Enlightening Nonsense

As a cave-sitter the worst that generally happens to you is that your ass will fall asleep and then you stand up, do the Hokey-Pokey and turn yourself around–because that’s what it’s all about–and you’re good to go; there is also the possibility of dying of boredom. Living in New York City I am provided with more pains-in-the-asses than the most perfectest cave on the most beautifulest mountain could provide and there is absolutely, positively no chance of dying of boredom. That being said, last weekend provided me with some serious difficulties and a part of me did wish to be teleported to a cave in the Himalayas for some rest and relaxation, or alternatively, pins and needles and boredom, oh my!

It started by me sharing with a girl that I was willing to risk opening myself to her more than the tight oyster shell that you pick up and after a few shucking attempts say, “Ah fuck it, there’s probably not a pearl in there anyway!” and being likened to a toxic waste problem where her solution wasn’t the simple big corporation plan of “Just ship it off to some Third-World country” but instead to fire me from the production plant altogether [See "You Can't Pee In The Same River Twice for a more in-depth coverage on how I became the Toxic Avenger.] This was followed almost immediately by what was planned as a nice walk and dinner with my parents turning into Satan occupying my body and my head turning in 360 degree circles and spitting pea soup on everyone in the vicinity. “Is there a fuckin’ open cave anywhere here??”

Sitting an hour basking in the lovely live sounds of Xion and his flute and vocalizing helped to pull some of the corrosive battery acid that had built up in my unused electronic heart for so long it had fused it’s white powdery poison to the compartment and coily-metal conductive piece, bringing to the forefront the question, “Should I just throw out the whole thing or is it salvageable and worth storing for another year on the shelf without being used?” I now felt somewhat less like killing my parents, and the man asking the time, and the lady walking slowly, and the garbage can that just sat there overflowing with its own putridity forcing on me his teaching with “It doesn’t look to good spilling out your garbage on everyone else, does it?” But since nothing of good cheer had replaced all the exiting poisons, I felt a bit empty, as if I were in a devil-worshipping club and just then over the system in an eerily-low voice it was announced,“Satan has left the house!” and you feel like, “So now what’s the point in even being here?” And so it was late and that needy dog of mine needed a walk (“Is it always about you, Bandhi?” “Uh, sorry, just thought your sour mood might not be enhanced by me shitting in the house, asshole.”)

I walked along Crack Alley Pass, a place where I usually encounter drug addicts who “Swear to God!” that they came to the city with just enough money for a one-way ticket and now, who would have thunk it, find themselves in need of money to get back home and can I help them out. Even the drug addicts knew to give me space (“Dude, stay away from that crabby guy with the dog–it’s not even worth getting a fix!”)

There were a group of people standing in the center of the sidewalk in a circle and as I passed I heard one of the woman say to another woman, “You have the voice of an angel!” The angelic one was big and black and whether it was angel wings or rolls of fat under her jacket, I figured if she couldn’t fly she could probably sing, at least that’s what racist propaganda has taught me about fat black women. I enjoyed the little scene in a somewhat detached way, like having the T.V. playing in the background as you go in the other room to take a piss, not directly involved but somehow feeling better that some actors are being employed because of my Con Edisonial support. And then I made the mistake of turning back.

I went up to the circle and, like the Hora at a bar mitzvah, I had to try and figure out how to weezle myself in while not breaking up the rhythm of the dance and at the same time pray to a God that I didn’t believe in that I didn’t get stuck holding the arthritic sweaty hands of great-great-grandma Oldy and dusty-dusty-dead Uncle Soiled. My first few “Hi. Uh hi. Hello? Uh, hey there”s went unnoticed–or ignored, but I prefer to see the cup as half-full instead of containing just enough liquid to tease you and leave you forever unsatisfied. Finally I got a handful of Oldy and Soiled.

“Hi. I hear you sing like an angel. Will you sing for me?”

My fat black angel looked at me and said, “I’m done singing,” and turned back to her circle, leaving me to either flap my feet and do a few Russian knee-bend and kicks like a centralized dance soloist or slumber myself back to my chair and think to myself, “Fuck the Hora and all those Jew bastards!”

