Some frolicking on the conch farm yesterday.
First an email exchange with the former Chairman of the Southeasternmost Delaware Republican Party, aka a snowbird:
Thank God you didn’t include my name. I believe my analysis is right and yes you can always find exceptions to the rule. What seems safe is that most of the gays out of the closes are liberal and that conservative gays are more likely to stay in the closet than liberals. I believe my first broad statement is correct. Anyone can find an exception to anything.
God had nothing to do with it, Sultan. I didn’t use your name when I quoted you in yesterday’s ”Different Strokes” post because I didn’t want to have to explainn to your conservative RepubliKLAN friends that you are a friend of mine and get you blackballed from their cult. I know how important it is to you to be a RepubliKLAN – it’s sort of like being a DEMONcrat isn’t it? I mean, you have to sign up and pay dues and worship, don’t you? Rasputin.
Then, an email exchange with Ricard Mason, co-founder of Haulover Breach (Miami’s clothing optional beach). Richard is a Korean War veteran, which means he’s ancient. He’s also had his life threatened by church people he spoke with about the positives of naturism, especially clothing optional beaches. Wonder what Jesus thought of that?
Sloan,
When I was a young college student in Boston in the early 1950s, the word used to describe a person that was thoughtful and reflective on an issue, and one that examined the facts, and sifted through the ascertations; and that person was called ”liberal minded.”Since shortened to the word Liberal. Then the Conservative Sound Machine attacked those that used the thought process as being Lefties, Socialists, Commies and so on. We can’t have a people thinking about issues. They have to accept a proscribed position and fight.For those with a minority following, who’s premise is based on protecting the status quo, they have to have an enemy, so that they can declare war, which leads to generating support through “fear.” However, during this period, they have driven all the liberal minded conservatives who were moderate on most issues, either underground or out of the conservative movement. The rebranding of the word conservation has caused the word to mean something totally different than the definition preached by Goldwater.
Richard
Hi, Richard.
As I recall, Goldwater was so hard-right that he declined to criticize the John Birch Society. Or maybe it was Joseph McCarthy. Or maybe it was both. I remember when he was running for president that Goldwater said something along the lines of extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, to counter criticism that he was an extremist. Googling just now, I learned that he voted against the censure of Joseph McCarthy and against the Civil Right’s legislation, the latter of which caused him to be branded in league with the KKK and won him a number of southern states in his race against Lyndon Johnson who won the presidency by a landslide. Goldwater voted for the U.S. to stop giving money to the UN after it admitted Red China. He gets much credit online for being a Libertarian, and for long years of service in Congress and in the Army Air Corps during WW II, rising eventually to the rank of Major General, and for being instrumental in the creation of the Air Force Academy. He also was known as a proactive conservationist. When/where I grew up, Birmingham, Alabama, he was viewed as a radical extremist, a John Birch type, if not actually a member. And, yes, I learned from you a few months ago that he was a nudist.
I well remember my parents’ shock when I told them I was backing John F. Kennedy for president. I may have been the only student in the prep school I attended who backed Kennedy. I think Bill Clinton was a good president, except for his blunder with Monica Lewinsky. I think Jimmy Carter should have served another term, better after taking a few years off. I didn’t care for Reagan, but I respected him for being predictable. I concluded the Bushes were part of the Illuminati, which is a Nation unto itself. I am extremely under-impressed with Barack Obama and now with the Nobel Committee. I doubt I will ever use the nude beach, if Key West gets one, but I’m extremely in favor of having one here, for a variety of reasons. Different strokes for different folks.
Sloan
Then, some Facebook chatter with someone who looks sort of like the devil, or maybe it was just his Fantasy Fest costume.
Soundman from Hell
PG 13 it is ! Children under 13 years old are not permitted access to Facebook. In addition, parents of children 13 years and older should consider whether their child should be supervised during the child’s use of the Facebook site
Hi Gary! A friend of mine said: Be permiscuious (sp)? in your lifetime, because, if you aren’t, when you go to Heaven, God will ask you if you had a great sex-life in your lifetime, and if you say ‘no,’ God will say, ‘you can’t come into Heaven – go to hell!’
Pretty is as pretty does,
Soundman, how’s hell?
Been there a few times,
Actually more than a few,
Maybe it didn’t have nuttin’ to do with seven wives,
Maybe they all get to go to heaven
for having had to put up with me,
Maybe I won’t be penalized for not having enough sex,
But then, I ain’t had any in …five years (almost)
‘cept in my dreams.
Maybe God doesn’t send people to hell
but back to earth for another spell –
Maybe ’bout the same sometimes,
Not necessarily other times.
Iffen’s you wants to get some shapshots
of this here pilgrim’s travels with God
through heaven and hell and in between,
HABITAT FOR HUMANITY file
goodmorningkeywest.com –
Not recommended for children,
Probably not for adults either.
Sloan
Oh, David (Mr. Almost a Mayor)
You are a Trip!
Soundman
David?
