Last Sunday night, a woman living in Pueblo, Colorado, who is like a daughter to me, was told in her sleep, “God has stopped listening to people. Something will happen in three days.” I told Brenda that what she had heard sort of reminded me of what I was told in my sleep three nights before 911: “Will you make a prayer for a divine intervention for all of humanity?” I said I wondered if something equally jolting, or worse, was coming down?
Three days after Brenda heard that, the terrorist attacks occurred in Mumbai, India (formerly Bombay). Brenda said she felt the attacks all that day inside of her. Meaning, she felt like shit all that day. I said there had been other terrorist attacks in India, and this one seemed to me like just another. Therefore, I told Brenda, I did not feel moved to give it much consideration. However, I later myself wondering if the attacks heralded something bigger to follow, maybe even a world war. Then early this morning in a dream, Brenda came to me very upset that I was letting something big, dark and evil take me away from her. So I got out of bed at dark-thirty and started writing.
In the news, there is speculation that Pakistan aided the terrorists in the Mumbai attacks. As I recall my history reading, at one time Pakistan was part of India. After Gandhi was killed, the Indian Muslims demanded a separate nation and Pakistan was carved out of the northwest portion of India. Relations between Pakistan and India were never very good; there were ongoing border wars and saber rattling. So it wasn’t far-fetched to wonder if Pakistan had a hand in the Mumbai attacks.
However, it is not just Pakistan that India has been in border wars with from time to time. Of all countries in the world that China might truly fear, economically and militarily, it is India, whose population is second only to China’s. China could profit greatly from a major war between Pakistan and India. Collateral benefits to such a war, depending on the prevaling winds, might include nuclear fallout destroying al-Qaeda along the Paki-Afghan border, the American military forces in Afghanistan, and any American naval personnel in the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.
Beyond all of that, you might say a little birdie told me to write that India might wish to look to China as an outside instigator of the Mumbai attacks.
Perhaps somehow related, my sixth wife, Cathy, was traveling with me when my son-in-law found me in Costa Rica, as described in the two procceding posts. From Costa Rica, Cathy and I traveled to South Africa. While staying in Capetown, we booked air travel to Mumbai out of Durbin, via Mauritius lying east of Madagascar. We scheduled four days in Mauritius, a month in India
After two weeks in Capetown, we traveled over to Durbin, on the Indian Ocean side of South Africa. After settling into a backpackers (sort of like a hostel but in a private home), we went to the Indian Consulate and filled out the forms for visas. To commemorate going to India, we then went to an Indian restaurant near the backpackers. Cathy loved Indian food, once having been involved in and cooked for an ashram founded by an Indian yogi, Kirpal Singh, in Vermont, I think it was. However, after only a few bites, Cathy became violently ill and raced to the restroom and threw up. She came back to our table shaking, barely able to hold herself up. We left the restaurant with her leaning on me and went to the backpackers. She threw up and heaved for another hour, and was laid low and trembled the rest of that day.
Like Brenda today, Cathy was a shaman in training. As such, she absorbed the spiritual poison in what she was moving toward dealing with. She was told from the spirit that the sickness she was throwing up and heaving was India. Because of this, we rearranged our travel schedule, so that instead of spending four days in Mauritius and a month in India, we would spend a month in Mauritius and four days in Mumbai.
At the Mumbai airport, we caught a taxi into the city. We asked the driver if there was an inexpensive hotel near the waterfront, and he said yes. On the way to the waterfront we saw poverty that paled anything we had seen in the United States and South Africa. Looking out the taxi window, Cathy said all she saw in the air were serpents. She was like that, saw lots of stuff in spirit that I did not see. When I said they probably weren’t the nice playful kind of snakes kids watched on the Saturday morning cartoons, Cathy said, no, they were not those kind of snakes. Now we knew what had made her so violently ill in the Indian restaurant in Durbin.
Cathy and I spent a good bit of time strolling the waterfront in front of our hotel. The ocean was nasty looking. The only fish being caught were saltwater catfish. The air was filled with swarming flocks of aggressive black-and-white crows. They came to our table at the rooftop restaurant at our hotel, begging for and even trying to steal food off our plates. I saw a swarm of those crows in an online photo of the Taj Mahal Hotel smoking with fires from the recent terrorist attacks.
Cathy’s and my hotel was just a few blocks down the waterfront from the Taj. Our room cost us $50 per night. One day, we went into the Taj to look around. The receptionist at the front desk told us a room for two would cost us $1,500 a night. We saw quite a few Arabic men in sheik attire, guests.There was a bookstore in the hotel, and there I found a book about India, written by an Indian journalist then living in England. A woman with Hindu roots. While the author was upbeat about India’s future, Cathy and I were not. I wrote to the author and related Cathy’s experiences in Durbin and what she saw in the air from the taxi on the way to the waterfront in Mumbai. I said India’s future might not be so rosy as she imagined, and maybe the best course for India was introspection.
I don’t remember if I included in that letter a vision I’d had in Boulder, Colorado, in June 1995. If not, I should have, because it might have shown a way through what journalist did not seem prepared to face about her own country. Why the vision was given to me, I cannot say. I had never been to India. I had never had an Indian guru. But then, I had many visionary experiences in Boulder during the early and mid 1990s, which were far, far beyond my Alabama roots in this life.
THE GIFT
A man dreams of a young yogi meditating in the lotus position facing away from the sleeping man. Before the young yogi appear two cobras raised up, hoods flaired out. One cobra is white, the other black.
The white cobra says, “We came to you once before because you were innocent. You knew we brought a gift, but you thought you must choose between us and you chose me.”
The black cobra says, “We come before you again because you are wise.”
The yogi, now much older, weeps, chooses them both.
The sleeping man awakens, weeping.
While this vision might not mean anything to a non-Hindu, for an advanced Indian yogi the vision might mean a great deal. Advanced yogis view the cobra as the most sacred of all animals. To be bitten in a dream by a cobra is considered a huge blessing and a prophecy of good spiritual things to come. To have a black and a white cobra give themselves to you in a dream might be viewed by an advanced yogi as dying and going to heaven.
For me, not a yogi, not having had an Indian guru, having never been in India in this life, to have had that vision in Boulder, I can only imagine it was to prepare me for some future event I would be called to deal with. Otherwise, why would I later go to Mumbai and the Taj Mahal Hotel? I never go anywhere just to go there. Never.
Sloan Bashinsky, 30 November 2008