I was not out of the circle just yet. “I didn’t mean any offense. I just had hoped to hear you sing.” 

She looked back at me almost like she remembered page 63 or Emily Post’s Rules of Etiquette on “How To Engage With A Person That You’d Rather Die Instead Of Have To Talk To” and said something like, “No offense taken. Now fuck off,” and I made a note to myself to call up the Estate of Emily Post and give them all a collective “Fuck you.”

One of the other street whores–I mean, “Hora-ers”–realizing that it was hard to keep the false image alive that their angel was anymore than a fat bitch with a nice set of pipes without a serious save, said to me, “It’s just been a long week.” I felt like saying, “It’s been a fuckin’ longer weekend for me and I was thinking about killing myself until I heard that I was in the presence of an angel who could lift my spirits and then she opened her mouth and now instead of killing myself I’d like to kill the whole lot of you mother fuckers.” But according to page 87 of Emily Post: “When you feel like using the phrase ‘mother fuckers’, instead replace it with a more buffered phrase like ‘persons with whom I am currently having difficulty in dealing.” The problem is when I’m feeling sharp-edged I don’t want fuckin’ Emily Post or Fatty McClarence putting in a request for smooth edges.

The truth was, I was asking for her to sing to me because I needed to hear it. At that moment I needed to be reminded that there is beauty everywhere and you just have to open your fuckin’ eyes–I mean, your “sensory organs with whom you may currently be having difficulty in dealing”–to be reminded of this fact. Either that, or I wanted the “fat lady to sing” and for it to be all “over.” Instead I got some nightmarish rendition of a Grimm’s Tale version of “Tuck Me Into Bed”:

“Mommy, will you read me a bedtime story?”

“Sure honey, if that will make you feel better for when I leave the room and the monster underneath your bed comes out to eat you.”

I was seeking solace and union but instead found myself walking away pissed-off, alone and hating Jews.

The next day my dog wanted to go for a walk and when I looked at her in protest she said, “Don’t start that shit again”–and so I didn’t. I would say that she wears the pants in our relationship but most of the time she walks around naked. There are the rare occasions, like Halloween, where I put a stupid hotdog costume on her and parade her around the block like I think this exploitation is in anyway as cute as the sweat shops in China that come to mind anytime I look at a label for anything, like an American flag, and it says, “Made in China.” Needless to say, she is not amused.

I put on a homemade hat that I bought from a street vender for $25 solely because I thought it would get me laid, a big pair of headphones, and was dressed in my usual scraggly attire which was in perfect harmony with my scraggly beard. I was totally unapproachable and that is exactly what I wanted. Satan had left my body, along with some choice words pea-souped into my parents’ faces but I was still a little on edge. If someone asked me to sing for them I would probably have no choice but to cut them into small pieces–one of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” we use at Camp Gitmo, knowing full well that these never “extract” anything of use from a prisoner except maybe the acid-dipped pipe that was just shoved up their rectums, and are solely used to satisfy one’s own personal sadism (gee, “camp” was never as much fun when I was growing up!)

Unkempt, unpleasant, unapproachable…for the moment life seemed almost as simple as sitting in a cave. But the Universe is a mother fucker–I mean, “indefinable guiding force with whom I was currently having difficulty in dealing”–and she fucked with me like I was her Gitmo bitch. I would have been fine with that if I could have only cut her indefinable self into pieces; I might have even been willing to take the acid-pipe up the ass. Instead I was to leave in tears, confessing to crimes that occurred before I was even born.

