Any American male should recognize this phenomenon. It's one of the ways patriarchy programs killers.
The dream was so vivid, it lived like a gargoyle on my shoulder ever since. So you can imagine how freaked I was the first time I saw this Indian guy with a long beard walking around this hillbilly burg. You know--what the you-know-what is that guy doing here? I immediately triggered my then-primitive intelligence network to find out who it was--which was easy, because most of my friends were fellow progressive pioneers in the red-state outlands, and a number of them had studied yoga with him.
(This is funny about the Swami, but maybe I'm getting it wrong. It may result in some extra difficult poses next Saturday, performed extra fast, but I don't care, because it's too funny to pass up. But every time I see him walking around town, he always looks like he's in a fog. On the other hand, maybe that's just an Easterner's idea of awareness, and he's just trying to avoid another one of my absurdist questions; I'm always trying to foil his inscrutability. Like I say, I could be wrong. Another game of parenthesis, anyone?)
Well, I was always worried about the meaning of that dream, and not long after we made our meat puppet acquaintance, I felt compelled to ask the Swami about it. He just laughed and said not to worry, that it was no big deal--which, as you can imagine, came as a great relief. But here's the funny thing--the dream was exactly right. It's an exact picture of our present relationship, because he always gets all cross with me if I try to say I can't do something. And having passed my Druid finals, I can just laugh it off now, knowing he's right. Sometimes my thighs get sore.
I don't get too uppity, though, if you can believe that. He may be a short squat Indian dude, and me a six-foot plus European crusader, lithe and muscled as a lion, but I never forget who's Yoda and who's Luke. Who wants to spend their last moments in life staring at their dripping heart close up, as it gasps its dying beats? Not me, buddy. Of course, I don't think he really has that much of a temper.
Hey Zeus Krisp Toes, look at the time! (Is that blasphemy? It's been so long since I was a Christian, I forget.) Some of the congregation are starting to slip sideways out the back, and I haven't even started on the meat of the matter--a phrase in rare use in the lands where sacred cows drink and munch their vegetables.
Anyway, we were taking one of our occasional breaks from our alternative nostril breathing and sitting around having one of our little cosmological tete-a-tetes, this time about whether the archetypal nature of the universe was allegorical or mythological. As a Hindu, he naturally prefers "allegory," because, let's face it, if there's a world religion with more deities crammed into Oneness than Hinduism, I don't know what it is (naturally, I'm excluding the infinite numbers of angels so crowded onto the pinhead dance floor they start getting into fights in the Aquinian demi-pantheon--which helps explain why the Enlightenment philosophers were so long-winded. Look who's talking). I, being a Westerner, prefer "mythology" as my penultimate reality--but then I've always been a romantic.
So we're sitting there casually chatting and all of a sudden the Ra man (as I like to tease him sometimes about our Egyptian incarnation) lights up like a human light bulb. Now this kind of thing is somewhat unusual for the Swami, who's admittedly more focused than I am, because he doesn't have glaucoma like I do, and doesn't ordinarily get distracted by the ever-present parenthetical swarm I have to deal with. But what had occurred to him was actually related to what we were talking about, and not parenthetical at all. So I had to quit my brief plan to file it away for some later tactical rhetorical advantage.
He craftily tied his new topic directly to what we'd been talking about before, the archetypal world, by stating the obvious: mind, just as the sleeping prophet Edgar Cayce was quite clear about, is the mechanism by which spirit works its will in physical reality.
And if you want a paradigm shift--which is what humanity needs if we are to save ourselves from destroying our own home planet, and living through the next brutally Hobbesian century watching our grandchildrens' eyes grow ever colder as aging wisdom brings them to the gut-wrenching truth of what final opportunity we have squandered--you're going to have to move out of your old way of thinking, and start changing, in your mind.
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