Drifting off to sleep in the night I see a vision of a shipping container in an endarkened field. I walk in to the black opening of the container and the door clangs shut behind me. Im in the dark and I cannot breathe. I cannot see and I am very afraid.
I am here. In this moment. I remind myself of this often, or rely on others to do so. I am here. In this moment. The only safe place now. If I look back into what has happened I see only shame and destruction. I continue stepping out of that darkness, even though I am released from it.
I let myself out.
I was no longer going to turn a blind eye to what was going on behind the curtain. Was it really the Wizard of Oz that programmed so many of us to be waylaid by a false prophet, a mechanism of control that uses a childhood fairytale as bait for taking control and abusing the psyche. Imagine. Youre in a storm. You lose yourself and find yourself lost but a fairy wakes you with a purpose, to go home.
Going home was a regular theme in my early days with the cult. Going home was the mountain top, the summit to reach. Home was a place where everything was okay, free of ancestral patterning, of pain and heartbreak. It was where we were meant to live. Home. The word is so chock full of meaning, very little needed to be explained outside of it being a goal at the end of our journey. Safe. Peaceful. Free. Home. Everyone could conjure up the context and meaning per their own individual illusions about Home and not be distracted by any real discourse or inquiry into the very profound human meaning of Home. However, find a touchstone that everyone can relate to and make it a destination. A destination never meant to be reached. A destination for the guru to point at and say, there is where you are going. And looking down from that summit, calm and serene, he would infer, he had already arrived.
The creation of destination easily became destiny and in a group of three hundred, all engaged with the fabrications of the guru, the momentum of numbers and proximity carried us all away. How did you come to that group? A woman asked. She had heard many stories already and I was assured my own experience could not be any stranger than the collection she held in a file on her desk.
Nonetheless I faltered. I put up a feint by speaking about the metaphorical concept of holograms, of one piece being indicative of the whole. Actually I am seeing the possible reality of that concept more and more lately but not in ways I once imagined. I now see that when a piece of the whole is hidden, it will be revealed in another aspect of the whole. If the truth is unable to express in one part, it will show itself in another. I mean truth with a little t, truth about what is actually going on but is being kept hidden.
Or maybe it is big T truth that Im seeing, because it has a fair amount of power and energy and movement. It wont be completely repressed ever, anywhere, in any case. Theres always a window somewhere, perhaps infinitesimally small, and in that aperture one can see what is happening behind the curtain. Its difficult to recognize but it is usually there in plain sight, sometimes making waves of some kind or another. If you see it you might stand stock-still in shock and when it passes, you only shake your head wondering what the heck that was, and once it has completely receded behind the curtain, you wonder if it ever actually happened.
Truth. Thats what we were seeking. He convinced us he was the living embodiment of that lofty quality. How did he do that?
He didnt say much. He would never give a lecture about truth. His platform was dependant on people coming to him for guidance, asking questions of life, the universe, and everything. I might say he required a seed of truth to spin his yarns of metaphysical wonder.
When I first met him, my fiancés spiritual teacher, I spent the day amused by his antics, absolutely sure he was a small town motorhead who read too much science fiction and remarkably had found himself a group of admirers to spin outlandish yarns for, yarns of spirituality, with biblical references, codes of behavior, and magical realms of an ethereal existence.
This was my first impression of the man, the initial holographic piece of the cult that I perceived. From what I have learned now, this first impression was closer to the truth than any other perceptions I have had of him. Or projections I graced him with. Right there in the very beginning I knew. So what happened!?!
The second day spent in the mans presence I began to wonder if all the note taking going on wasnt indicative of a social or psychological experiment that was being conducted. Very dear people would speak to the man about their deepest fears, or hurts, or destructive habits, or any manner of human experiences that are heartbreaking if you let them in. I was touched by their vulnerability and their openness to share the deepest parts of themselves.
But no, according to the man on the stage, that wasnt the deepest part of themselves. That was only their Selves, a level within that could not be trusted, though it was innocent, should not be given any awareness to, though it was a continual distraction, an aspect of the questioner that was causing all their grief because they were giving it way too much energy and attention. The gentle counsel from the man, what seems to slither toward me now, was to turn away from such illusions and know the truth.
Questioner. Uh, okay. What truth?
Man on stage: The truth you know in your heart.
Q. Oh!! That truth. Why didnt I think of that?
M. Because you are caught up in the level of your self that isnt real.
M. The real you is already home.
[At that point, the slithering reaches right into the body and feels it up.]
Q. Oh, yeah. I can feel that.
M. Yes, youve got it.
Q. Yum.
Q. Nice.
Q. Can I have some more?
That small town motor-head seemed to be seducing people with an ability we all have, if only sometimes consciously developed, and rarely wielded for the sake of power and control. For example, if your lover is feeling out of sorts, you go to [insert pronoun] and extend your tender loving care towards them. When it is genuine you know and they know it goes right where it needs to go, and it helps. If we are lucky, we learn it from our mothers, how to reach right into someone and soothe their hurt and injury with a loving awareness. Im stepping on very thin ice if I were to say that is how Jesus healed. Anway, if Jesus did exist, it wasnt his invention. It is a natural human birthright, our ability to soothe each other, if we choose.