The first person the Universe sent to me was a girl who commented on how lovely my dog was. I wanted to say, “Funny, she had just commented to me before you came over, ‘Do you think this girl is as stupid as she is ugly?’” but was still harboring a little emptiness from Satan’s sudden departure the night before without so much as a note saying he’d at least call me and didn’t have my senseless jerkhole program fully loaded by the time she approached. All I could come up with was, “I know kung fu,” which not only didn’t make sense but had me reciting not Samuel Clemens writing as Mark Twain, not Francis Bacon writing as Shakespeare–but Keanu Reeves, the worst thing to hit the screen since “I Spit On Your Grave,” which had an awesome title but the fact that an editor couldn’t figure out to trim a 15-minute boat ride scene with no dialogue makes you think that they really didn’t put too much energy into anything other than the title and collecting a few bucks from four high school kids who after a half-hour pulling off and putting back videos on the shelf of Blockbuster, one came across this film and said, “Guys, I found our movie.” I wish I said, “I know kung fu” instead and started punching and kicking in the store until I accidentally knocked down a display and we were all kicked out without picking a movie to rent and then I would have not spent the next couple of decades every time I make a suggestion with my friends questioning it with, “I don’t know…remember ‘I Spit On Your Grave’?” Remind me after my letter-writing campaign to the Estate of Emily Post to look up who produced that piece of shit movie and tell him to go fuck himself as well.

I think the Stupid Ugly Girl, who was neither stupid nor ugly but was certainly a girl, asked me what type of dog she was. 

“Mutt.” Bandhi looked at me aggressively and to prevent her unrabies-vaccinated self from biting my ass, I modified my answer. “I think she’s part lab and part Egyptian pharaoh.” I looked at Bandhi and sent her a telepathic message. “You happy now, you fuckin’ mutt?” She wagged her tail and the girl pet her and even my dark self was feeling a little lighter.

I went down to the fruit stand on 9th Avenue between 43rd and 42nd Street, the only stand in New York City where you can get four bananas for a dollar. Every place else gives you five for the same price but I am a sucker for nonconformity and so I support this stand with my hard-earned dollars. Not that hard-earned, mind you. If it required too much hard work I would probably cut Bandhi’s food from one meal a day to one every other day and put myself back in the easy lane, that fuckin’ mutt.

Since I do come here fairly often and usually buy about twenty bananas at a time, the Fruit Stand Guy is always very pleasant to me. One time when I got home I thought he might have short-changed my banana count. “Let’s see…you have 24 bananas…you put 6 in a shake…while you are blending the shake you eat a couple of more…you eat a few nuts with the bananas but that has no relevance to the math problem at hand and is there solely to distract the less-focused mind…oh shoot, I forgot to add the bunch of cilantro to the shake…” I finally decided it wasn’t worth the brain strain and that I probably just suck at math.

As I was approaching the stand, another woman was eyeing my dog with adoration. I think she said something but I didn’t respond, instead I hid behind my headphones in the anti-social way we have been conditioned with our iPods and cel phones and our electronic version of Emily friggin’ Post flashing across our new “Oprah’s Favorite Toy!”, the Amazon Kindle. I had my dog sit while I turned the tape over on my old technology audiotape Walkman, which I was using to say, “Sure I’ll shut off from human interaction, but I’m not going to do it your way, damn you!” She still stood there and I still ignored her.

I saw my friend the Fruit Stand Guy, who really wasn’t the kind of friend I would invite to my apartment for a cup of tea or anything, but a friend in the sense that he was someone who I never shared anything too deep with, on occasion gave him money, and always left thinking, “I wonder if I could do better.” I guess he was more like a lover than a friend.

“Three dollars in bananas.”

“That’s it?” he asked.

I thought about telling him that I had a week before rent was due and was about $1000 short and that one more dollar of bananas would probably have me coming to him next week homeless and looking for a job, instead of buying his fuckin’ cheap-ass fruit. Still a bit too empty for that, but I was slowly lighting up.

“Just fill the bag, fucker.”

The woman who was watching my dog longingly finally left. I got my bananas and started to walk back uptown. I then turned around and ran towards the Dog Stalking Lady. She was standing on the sidewalk by the street, holding some plastic bags, hair about as unkempt as mine, and not quite on the corner of 42nd Street, which would imply that she might not be planning to cross the street and instead was just homeless, crazy or foreign, or some combination of the three.

I said to her, “Did you want to meet my dog?”