David who slew the giant
with a sligshot made from
a cod piece and bungee cords
at Fantasy Fest?
Almost a mayor is
way, way too fucking close
for comfort –
I came in so dead last
nobody even came in second –
Without a runoff,
I landslide won!
My question you did not answer:
“How’s hell, Soundman?”
Or should I have asked,
“How in the hell is hell?”
Me, I’m trying be a good little boy,
Christmas’s coming,
Don’t want no switches and ashes
in my stockings –
A woman who thinks I’m cute and wonderful
will do,
I hope it’s mutual
and this isn’t another of those
“Be careful what you ask for” deals.
In this moment my hero
Wiley C. Coyote comes to my mind’s eye –
The poor creature,
All that thinking and scheming
and all he got for it was getting obliterated
time and time again.
Maybe this wall should be open to pre-13s,
Maybe it’s too deep, er, too late
for older people,
to do them, er, us any good.
Sloan
“SLOAN – LOL
Oh Sloan ,
(Mr. Almost a Mayor)
As you know it’s crazy in hell, just completed our Fantasy Fest Parade Float With ANGUS and won Best Band!
I’m a little frazzled – but still an ASPIRING Urban Terrorist!And……..
You are a Trip !”
Therefore, consider this next chapter in HABITAT FOR HUMANITY: Snapshots of a pilgrim’s travels with God.
CHAPTER 6
INDIA
From Mauritius, Cathy and I went to India. We had originally purchased airline tickets in Capetown, South Africa, that would give us four days in Mauritius and one month in India. Arriving Durban, South Africa on the Baz Bus, we decided to go to an Indian restaurant to commemorate our approaching trip to India, landing in Mumbai, formerly Bombay. When our food arrived, Cathy took one bite, got violently sick and raced to the bathroom and threw up. We left the restaurant and she had to stop and throw up again before we reached the backpacker’s where we were staying. This caused us to change our itinerary to one month in Mauritius and four days in India.
On arriving at the Mumbai airport and clearing customs, we caught a cab into the city. I told the driver we’d like to stay on the waterfront in a modest hotel, if possible. On the drive in we passed some pretty depressing scenes. I thought I had seen poverty in the shanty towns outside of Capetown, but this was much more severe. Cathy said all she saw in the air were serpents. She had that kind of spirit vision, which matched her spirit hearing. I said I bet those weren’t the kind of nice snakes children see in the Saturday morning cartoons. She said, no, they were not those kind of snakes.
Not too long after Cathy and I met, she went through cataclysmic healing of the incest with her father, mentioned in an earlier chapter. Not long after that, she had a dream in which her Indian yogi from before I knew her, Kirpal Singh was his name, I recall, sitting in the lotus position in the air above her head, sucking her energy up out of her into him. When she told me the dream, I said that needed to stop. I said I was going to ask Jesus and Archangel Michael to deal with it, and for her to report to me what was happening. This is how we worked in the spirit together, she said okay.
When she said Jesus and Michael were there, I asked if Kirpal Singh also was there? Yes. I told him what he was doing wasn’t right. He was stealing from Cathy and avoiding doing what he needed to be doing instead. He needed to leave. Cathy gasped, for she had been very fond of Kirpal, and, from what she had told me about him, he had seemed like a pretty good yogi to spend time around, contrary to some real horror stories I’d run into with quite a few people who’d spend time in India or with gurus from there residing in the States. It was like these people were possessed, and it tended to become my assignment to try to dispossess them, which seldom went well.
I told Cathy this divorce from Kirpal was necessary, she needed the energy he was stealing from her and he had stuff to do that this was preventing him from doing. She nodded agreement. I asked Jesus and Michael to take Kirpal wherever he then needed to be, and Cathy reported him leaving with them.
I have never had an easy time dealing with spirit stuff out of India. It makes me sick, I feel poisoned. Sometimes I get attacked in spirit ways. Once I nearly got killed, it seemed. I felt poisoned the entire four days in Mumbai, and was really glad to be out of there. As was Cathy really glad.
I could name Indian gurus with international reputations, whose sanyasans (students) I’ve had intense dealings with, but I see no point in it. Some of these gurus were more benign than others. Some were truly malevolent, but to convince their sanyasans of it was impossible. Suffice to say, if you try to come to God through a guru, you get the guru in you, for better or for worse. If you try to come to God directly, you get God in you, for better or for worse.
I well remember, with some wry amusement, a woman I met in 2004, who’d chased gurus, Indian and other kinds, for much of her adult life. I told her that Americans who did that, who, like her, had been born into Christendom and had abandoned it, were looking for a Jesus to replace the Jesus who hadn’t worked for them. She laughed, said it was true! Then, she was off for a weekend with her current guru.