I may be speaking out of turn here because I was not ever soothed by him, although I believe I saw it happen to others. I believed thats what I saw on Day Two of the three day retreat with the man. I was touched by the people who gathered around him that day and how they trusted him with their deepest concerns and difficulties in life. They loved him.
Now we get to the woowoo part. I do not like this part because I do not understand it. All I do know is what I saw and that I am not the only one to have similar experiences around the man, or whatever he may be.
It was afternoon, day three. I was sitting on the floor leaning into a backjack looking up at the man on the stage. Perhaps I was tired. Perhaps I had been staring too long. All in a flash, the man disappeared and sitting in his place was a huge monkey, made entirely of gold, wearing gold armour and radiating gold light in all directions. I elbowed my husband. Did he see anything? No.
I couldnt speak for the rest of the day and into the night. Lying in bed I finally drew up some courage to tell my husband what I had seen. Planet of the Apes was the only reference I could pull up with my pluck, but whats with the brilliant radiation?
It sounds like Hanuman, he said. The Hindu deity of devotion. I fell asleep with a plan to research this character the next day. What I found out made an impression. He symbolizes the human excellences of inner self-control, faith, and service to a cause…Hanuman is considered to be the purest of gods, devoted to his master.
How is it possible to be looking at a motor-head wannabe guru and suddenly be seeing a Hindu god, one I had never seen nor heard of before?
Comments please.
A projection of the collective Self for sure. Everything is. The hologram of the Self is an infinitely creative phenomenon moving seamlessly between good and evil displaying everything in between with equal conviction. Without discrimination the spectrum swift quickly from what appears to be good to what appears to be evil and back again. Without discrimination because Self is simply the light of consciousness. In my profession as a transpersonal psychotherapist, I have one- on -one or group sessions doing therapy or facilitate meditation with my clients. There are times when my clients experience me as a Hindu goddess, pure light, an ancient woman of wisdom, alienlike etc. Archetypes in the collective consciousness basically. Am I that? Sure. I am also that. Are they that? Sure, they are also that. Do I experience myself as a Hindu goddess or other in the situation? No. When I look back at the state of consciousness that I was in, at the time my client or student had the vision, I see that I was being pure of self to some extent. Or simply being. And I am not talking about spiritual enlightenment or anything like that. My mind was simply empty, my heart was relaxed and transparent, and I was here and now momentarily liberated from self - seeing the other as same. Or seeing no separation. Another way of saying it is that I was open and empty. And my client was open and relaxing his or her familiar sense of self. Trusting and receptive to the larger field of consciousness or to the collective Self. After years of meditation and prayer, I can go to Point zero as I sometimes like to name it. Like a sponge I, minutes and hours after embodying stillness once again absorb the waters of self and ego, forget and swim with delight or dislike, in what I once thought was me: feelings, thoughts, body sensation, needs and wants, boundaries, desires, beliefs, convictions etc. This aware consciousness – this body mind fluctuates between formless and form. Sometimes deliberately, other times spontaneously. Some master somewhere once said that if what we experience comes and goes it is not It. The Golden Hanuman appeared and disappeared. Why? It is likely that you ran into Hanuman in your time in India? Very likely. Hanuman is everywhere in the motherland of Spirit and JDR can sit as an empty screen on which one can project all things. He has developed some level of psychic abilities because he enjoys control. Jess, I am full of respect for you. You inspire me. Thank you. I can only encourage you to keep investigating this mystery. In my doing just that I encountered a quote from Nisargadatta. “ I am not talking to an individual. It is consciousness itself that must seek its Source.” This is the direction of this heart/body/mind. And might I ad that it is fascinating when we encounter a deity in the other or in ourselves. I believe that this divine encounter prepare us to finally see that we are this Love 🙏🏻❤️Namaste.
How, you ask, can you see Hanuman before you like that? It seems extraordinary, but quite easily explained as a projection of your Self. I believe we are always and only observing and interacting with fractured holograms; mirrored images of our collective Selfhood. There is no truth with a capital T other than one end of a spectrum that turns out to be a snake eating its tail, or perhaps I should say, tale.
One day you're enamoured and then something flips and you're repulsed. What flipped the switch? What opened you up to seeing the god of devotion? Why the need to judge yourself so harshly? How can we stand upon empty space, point fingers and decide which end of the snake is real, or good, or wrong, or evil?
(We can and do imagine ourselves to be standing on solid ground, it certainly feels that way to our senses.) Personally, I've seen too much to believe this snake to be anything but phenomenon eating phenomenon. Swinging swords at it won't kill it, neither will examining it scale by scale explain it. You said it; "I am here. In this moment. I remind myself of this often, or rely on others to do so. I am here. In this moment. The only safe place (is) now." That is the practice and the reason. The substrate of the sub stack, and both are simultaneously here now. Congratulations, you've found the contents of the container.