She nodded and said yes. My dog, always the good sport, that is when she’s not working on her hobby of chewing up my personal items and re-gifting them to me proudly on my arrival home as some newly-structured item now made totally dysfunctional, rubbed her body into the Crazy Foreign Bag Lady’s legs and sat down at her feet. The Crazy Foreign Bag Lady melted and pet my Dr. Jekyll dog who would wait until we left to turn into Mr. Hyde and tell me, “Did you smell that Crazy bitch? I mean, I stick my nose in other dog’s asses and even I found her maloderous.” And after a few rubs, her rubbing my dog and me rubbing against her leg, we were off.

I reflected on my walk home that we all have gifts. My gift is with words. Bandhi’s gift is to fool people into thinking that she’s not a monster. The gift of the Fat Black Angel was to sing beautifully for eight performances a week on the Broadway stage and in between attending to her adoring fans on the sidewalk still manage to be a heartless bitch. Yet somehow all of us still have the ability to raise another’s spirits.

I have said in my teachings before that we should each get in touch with our gifts and unwrap them and share them with the world. Before this past weekend I emphasized that this was our birthright and that this was the way to make the world a better place, that by sharing all of our gifts the world would magically transform into, if not Heaven on Earth than at least Christmas–a beautiful opportunity for everyone to feel connected and loving except for Jewish children who have to face their friends whose parents gave them the new Nintendo Wii and explain to them that a bag of fake gold coins that are really chocolates is somehow comparable.

But I realized that one way this would make the world a more Christmassy place [I must sidetrack to tell you that my spellcheck actually acknowledges "Christmassy" as a word!] is to help share gifts with the people who really need it–those poor Jewish kids who have finished their chocolate coins and all they have left is some gold foil to show for it. That a gift held onto and not shared freely is really not a gift at all. Like a chest full of gold and jewels that we bury with us like Egyptian pharaohs and serves no one, except some corporate entrepreneurial whores who are marketing chocolate jewels to be bagged and tagged and sold to guilty Jewish parents who know their kids are getting royally screwed each December. Perhaps it’s time to unwrap your gift and give it away. You may just prevent a sidewalk killing spree.

REFLECTION:

What are your gifts? Do you share them with others or do you hold onto them? Why are you holding onto them? Is it because you feel insecure about them and don’t fully acknowledge them as gifts? Or is it because you’re a selfish fat black bitch who “had a long week”? I have met a TON of people who are either great singers or musicians or have some other talent and are embarrassed to share their gifts. What selfish fucks!

MEDITATION:

Imagine you have a gift in a box and you give it to another. It is a magic gift and when you give it away it seems to multiply and still remain in your hands. Notice that the more you give your gift away, the more solid the gift feels in your hands. See one of the receivers walking away with your gift in his hands, smiling broadly, and then the gift dissolving from his hands and filling the darkness that had temporarily took residence in his heart and replacing it with light. Know that when you give your gift away, it is never really lost–only enhanced. Know, too, that the more you give your gift away, the more it disappears from the hands of others and yourself…and the more it fills hearts.

I am not always forthcoming about my personal affairs. Partly because I follow politics and saw what happened when Gary Hart and Bill Clinton didn’t keep their “affairs” in order, or at least their dicks in their pants. But also because I am finding my comfort level between self-exploration and exploring with others.

In sexual analogy terms: perhaps I am worried that if I fuck with someone else it will screw up my masturbation sessions. But there is more to life than jerking-off (although there are a few people I talk to that don’t seem to think so) and, if for no other reason than ease in clean-up, sometimes it is useful to explore with others (I’ve done yoga for years and still can’t stick my tongue up my ass without needing a serious chiropractic adjustment the next day!)

As much as I bullshit others, which I try not to do too often, I never intentionally bullshit myself. If I steal something from a store, I don’t say, “But they overcharge anyway!” I say, “I’m a thief–and I can live with that.” If I lie and manipulate another in order to get them into bed I don’t say, “Well, I know what’s best for her!” I say, “Yoga is about seeking ‘union’–and I just found greater union with all the jerks who think with their dicks and not their hearts.”

I have created a certain mystique around the character of “Swami X” and a large part of that was because I saw a bigger gameplan, that this would facilitate getting the messages out that want to come through me in the forms of books, appearances, teachings, etc. I knew I wasn’t “Swami X” and I knew of the potential trappings to start thinking I was: a cheap multi-personality drama, probably starring Keanu Reeves as me if Satan was directing things. I was aware of all of this. And I felt like I had it under control.

