Riffin' On Vietnam

“Understand that as the mighty wind, blowing everywhere, rests always in the sky, all created beings rest in Me.” 9.6 Bhagavad Gita The Most Confidential Knowledge

It is the most confidential knowledge that as a vehicle, the concept of “God” is such that when explored in the abstract, it manifests/emanates with a specific form that addresses the serious social issues of the day in a way which, Itself, parallels the art of “testifying” in that it is simply an overt display, one which reminds you in its magnificence/uniqueness that all physical displays testify that all acts, spontaneous and willful, are locked within a transcendental-social framework which itself is redemptive/ensures the continued successful survival of all life-forms. That being said, while the comprehensive activity of the lifeforms the planet over are probably secretly coordinated, by the very frameworks which allow for potential actions to emerge, to be able to successfully deter, across time, all active threats to life, there still remains the acute phenomena of not having an immediate solution to a specific problem, and having very real consequences which emerge from such a fact. As such, I feel it’s important that we emphasize our earlier stated notion that a robust, active study of the concept of “God” (or “Infinity”) in the abstract seems to yield an emanation of God, whether via “wisdom” or even the occasional “spiritual experience” if you believe in the such, or come to, which  addresses the serious social issues of the day.

        My story is that I had a spiritual experience that truly defied my understanding…and attempting to wrestle some understanding from it, I took up a robust study of the Dharma. However, there was this thing with music festival and festival rituals and spontaneous…devastating storms. That was the primordial rumblings which forced a very serious academic study of Oriental spirituality in my life. Which rather quickly…and clearly… fulfilled my destiny at some level.

                I was many, many years in on the academic-wisdom path before I heard Joseph Campbell translate “Nirvana” as meaning “the place beyond the winds”, and I knew with a cold shiver how deeply it intersected the very storms that had been following me for years…while camping… while driving on the interstate…while at home…pounded and pounded, in dangerous ways…

                My ex girlfriends…knew about it. It hung out with them, too… hung over them… there was a woman, in her 30’s at the time, in Iowa…she’d show up during storms/if storm sirens went off. She had a key to my apartment but lived in a town nearly 40 minutes out. I’d just wake up to her hovering over me in bed….

                There was an incident at a public event on a small farm in Iowa in which a storm formed over us. They shut down music on the stage and forecasted a storm arriving within 15 minutes, and gave us shelter instruction, but within 45 seconds of the announcement, which cut a set short suddenly, a black cloud could be seen rolling over the miles of cornfield which touched the property to the East- it was a 60 mph headwind kicking up the dirt in the fields…

Coming towards us.

                When it hit the first easy-ups on the corner lot of the property, vendor displays, it sent an entire rack of wood-carved sculptures air-born. People ran for cover. I was beckoned over to the easy up over the soundboard, to attempt to secure it in place with 5 other men. We took corners and hunkered down. Nearby, the winds picked up 2 porta potties amongst a row…one entirely went airborn to quickly turn on its side and land on the ground again…

                One of the men, the owner of the soundboard, was over 300 lbs. The others were burly. At one point, one got flat freaked out by wind noises and thunder in the distance, and he let go and ran away at full speed without saying anything. The sound guy would only tell us his stage name “Dj Buddha”. We nearly died that day. The soundboard made it. I had to dry out the iphone that had been in my pocket. I couldn’t move it to a different pocket out of the blowing rain because both hands were firmly holding the easy-up down the entire time.  

                It was not through the profound elegance of the Bhagavad Gita that I came to really overtly know in a visceral way the dominion of God…that the Universe is just some sort of Divine Emanation. It was through some really weird and witchy things that happened not far from the Keesey disciples running loose out there…but really it was everything.  

It also too wasn't a priest-class sort of awakening. It was a strange and random dinner roll tossed to any normal young man. The mystery came on evident, to just some dude. And that seemed to be the secret mystique of the whole esoteric hippie scene...the mystery manifest and building a culture of appropriate response to it...

                And when it brought me to that which utterly liberated me, which made a yogi out of me… it had brought me in such a way that I knew that my will, for whatever reason, some synchronicity pertaining to my destiny… that my will had dominion over the winds themselves. That along the way, in all of the melodramas, all of the strange days or long nights across my youth, somehow, in all the storms along the way, I’d truly been in the vicinity of a dragon. It consumed me… a billion times over… I died a hundred deaths, but far worse, lived a million lives across a couple hundred days… I’d known inexplicable physical anomalies… weird cadences so natural, and caught in the midst of something supernatural thriving just under the radars…

                I’d lived a good chunk of my life in a dragon’s lair. The dragon wasn’t my own but…the dragon had won real battles. The dragon had…killed my ex’s twin…killed a lot of my friends…reshaped the entire culture even (for the better)…it’d changed what it was to have a body and the sorts of things it could even feel.

                It forced us to survive. It.  

                I’d fought it…with a system, largely unrecognized…inherited notions of American Grafiti… the inherent sanctity of youth and rock n roll…my “personality”…my “identity”…

                But I’d slayed it with the Dharma.

                It seemed to have touched the entire world. Shaped it. Always to die.

                The lot of Man truly is to direct the cosmos with their will. Most of the populace does get to rest reliably on the very real notion that it will all work out across time, that no single person can have it all figured out…but we do need to be able to figure out some of the very real issues facing us…and no, we can’t rely on an unseen conspiracy of super-elite, super-intelligent types who will simply roll out a solution…somehow this is a societal thing, some of these issues facing us. The real solution that can be implemented within the frameworks that exist today as they are is effective spirituality. As in…if you are crazy enough to believe such a thing, there might be ways of framing the cosmos which make it pretty believable that a person could impact  any issue meaningfully by really turning it over to God and working it…

                For some reason, only a few cultures are doing this, and they are stereotypically of the East. The elites in the West know all of this…its in Western culture…but there aren’t enough things out there which are reliably instilling such revelations in such people socially…

                For some reason, the structured and safe (the legal) consumption of psychedelics…and anecdotally it seems that also the flagrant illegal and recreational use of them… seems to be spontaneously awakening individuals to such vantage points/world-views… these things have been culturally noted and yes its dangerous to report them because…it makes one want to try them, and doing as much is not worth the legal risk. They simply can’t be done safely in a culture which practices prohibition.

                But, it also occurs to me that if one wanted to responsibly or effectively deter people from turning to psychedelics for these things, they could yknow invest millions in Tibet House, U.S. or something along those lines…grow the culture.