Was believing that I was somehow innocent.
At 21, coming out of a traumatic series of events where my brother-like cousin had made a flying seppoekoe into my garden, I went through a jungle like travel in the US where I got banged up pretty badly until an angel landed on my shoulder and whispered ‘why dont you go to California?’
So I cried and took the greyhound to LA. Okay this was something you have to imagine for a while. Being in a hole of shit in New Orleans with cockroaches everywhere and sweating so much that the whole mattress is soaked, reading Dostoyevsky and writing stories about … well lets not … well, so and then suddenly, out of nothing, the open Arizona skies. We step out at a Wendy’s in the middle of absolutely nothing, I get some M&Ms and a coke (I am on a diet of a traumatized dude) and do a Zen exercise around the back of the restaurant, and somehow attain a nirvana.
12 hours pass of which I have no memory, except enjoying a piece of food and being surprised at how comfortable these plastic benches can be to lie on.
As I leave LA it is storming, a rainstorm sweeps through the palmtrees on the rocky hillsides and the river is not the T2 chasms of hot concrete but an actual river so violent that it rips out of its bed into the air and meets with the rain. Being the last to arrive and the first in the bus, I took the front seat next to the driver, and talked with him all the way to San Fransisco about the miracles we both had witnessed. He told me of 3 times that death failed to get him. And of one time when he stood on Jim Morrison’s toe, only to be told don’t worry man, people came her to listen to my songs, not to stare at my feet.
It’s cold in San Fransisco. Grey, cloudy. The 7 hills appear like any other semiindustrialized shithole in the middle east.
I get picked up by the uncle of my best friend. That’s why California had such a ring to it. Not just that but mainly that; I have family there, somewhat.
I spend some days in safety. The typical American home. We go disco-bowling. I play no nintendo with the cousins, to my great amazement and disappointment. The uncle suggests a place for me to visit.
The Expanding Light.
Founded by Paramahansa Yogananda, or his first disciple Kryananda, a retreat in the Sierra Nevada where, for the measly tasks fo cooking and cleaning some dust, one can stay and take part in meditations of the most powerful kinds. If you have seen the movie Bruno, you have seen the guy that runs that placed; David. A good fellow who failed to be distracted or insulted by Sasha Baron Cohen, and whom I remember playing expertly the Harmonium, singing weirdly entrancing songs that I still remember with a freshness of heart. I must say, those guys were good.
But as time passed and I went home and I quit being vegetarian and I relinquished some of my routine and I became a normal person again I noticed I didnt turn into a normal person again. I wondered, all the time, what was missing. The end, the answer, is that somewhere down the line, between the searing heat in my traumatized heart and the blessings of the divine mother, something had tilted in me; the light of the world no longer refracted in me the same way; it somehow did no longer relate to the primary emotion I had always enjoyed. This emotion is rage.
I had started to believe that I was innocent. I had actually started to believe that. Which meant that all aspects of me that I could not reasonably consider innocent were repressed. Which resulted in a very thin layer of a personality. I developed a neurotic disorder, and embarked on a path that, within some years, resulted in a cascade of catharses which is still after 12 years or so, ongoing. This false idea of innocence, once it had taken hold, is still somehow doing shit to me.
It is the least innocent phenomenon that I know of; the belief that I am innocence is the greatest cruelty ever inflicted on me; I am cruel, and I know it. I know it so I can control it. This is self-valuing. Knowing the inevitability of cruelty. What ultimately became my philosophy is an antichristian logic; no objective judgments of right and wrong can take place because it is a matter of the flesh; to thrive, one must simply build one what one is and has and is capable of and in terms of what one loves and with the gifts that are valued in the world and with the discipline of which one is capable, all this is measure and ratio of ones heart, or ribcage as the Greeks called that locus of passion.
Intelligence is the substance of durability. Our human intelligence is, sometimes, related to what takes place in our conscious minds. Usually it is merely the breathing, the beating of the heart, and moronic ideas make their paths in the waking mind that is excluded from making decisions, as the body is transported by economic necessity from cubicle to home to cubicle.
Anyone who calls himself innocent, or who wishes to forgive you without knowing what you have done, is insane. That I did not see this immediately for the grave atrocity that it is when I engaged it in the form of yoga was due to the nobility of these specific people, who truly weren’t wretched, cooked extremely well and built temples of splendid craft and proportion; I was eased into the belief without having to lose my aesthetic standards.
The Elder yogi Babaji says that a man with a strong heart could physically withstand the atomic bomb. No one believes that. But people believe that Jesus walked on water. Because he was another dude. Someone who was somehow innocent, and who somehow saw it in them, too. They didnt know how that could possibly be, but they ran with it. Why not? Easy sell. I can’t believe I fell for it.