But then there were points where working to build this character got in the way of just being me. Separating the “me” who walks my dog and meets people with the “me” who teaches yoga and meets a different group of people, or the “me” who goes to the health food store and knows and jokes with all the workers and the “me” who goes to New-Age and Raw Expos and Festivals and plays my character–it started to become a pain in the ass compartmentalizing all the “me”s!

Because our education system didn’t fully succeed (according to Reagan’s Educational Secretary, Charlotte Iserby, in “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” and John A. Stormer in “None Dare Call It Education”) at making me completely dysfunctional and believing in Communist principles and dependent on a Master government to wipe my ass before I put on my pants in the morning, like a skilled clown, I was still able to juggle these balls of “me” without letting them drop on the floor and then having to rely on my comic facial expressions to cover the fact that I’m a shitty juggler. 

That is, until someone from one “me” category wanted to jump into another “me” category. Then it got all screwed up and even Al Gore couldn’t take a hit of American controlled Afghanistan opium and in his high believe, once again, that he invented the Internet, and help me to figure out how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Or according to the “Two Worlds Colliding” Theory of George Costanza when discussing how his wife, Susan, wanted to go out with him and his friends, “A George divided against itself cannot stand!”

So when one girl who knew me as “Swami X” wanted to get to know me more intimately–and I don’t just mean carnally, you perverts–I held out on telling her my “real” name. And then I self-reflected. And I finally saw that much of my juggling of “me”s was an avoidance of allowing myself to take my hands off my balls and take a risk that I was funny enough just being a clown.

Now I’m one who will talk to homeless crack addicts, who will walk in Central Park in dark areas at 1:30 in the morning, who will have “discussions” with police that usually end up with me in handcuffs (you know the old phrase, “Win the argument, get sodomized in a jail cell.”) But I became painfully aware that I was hiding behind “spirituality” and “self-exploration”–that I was basically jerking-off, perhaps for fear of prematurely ejaculating–and so when this girl expressed that she wanted to know more of Who I Am, I finally decided that if I blew a load in my pants before we even got to the bedroom that I was good with that. And so I shared with her not only my birth name but my willingness to risk exploring more.

And with that I received a one-paragraph email response that said:

“…I believe that you and I would create a very toxic relationship. Therefore, in efforts to skip a chapter in life in which I don’t care to be a part of nor subject anyone like yourself to, I resign from communicating with you…”

Wow! Even Abner Luima would ask for another poke up the ass with the broom handle than to receive that kind of treatment!

It confirmed what I knew to be the case: that she was enamored with the character that she met at the Rawspirit Festival and when I told her my birth name it was like going to Disney World and seeing Mickey Mouse banging Minnie in a back alley–kind of destroys the whole theme park fantasy (unless you’re into bestiality, I suppose.) What was so telling was that her email even addressed me as the character name and not the birth name, almost like she had to hold onto the fiction to keep her George’s undivided.

It was as if I just told her that the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote were not real animals but a cartoon depiction and she was like, “No, they’re real–I saw them on my television set!” There was just no point in explaining that not only doesn’t a coyote have the vocal cords to speak English, the scientific know-how to design elaborate plans to construct rockets and bombs to catch and/or kill the Road Runner, nor the finances to pay for said bombs and rockets from the Acme Company–who would probably not send rockets and bombs through the Postal Service unless one showed them an official Haliburton I.D. card or one from one of their other subsidiairies, like Al Qaeda–and even if this coyote was the one in a quadrillion that did have all this going for him, defying all odds against an education system that was designed to teach him not to think beyond, “Me hungry. Road Runner food,” he could still not take a 2000 foot plunge off a cliff–multiple times–and live.

I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t hurt. But my hurt was not just the typical “feeling rejected” sort of hurt. It  was more due to my immediate association of the word “toxic” with the classic horror movie “The Toxic Avenger,” in which a nerdy high school kid who was constantly being bullied is finally thrown into an open container of toxic waste, that only Homer Simpson and his crew could have been so irresponsible as to leave open and outside a high school. And while I used to enjoy the thought of this deformed creature taking revenge on his tormentors with his new-found strength and psychosis, now I could only think of him as a boy who had so much to offer the world but because of pre-judgements and the inability to shed his “toxic” image, he would forever be seen as a monster–and unable to get a girl until the sequel, “Toxic Avenger 2.”

