it out into the confines of world-bearing words for it to
become anything anyone else can use, since it’s a peculiarity of our species to
do things like, change the world, in a group. Probably the first obstacle one
armed with such a world-changing insight would encounter is that just about
every single person you hear, whether online, on the air, or in person,
believes they have said insight. So, you are faced with an insurmountable task:
how to get the word out?
You would think it would
have to be on the strength of the insight and on its consequent wording into
edible idea, assuming here no one you hear is saying it out there. You would
think, but that is, again, only half of it. Who you are and where you try and
communicate your world-solving idea might even be more important than how
strong it is in relation to truth, truth being simply what’s actually going on
here. We are after all, when you boil us down in Nature, not in Spirit, herd
animals.
Let me back up a minute
and say this is an experiment. I have such an idea, and in order to try and get
it out into the field let’s say, I’m going to attempt to surmount the former
criterion of who and do this anonymously, and to meet the criterion of the
latter, of where, I’m going to try and get this where the residents of the
International Township of Auroville can read it, what is called the city of human
unity, though ironically it’s a rather insular and conflict-ridden town, irony the
backbone of humanity when sincerity isn’t.
I figure no matter what the current state of their ‘union’, it would be
the kind of community that would be in the best position to not only receive
such an idea package but also begin to put it into play, one way or another.
One could come up with a
barrage of concepts that would seem to identify our basic problem: evil,
hatred, lack of unity, ignorance, poverty, crime, war, to name some of the more
apparent ones, and it’s not that any given one isn’t a basic problem in human
life; it’s that they all come from the same place, and it is as plain as the
nose on your face. We think we are individuals separate from every other person
or thing, separate in the most fundamental sense, in terms of identity – that
we are alone inside of ourselves cut off from everyone else. And this comes
primarily from the fact that we are largely (some completely) unconscious of up
to a third or a fourth of our daily life, the time we call sleep (not to
mention of our deeps at any given moment), even though it’s common knowledge we
have experience during sleep, experience that we are conscious in, albeit
oftentimes as puppets or robots, but that we can learn to control with our
will, though just becoming conscious of that experience by being able to
remember it and maintaining that awareness would fix our world, if we met our
children at the door of birth with that mandate, to be conscious of all of
their experience in any given day and guided them on the right use of that
knowledge.
How would this fix our
world? It wouldn’t all across the board. In some cases it would arm people with
foul intent to do harm, and I’d imagine there’d be a stage in the beginning
with most anyone where they used their knowledge to manipulate those around
them, since this knowledge is power, but if one really does indeed become
conscious of all of their experience, that abuse of power becomes self-abuse in
time such is the strength of the inner connection between ‘us and them’,
ourselves and those whom we harm or manipulate. If a community such as Auroville
were to adopt this program such wrong use of knowledge could be greatly
curtailed, since it would be part of the initiation of individuals into the
community, both those born into it and those coming later, and as such,
pitfalls could be more easily avoided, since the initiation would entail right
use of the knowledge.
Another reason this kind
of experimentation, research, whatever kind of learning you called it, would
best be begun in Auroville, apart from the fact that it was founded to be the
very place human unity is to be worked out, is because the people there would
be more likely to have the inner development necessary to have meaningful
dreams and other conscious inner experience, else they would live in
conventional communities and not have come to such an intentional township to
begin with (the ‘call’ to live in such a community presupposes that), not all
by any means, but enough people to do the inner work. I was surprised to learn
early on in my investigation of the experience during sleep that most people
don’t even think they have such experience, and if they do occasionally
remember something of that experience it’s a chaotic jumble with little
meaning, few have what would be called dream experiences, and many dream mostly
in black and white, hence in modern technologically-based societies there’s
little or no emphasis on becoming conscious of the experience during sleep.
The first thing you need
to be convinced of, not taught based on the words of experts, but by your own
personal experience, is that we are connected to one another on the inside of
ourselves, and when you think about someone with sufficient force, either of
love, anger, hatred, jealousy, whatever force of emotion, they pick that up in
their experience during sleep (though it’s more like you pick it up in your
subliminal consciousness as soon as whoever think-feels it, and the experience
isn’t formulated into a communication, a message, until you’re in the receptive
state of dreaming), and the reverse is true; you pick up the feeling-toned
thoughts of others that are about you. It doesn’t even have to be personal,
doesn’t have to have your name attached. If people have strong feelings about a
particular grouping of people of whatever category, members of that group pick
up those feelings. When it’s hatred, and let’s say the group of hated people do
hateful things themselves, they are armed with more hate to continue harmful
acts. If it’s goodwill the reverse is true; they are disarmed to the extent
goodwill sent to them via the inside can disarm harmful social actors, which is
just enough to help disarm them completely when they are sincerely undergoing a
process of change to correct their harmful behavior. Becoming conscious of your
experience during sleep will convince you of this inner connection, especially
if you are becoming conscious of that experience with the people around you with
whom you live, move, and have your being. You might now can see how this
knowledge would help humanity be a better race, and if you’re particularly far
reaching in your thought, you’d see how this knowledge would in time
revolutionize human society.
It would do so because the
more you become aware of that inner connection, which, it must be understood,
is not only with other human beings, but with all living things, and even
objects would not be out of that loop, the more it becomes more than a
connection; in time it becomes a shared identity, something that begins as a
slight suspicion (like of that inner connection) but slowly blossoms out into a
quiet knowing, which by this time has come out of the inner life and is staring
you in the face in any face you look into, and once you begin to see you are
‘them’, using that word here to denote people you don’t particularly like or
people you like in a way that causes them harm, you begin to limit any harm
either in thought, word, or deed, you might give them. When the insight of a
shared identity becomes a reality for you, what you see when you look out on
the world, you would not easily be able to cause harm to anyone regardless of
the strength of your impulse to do so, though by that time even your impulses
would have begun to surrender to the mental realization and not carry so much
overwhelming strength, and nor would hatred sent to you by others be able to
override your realization and push you towards obeying your nature and doing
something harmful.
I say that because we
operate under the assumption that we have an absolute freewill – all human law
is based on this assumption –, but the truth of the matter is we are not so
free, and not only do many if not most harmful acts come as a result of
impulses rising up and taking over, but also the ill will people feel towards
those that cause harm to others is largely the result of the same subconscious
action. I shouldn’t have to mention that in the process of becoming conscious
of the experience during sleep you at the same time become more aware of the
complexes in your subconscious that are putting the chains on your freewill.
Becoming conscious of
sleep, something so very basic you’d think it’s one of the first things we do
in the process of becoming self-aware (you’d think), we would see that human
unity isn’t an ideal that we have to adopt and promote but part and parcel of
our daily reality, one we just don’t yet recognize, and we’d also come to
understand the world is much bigger than things, or I should say, that it isn’t
a thing; identity is inherent in it, yours, ours, and theirs too. Where’s the
harm in that?
(If any reader might feel I would be the last person qualified to speak of human unity because you know something of my story and are of the opinion that if you've done wrong you no longer have the right to speak about important matters, reading another essay on my Atomic Review might widen your mind and open you heart enough to give me the benefit of the doubt: Make Peace With the World)
* * * * * * * * * *
No comments:
Post a Comment