Now, maybe I should say that I don’t have anything personal against India. If you are born there and want to get involved with a guru, then that is in keeping with your soul’s decision to be Indian. But if you were born in America, for example, and for further example you were born into a Catholic, Protestant, Mormon or Jewish family, and you later give up on that and take up with an Indian guru, for example, what you have done, really, is put a band-aid over what didn’t work out to begin with. Except this band-aid, as Cathy learned in spades, as I’ve seen many people experience with learning much in most cases, it a bit toxic. Or a lot toxic.
The first step, therefore, is to remove the band-aid. The next step is to go back into the root religion of birth, not into its form but into its essence, and experience the essence. From that foundation you can go into the unlimited, into that which has no form, at least not form by human standards. The spirit form, if form means something to you, is identified in the “Earth is the sacred prism” poem in an earlier chapter. Another way to look at this is there is always a bigger realm into which you can go from where you are, a bigger paradigm, a bigger state of being. Always something is bigger than where you are, and if you go into it, there is always something bigger than that container, and there is always something bigger than that container, and so on.
The angels understand this, operate in that understanding. They are trying to teach that understanding to human beings. They also are trying to teach the way they live to human beings, which is very much like the real people described in Mutant Message Down Under live: led/nudged by the spirit. Archangel Michael told Cathy and me that they, the angels, don’t know what they are going to be asked to do next, until it arrives in their awareness; then they do it, without question. This is how I was trained over many years to live. It is how Cathy was trained to live after she and I met through an unexpected turn of events.
Back to India and my disposition toward it, which may be quite different than you may have surmised from reading this chapter, so far. In the fall of 2002, my last wife, number seven, Patricia, came to me in a dream and said, “Sloan, you married Kali!” I awoke with a start, terrified. Kali is the Hindu Goddess of destruction and rebirth. Not even Shiva messes with Kali. If she beckons, Shiva comes. If she says jump, Shiva asks how high? Since that dream, I have experienced Kali a number of times in dreams, and in other ways I’ve felt her presence. She is not mean to me but she is exacting. She is not the wicked monster many paint her as being. She is, actually, the Hindu equivalent of the Christian Holy Spirit, of Judaism’s Shekinah — the spirit of God, which, along with Wisdom, is assigned the female gender in Judaism.
Many people go to India hoping to experience an awakening of what is called the kundalini, also known as the serpent or Shakti energy. This is an indigenous suprahuman (not supernatural) attribute, but as civilization and its ways of raising and educating children evolved, the kundalini stopped naturally rising/awakening in people. So yogis began trying to awaken and raise it in other ways. There are reliable reports of spontaneous kundalini awakenings, full blown, that put the “victim” in extreme peril. A fellow named Gopi Krishna wrote about this happening to him in his book, Kundalini. He went to reputed advanced yogis, and got no help. So he researched it and learned some techniques and worked it out on his own.
I read a book by an American contemplative Christian, Christian Spirituality and the Kundalini Experience, I think it was called, written by the “victim,” accompanied by an Introduction from his wife, about his own spontaneous kundalini arousal, which he, too, had to research and learn techniques of coping with it. He did not seek it out, he did not go to India, it just happened. He concluded it was a supra human, not a spiritual event.
I read a book by an Indian last name Krishnamurti, not J. Krishnamurti, who built up a large following in America and perhaps in India. This fellow searched high and low for spiritual truth/enlightenment in India, including gaining an audience with the aforesaid J. Krishnamurti, whom he decided was only pretending to have tasted the sugar, although maybe he had seen it.
After that, this other Krishnamurti went to England to live, and there he experienced a spontaneous and very quick total awakening of the kundalini, which, as he described it, was unlike any kundalini awakening I’d ever read or heard of. He wrote a book about it, and people started coming to see him. He told them he could not help them, because what had happened to him was unique and it wasn’t likely to happen to them, and he didn’t know how to tell them to get it to happen to them. Later, he wrote a second book, saying many of the same things, which puzzled me, because he already had said in the first book that he couldn’t deliver what had happened to him to other people.
The angels assigned to me have been raising the kundalini in me since shortly after they got on my case in early 1987. I didn’t go to India to get it going. I didn’t even ask for it. I used to do hatha yoga, but it didn’t awaken the kundalini in me. Years later, I read that hatha yoga came about after people observed the weird contortions people went into, who were experiencing spontaneous kundalini arousal. Hatha yoga postures copycatted those contortions, hoping to create a kundalini arousal. Every now and then it succeeded, but not usually.
Maybe in closing this chapter, I should share a spontaneous vision that came to me in June 1995, just before the first dark night lifted, the dark night in Boulder, Colorado.
A sleeping man dreams he sees from behind a young yogi sitting in meditation in the lotus position. Before the young yogi appear two cobras, raised up, hoods flaired. One cobra is pure white, the other pure black. The pure white cobra says to the young yogi, “We came to you once before, because you were innocent, and you knew we brought a gift and you believed you had to chose one of us and you chose me.” The pure black cobra then says, “We come before you again because you now are wise.” The young yogi, now very advanced in years, weeps, chooses them both. The sleeping man, now an old man, awakens, crying.
Sloan