I knew she had fallen for a fiction and yet I believed that she would find an authentic “me” much more attractive than any storybook character I could create. I had broken down a barrier to let her into my sanctuary and I found myself coming home to a temple where all the light statues were stolen and the heavier ones were pissed upon. My House of Worship had turned into a House of Urine, to bastardize a Jesus line from “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

I wanted to be mad at her, for betraying a trust, for throwing salt on the slug that was in the center of my chest where a heart should have been. But as much as I tried, I could see the bigger picture and, as always, I was left saying to the Universe, “Well played, Universe. You won this round. But I’ll be back, I tell you. I’ll be back! Hoo-hoo-ha-ha!” The Universe had held a mirror up to my face and said, “Put on your yoga poser pancake as thick as you want–that’s still a zit over there.” (Great, now you all know I wear pancake!)

The real lesson was about me staying in the safety of my self-created cocoon and calling my hibernation “spirituality” when my wings had already fully formed and it was time to flap my butterfly ass out of there. The typical person would clip his wings and blame the other for now being a kind of weird wingless butterfly who can’t fly like he should be able to and can’t crawl like the caterpillar he once was and will probably be eaten by a bird within a day or two, that is, if the bird is not too confused as to what the heck he is and decides to shit on him instead. I’m not your typical butterfly and won’t choose to cripple myself in self-pity. I am going to acknowledge that these wings were made for flyin’ and if I have to fly solo for a bit, it will be with a more expansive view of the world than I had locked inside a cocoon in safety…but also in darkness.

I shared the saying of Hericlitus with this girl several times before she gave me the hemlock, “You can’t step into the same river twice,” not just because I thought it was often relevant and would make me appear smart but because she couldn’t seem to grasp the meaning, instead thinking that it meant that while Calgon was the “ancient Chinese secret” (according to the commercial), stepping in a river twice was the ancient Chinese curse.

What it means is that the water is always changing and that if you step into the river once, and then step in the exact same spot ten seconds later, the water where you first stepped will be replaced by a whole new set of water molecules; that the river is constantly changing. Likewise in our lives, with the myriad of different life experiences and relationships and learnings we’ve undergone and undergo each day, you can’t really have the same experience twice. Going back to sexual analogy: you can only be a virgin once and once you get laid–even if it is by the blacksmith from the bad family down the way and so you lie and tell everyone you were impregnated by God–you can no longer be a virgin, no matter how many believers in fairy tales read about your immaculate conception forever after. 

So a girl who was married and divorced twice, once to a person she didn’t love but figured, “What the hay, it’s only marriage!” and another time to a guy who would disappear for days at a time on “Vision Quests,” which is fake Native-speak for “I’m freaking out and need to run away for a few days without telling you where I’m going or when I’ll be back”–labels me “toxic” for saying, “Hey, I’m willing to risk seeing where this goes.”

That’s like someone who had Hitler as her first husband and Stalin as her second telling Dudley Do-Right kneeling before her in proposal position, “I think you’re a monster and want to avoid getting involved.” You would think my self-reflectory ways and willingness to share even difficult feelings would take me out of the “Killed Twenty Million People Between Them” category. I’m not saying I’m not a prick but I would probably tell my significant other where I was disappearing to if I went on a “Vision Quest,” and most probably it would only be to the health food store to buy bananas for one of my shakes.

So I snuck back and pee’d in her river. Unfortunately for me, by the time she stepped in the river again it was already clean. Damn that Hericlitus!

REFLECTION & MEDITATION:

Think to a time when you were enamored by someone else; maybe it is even presently. What was it that interested you? Were you in love with the idea of “being in love”? Or was there some quality about that person that was the interest of your attention: “He is honest”; “She is loyal”; “He is good-looking”; “She has a nice ass”? Were you emphatuated with the quality or the being beyond the quality? Is the perceived quality Who They Are? Is it real heart-felt love or a cerebral construction fueled by your desire? Has any of your past “loves” really been more than emphatuation and a desire to step into a fairy tale? Think back to when you ever pushed away from someone. Was it because of love and self-respect for what you needed…or was it because of fear?

