Sailing into the Kingdom on a Magic Carpet of Sound

The beloved spiritual master, A.C, Bhaktivedanta wrote a book called “Easy Journey to other Planets”. Although I have never read the book, I know what it’s about because I came into the same reality by another route and that’s what I want to talk about tonight. That book, the title of that book, has been running through my head for weeks now. It keeps coming up. Sometimes I see the book cover in my mind when I close my eyes.

So many seriously strange things have happened to me in this life that the present, regular appearance of inexplicable phenomena is just more of the same. It’s strange now? It’s always been strange. The intensity and landscape vary but supernatural coffee is always percolating underneath the stage sets.

Before I went on my internet free journey I had begun doing the Hare Krishna-Hare Rama chant. It gradually increased its presence and replaced the Tara Chant which had previously replaced the Ganesha chant. It wasn’t long before I began to notice the particular power of the chant and also that it was much more personally in tune with me than the others.

All of my life I’ve been searching for the divine, even when I didn’t know what I was searching for. It’s led me for a period of time into just about every religious tapestry. One thing remained true through it all. The Eastern Traditions proved to be a more comfortable fit.

I wonder sometimes about Christians. I believe that Jesus was the son of God and I believe in what he had to say. As far as the miracles and the rising from the dead, that’s easy. I know God can accomplish anything. Rising from the dead is small potatoes in relation to what the divine is capable of. If we knew what we were capable of we would very quickly find ourselves deeply committed to seeking union with the divine.

I don’t see where any of what is said here conflicts with Jesus Christ. There’s an important thing that I think is generally overlooked and that is that the Bible does not contain everything that happened. People think the story is complete. It’s very much incomplete. Jesus went missing in the book for 17 years. It’s not a wrong assumption to believe that there’s a lot more to the story than what’s on paper.

Believing that the Bible contains everything is a limiting condition. It confines us to only what is written down and cuts off reflection upon the immeasurable possibilities of the divine. Do you catch my drift? There’s an unconscious assumption across the board that it all got written down. It didn’t.

This is why one will never realize the divine unless they go within where it all is. The body is a grave that conceals a spark of light. In our lives there is a period of time that we are given to connect with this light. This is the purpose of life. It has no other purpose. The divine experiences and realizes itself in the human state. If you don’t connect to the light during the time period; the length of your particular cassette, you get recycled. You might get recycled anyway but after a different fashion. “We shall not all die but we shall all be changed”.

I remember Christians coming up to me with a messianic gleam and asking me if I was saved. I would reply, “Yes” because it happens to be true. That was too easy for them and so they had to dissect the elements of my salvation. This inevitably led to my not being saved, according to them. There were some very specific agreements and understandings that had to take place. I was in agreement and understanding of all of them, according to the way I interpreted the meaning. This would lead inevitably to finding something, somewhere, somehow that indicated that I was not saved. It reminded me of lawyers looking for case histories that they could enter into evidence or present to the judge to show precedence, only in reverse; if that makes sense (grin).

You look at the word Christ and the word Krishna and it’s a no brainer. I can find parallels for nearly everything in Eastern thought that Western thought presents. During the night of my kundalini awakening, I remember looking at some western pen and ink pictures on the wall. They were of knights on horseback. As I looked at them they morphed back and forth from West to East and I was given to understand in no uncertain terms that they are the same, only differing in appearance. This is what everyone argues about... appearances.

The divine is invisible but we can see it in operation all around us should we choose to. We can see, convincingly, the total absence of God or the total presence of God depending on what we prefer to believe. In my own case, I have had so much direct experience that it’s beyond doubt, yet... I still experience doubt and separation every single day. I’m learning that these conditions automatically present themselves at regular intervals and our job is not to attach to them; not to think that the doubt and separation are our own. Everything that comes into our minds is not born of our being. There’s only one mind and these thoughts are fishes that swim in it. They travel all over the world and enter into every head. A master is subjected to this just as we are but it doesn’t affect.

Everything real and enduring is built out of love... Love is the key to success in anything and everything; loving what you do makes it come alive. Loving another makes both of you glow. The enemy of love is selfishness. We learn to be selfish. Life shows us the practicality of it and implies we would have much less without it.

Chanting, for me, is a way of weaving a magic carpet. Like a real carpet, it takes time and industry. Eventually you can ride that carpet to other worlds. I am not the only one to discover this. Other readers here know this. Love holds the particles of the carpet together and the sound current is very much like a highway ocean you sail on... vibrate over... swim along.

Personally I have no beef with anyone. Smoking Mirrors is an enigma to me but then I realize that it’s a kind of bait for this place. This place has, all along, gotten 10% of what Mirrors gets. Of course, Mirrors gets linked much, much more but still... that’s the way it goes. The general interest is much more upon the operation of the world than the operation of the divine, even though the world is just a small extension of it.

When one chants one can travel on a carpet of sound to the land of one’s focus. I remember two years ago... one afternoon during a meditation that lasted several hours that I found myself looking into a long and very large corridor that ended in a brilliant light. The light seemed to be an entity but I could not distinguish him. There were shapes and forms all around it and they grew brighter the closer they were to the light. I hovered there on the edge of seeing but never actually seeing. Still, it was an impressive period and a memorable experience.

As we dig deeper into the dirt and darkness of ourselves, we create a larger and larger opening through which the light can pass and also illuminate our progress. Some have to dig harder and deeper than others and those are the ones who are less inclined to dig; for some reason it works like that, the same way that more talents got added unto that particular servant in that particular parable.

I look at chanting and devotional practice as power tools and even when using real power tools, which I do most days, I imagine that they are also being applied to a similar end, regardless of the actual project I am engaged in. It seems fruitful to me to turn every activity into an act of celebrating and recognizing the presence of the divine. No doubt there are other modalities but these serve here for the moment.

In the tension and uncertainty of the times we should not forget that immense blessings of awareness are being conferred to those who put themselves in a position to receive them and there are other blessings too. Personally, I can't visualize doing anything else. Everything else is ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

Visible sings: ♫ Every Day ♫
'Every Day' is track no. 11 of 11 on Visible's 2001 album 'God in Country'
Lyrics (pops up)



The New Shangri-La.