A song by Brahmael

 

About the origin of the song: It was after bedtime and I was alone in my designated bedroom in my brother’s apartment, and the lamp flickers a few times, which happens every once in a while…I know so what?  but at this time I thought, could that be maharaji-ji signaling me?  And then the doubt of course not, b/c lights flicker every now and then, and if maharaji-ji was signaling me, he’d do something obvious like make the lamp go out.  And right after that notion, the lamp quickly dimmed until it went out, and it did not come back on.  I was curled up there in the dark, shocked by what had just occurred.  Forgive my memory of whether it was definitively that same night, or whether it may have been the following night, but the words “light the way” melodically graced my mind so I began writing them out.  As I wrote, it was almost as though the song continued to write itself and the closer the lyrical summation became, the more ecstatic I grew…I’d never written anything feeling so positively grand until then, and I could sense a real audience in union.  my joy was so great, I was moved into tears and rapture over and over again that night.  The night after I wrote open eye, Neem Karoli Baba appeared to me in a dream, he said nothing, he only stood statuesquely about 20 feet in front of me like a statue, enrobed in a charcoal colored blanket for a moment looking towards me with eyes so wet they appeared silver.  then he vanished and I woke up, and it was early in the morning.  That was a unique dream encounter.  My mind takes forms and identities and reels them into my dreams especially at low points in my life, but He was obviously not a random fixture of dreaming.

 

OPEN EYE

©2002 Brahmael

 

Light the way, grow high in love

Be here now and again…

Light the way, shine down above

Be here in body of…

Body of the stars and rain and moon

And every bell that chimes at noon

Let the light array and the truth begin

in every joy that grows within

 

Light the way Ally

When I hail my King

A strobe in The Way

For the rays He brings

 

Striding aside my King each time

I feel I’m riding on a wave of white

Still in static chains, I feel held tight

See Him pass through my wavered light

 

By the way I fall in ascension time

My fears unspoken leave me lost and blind

Round these walls I stall, leaving me behind

I hear the calling of divine Allies

 

So I hold my faith and I hear their songs

Each leaf on the tree to another belongs

Hand in hand in a trance of light

We dance in the fields of Jehovah’s light

 

Aiding another we all shall rise

To the heart of loving without disguise

Guardian, nurture, we all can try,

Liberation by opening our eyes.

 

Confined, to time, we’ve all become

Gathered now, let’s go beyond…

 

How did I come to associate Neeb Karori Baba as Guru?

 

In just one week after I completed my final requirement for my bachelor’s degree in July of 2002,  I was bumming around, unemployed, at my grandma’s house and happened to see an album review on her footstool in the Kansas city star newspaper’s “Arts” section.  The album was by Bhagavan Das.  I had never heard of Bhagavan Das before, but after reading the positive review and the fact that Mike D. was involved with the production, I was very interested in hearing it, b/c I had acquired a taste for eastern world music in the prior few years and Mike D. was pretty cool by me.  Less than one hour after initially seeing the review, I asked my grandma if she needed anything and excused myself to go see if I could find the album at the store.  My motive was not just a whimsical act of consumerism; I wasn’t an avid collector of ethnic music because I had learned to be frugal about spending money on cd’s since I didn’t want to make the mistake I had done with a lot of metal albums that ended up just sitting on the shelf.  I was always on the lookout for new sounds and hybrids but was critical about what I actually bought.

 

I knew of only one store in my hometown that sported a decent world music section, and that was Borders (a large chain book store, here in the United States).  I went, saw the album, picked it up, and decided to shop around.  I was interested in taking up Yoga and wanted to see what sort of yoga instruction books they had.  While looking through the books on yoga, I came across this strange square shaped book that had a chunk of brown pages surrounded in between white pages.  It looked like it had been untouched for several months, because the top of the rim of the pages had a fine layer of dust on it.  I opened it up to the front, and there was a picture of this guy in a blanket with his index finger raised, I had no idea who the guy was, but I really liked the picture.  It’s a very bright…very funny photograph.  then I flipped through a couple of the brown pages showing some very creative images, and I’m thinking, “man, this is artsy, I could make these images into a movie, I’m going to buy this.” 

 

Well, I spent a good deal of time that week just pouring over the book, just the brown pages, at the time I wasn’t the least bit interested in the white narrative pages of it, b/c it was talking about dosing up on LSD, and that turned me off at first, b/c I didn’t care to read about someone’s LSD experiences.  even though I had done LSD a few times about ten years prior, and my own experiences were very good, it was for pure recreation, and that’s how I continued to see it.  the people I used to smoke marijuana with and dose with during my junior year in high school were not at all admirable people, and we had our falling out before I reached even my senior year of high school.  Essentially, over the 6 years it took me to obtain my bachelors degree, I had learned to disassociate myself from those experiences altogether. 

 

The book in itself proved a great remedy for my monotony and stimulated my imagination, the reason I buy any kind of published medium.  I didn’t even open the CD until nearly a week later, but when I did, I saw the guy there again on the inside of the CD jacket.  I just stared at the photo for a moment, trying to understand why he was there also.   Then I went back to the book, skimmed the white pages, until I saw a picture of Bhagavan Dass when he was 23 yrs old.  Until then, it hadn’t occurred to me that the Bhagwan Dass I’d seen mentioned in the book (b/c I had barely glimpsed at anything except the brown pages thus far) and the Bhagavan Das I had seen in the album review were the same person, and the fact that I had just bought an album titled “NOW” and a Book titled “Remember Be Here Now” and made no association that the two articles could be related, was  a sign of my extreme ignorance at the time, but complimented with my aloofness it was easy for me to mistake it as innocence.

 

That was the gist of my introduction to maharaji-ji as Guru.  In the couple of years leading up to that, there had been numerous times I felt I was in touch with some greater and benevolent presence, I had told a few close friends and family members about my “guardian angel”, but a “guru” had not been manifested as someone I could identify and envision, and I believe this more direct manifestation impacting me so strongly was consequential to my own abandonment of the spiritual awakening and path that had taken shape in my junior year of college. 

 

"Stephen Hale" <brahmael@hotmail.com>