I responded to her “toxic” email that I didn’t think we would be a match made in Heaven either, that her energy was a bit too frantic for me at the moment, but that I was willing to risk exploring further to see, if not how close we could grow in a relationship, then how close I could grow in comfort with expressing my Authentic Self.

Imagine yourself face to face with someone you love and unsure of how they feel about you. Imagine telling them that you are willing to give your heart and soul to them and they respond, “Uh, thanks but no thanks.” How do you feel? Now imagine their response is instead, “You had me at ‘hello’!” How do you feel (besides ripped-off that they stole that line from “Jerry Maguire”)? If your goal is living and loving fully–no matter what the risk–then either response would bring you closer to joy; if your goal is a fairy tale love then only the second response would bring you joy.

Nothing wrong with reading a fiction book (like one involving an “immaculate conception.”) It’s when you place it back in the Non-Fiction section that you are living in denial–and you’ll piss the librarian off as well!

A mantra is a set of words that sounds like gibberish but is supposed to have the power to connect you to whatever is specific to the mantra, whether an aspect of humanity as represented by a particular god or maybe your ability to master the sciences. During the Second Level initiation from Babaji’s kriya yoga you choose and then are initiated into a mantra. 

When my teacher, Govindan, asked me which mantra I had chosen I told him that the Saraswati mantra was definitely the call, as she is a goddess that helps one connect to his creativity and that is the most important aspect through which I care to express my Self. “But,” I told him, “Money has been an issue and a stressor and so I was reflecting on the Lakshmi mantra for prosperity as well.”

If I had to choose just one it would definitely have been Saraswati, as I would choose the life of a starving artist pursuing his pure expression over a rich, sold-not-only-his-principles-but-his-soul, “successful” by today’s standards, businessman any day. But also given the choice, who wants to suffer and struggle besides the yoga poser who wants to shove this in everyone’s face to show how “pious” he is. And how can one even relax into his creativity if he doesn’t know if he is going to make rent or not? It’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs–”making rent” falling under both “Physiological” and “Safety” needs, the lowest two categories of his pyramid. Govindan initiated me into both; there was a part of me that knew he would.

I have repeated each of the mantras thousands of times over the years and have fallen in and out of favor with them, periodically thinking, “This is a bunch of bullocks!” (a clear language influence from watching English sit-coms in between BBC lies.) Times have been a bit tough financially and the other day I was doing the Lakshmi mantra when I interrupted this program for a test of the Emergency Broadcasting System.

“Lakshmi, when I do this mantra I feel a bit like a whining bitch asking for money.”

“‘You are just asking for support in order to live your heart.”

Okay, I could accept that. I started mantra-ing some more. Then: “What would happen if someone repeated the mantra in order to try and get something that wasn’t really from their heart? Like let’s say they just wanted to be sickly wealthy in order to buy things and control people and travel places–no heart. I guess I’m asking if Bill Clinton did the mantra, would it work?”

“No, not in the regard of the person receiving a bag of money to spend on extraneous items and bedding their secretaries. If their consciousness is not high enough to be in touch with their heart’s desire, the mantra can serve to help open them to what it is for which they really need support.”

“I thought that the Universe is always providing support for one in his heart-centered ventures.”

“It does.”

“So then why would you need this mantra.”

“You don’t…if you are in your heart.”

REFLECTION/MEDITATION

What is in your heart for you to do with your gift of life–not what makes sense for you to do, or what others think you should do, or what is your responsibility to do–what is in your heart? Write it down in words so it is finally clearly defined by you. This helps to “put it out there” and allows the Universe to get to work. The Universe is ready and willing to help you achieve everything your heart desires but will only meet you halfway. All you really have to do is be clear and live from your heart and she pretty much takes care of all the rest.

Imagine going through a typical day of yours, the only difference being that you are committed to living what is in your heart.