A Short Autobiography - Mukunda Das (Emanuel Comer)

Ive been posting on this blog for quite a while now and am starting to release some stuff on my research and personal yogic experience on the DTP or devotional transformative practice and after doing some contemplation on my own life as a type of psycho-analytic JNANA practice I thought I would write it all down for myself and to share with others who are interested in this blog and maybe also my youtube videos (MukundaDas), so they can have an idea of who I am and how I have come to this point of doing spiritual service to others as part of my KARMA module.

I was born in Takaka, a small toen at the top of the south island of New Zealand, this town is quite well known for its alternative culture and I personally consider it quite a spiritual place. My family, which consisted of my Mum and Dad and brother Joel moved from Takaka to Golden bay, a small town near Christchurch and then down to Otago where I did my schooling. This town was called Waitahuna and was a very small country town with a larger town nearby called Lawrence. The earliest type of spiritual experiences i can remember was asking my mum and dad whether God was a man or woman around about three or four years old, and I remember going to Church where they all sung 'Emanuel' and wondering why they were all saying my name, I think I may have even gone into a state during this experience. I went to Waitanhuna school and enjoyed it a bit but got in trouble quite alot, one of the incidents was when I wrote a fake newspaper article about vampires attacking the inhabitants of Waitahuna and my teacher threw the art work in the bin. I also remember being into comedians which I took to the primary school for the other classmates to listen to while they did their work. I was mainly into just playing outside with my brother and we used to make lots of games together and go on adventures in the country. Later I went to the area school in Lawrence where a started more involved schooling. Most of my development at this state would be around the sensory level and going up to the bodily level (archaic - magic - mythic). Later on at home my brother and I got into doing computer programming on our commodore 64 at home and used to make games, I would read the books on computer programming and learnt alot about the BASIC programming language but gave up my personal studies in this when I got to MECHANICAL language. I made one game that was two fighters that would attack each other based on random calculations and you could go against someone else on who you thought would win, I also used to make small animations of a cartoon character I had made called beople. I liked drawing alot and was often doing cartoon and stuff with my friends in school. Around about the time I was doing high-school science I started really hitting the rational stage of development and was enjoying making sense of the world through the lense of science. Later in my studies at school I did physics and maths and was getting high grades up to 98% in the exams. I took up skateboarding and basketball and playing drums in my late teens and started hitting the green stage of development my the end of my high school schooling and was even attempting to design alternative green-based energy systems based on wind tunnels and applied physics. Around this time was the september 11th attcks and around this time my father passed away from a brain tumour. This really marked a spiritual turning in my life. I was also doing alot of shadow therapy stuff in my own personal books and starting to make progress in the shadow line. I then moved up to the North island with my mum to Hamilton and by this time I was quite a good drummer and started playing in bands. My first spiritual attempts at this point was astral traveling which I had some success in and also some meditation experiences after reading Alan Watts the way of Zen. I really mostly was living in the green stage for the next few years and had some girlfriends and relationship stuff, also I read a good book called the awakened mind about brain states and meditation and started doing some meditation every now and then. Around about 21 I took acid for the first time at a dance party down in Takaka and had my first spiritual emergence experience even though I didnt really know what it was, I also started reading Ken Wilber at that point and moved into the integral stage of development. I moved house into the hippy flat mem drive and that is when I first got into the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Hare Krishna philosophy - my FACE line was pretty much fully developed at this point and I was up to a personal conception of God. I was still playing in bands and starting to do quite big gigs at festivals and stuff. Me and my firends started going to the Hare Krishna meetings in our local area and I took a real interest in this, subsequently getting the beads and starting to chant the maha mantra. I had many more spiritual emergence experiences over the next few years and did tertiary study in music at WINTEC. After my studies my meditative states were getting quite deep and I met a Guru named Gaurahari who was teaching ecstatic bhakti yoga and around this time I started getting the ecstatic symptoms of divine love, I also went through the first two dark nights of the soul. Also I had then progressed to the post-integral stage of development and was reading Bhaktivinode Thakur. After many experiences of separtion pains I eventually met the Supreme Personality of Godhead Krishna and Radha and have been in direct contact with them through contact with my spiritual senses and talking meditation so that we can have conversations with one another. Since then i have been hanging out with God, mostly as Radha in the conjugal rasa (girlfriend and boyfriend). It was 1 year and eight months ago now that my third and final dark night kicked and this has been one of the hardest experiences I have been through. After working developing post-integral theory in a devotional context I moved to the para-mind stage of development and since then my philosophy has become contradictory in nature. Ive mostly read Bhagavad Gita over the years and dipping into pastimes, now I am doing Srimad Bhagavatam. Through the darkness and pain of the dark nights I get glimpses of Supreme bliss - the prema state, A vibrant state of pure love that feels like pure happiness is erupting at every moment. Now I am pretty much practicing the DTP that I have developed - an update of the integral life practice full-time when I am feeling ok and am really looking forwards to the end of the dark night. My spiritual emergence experiences seem to have come to some kind of conclusion and now I am really feeling on top of things and able to do spiritual service to others. I talk to my mum and brother regularly, I live with my brother in the flat and my mum is accross town and we have many spiritual discussions together as well as what talks I have with other spiritual practitioners over the internet.

Thanks for reading and letting me get this down, much love.

All Glories to Guru and Gauranga.

-Mukunda Das (Emanuel Comer)

Devotional Service and relationships

11th September 2016,

I've been doing the devotional service transformative practice for about 3 months now since I developed it. The devotional Service transformative practice or DTP, is a moderation of the integral life practice based on post-integral theory and insights from the Gaudiya Vaishnava bhakti yoga tradition. The practice is really a joy to do, and the more I did it, the more I came to realise that all human acticities reflect the DTP but in an untransformed version. All activities can be divided into spiritual or material, likewise there is a spiritual world and a material world. For each one of these activities there can be the untransformed version or the transformed version. Taking for instance, work as an example - working for results in ones work or fruitive work, is the untransformed version of conscious working or karma yoga. Similarly things like relationships with other people can be in an untransformed, dysfunctional state based on what Prabhupada would call bodily relations, or they can be relationships formed around a spiritual bond. The devotional path can be very hard at times, Im currently going through a dark night of the soul and nothing could have prepared me for that. Also as I have come to be more evolved and conscious Ive found that fewer and fewer people were willing to relate to me - mainly because I am only seeking conscious relationship not just wasting time. Typically, this trend is seen in Vaidhi Bhakti when one goes through the harsh process of separating from non-devotees and possibly having to go through the disapproval of parents etc for becoming a devotee. Its hard to find good relationships but not impossible. Luckily with integral theory we can make more informed decisions on the state of consciousness of the people around us and whether they are going to be healthy relationships or not. Of course in one sense, a devotee should relate to all living beings in a loving mood but in some cases its more like tough-love as opposed to really deep spiritual communions with our brothers and sisters. Really relationships is a bhakti core practice, and in some ways getting relationships with our neighbours right can take just as much effort as Our relationship with Radha and Krishna. But really it is worth it. It is really, just very important - no man is an island and a spiritual practice that doesn't include relationships in it is not going to have as gooder result as just say chanting all day or something. Not to mention the social-intelligence line that shows us that the more we relate to each other, the better we get at it. Ive been working away at this relationship thing for a while now and starting to get some results, I'll be making more posts on this blog regarding my progress in the DTP and other topics related to devotional service and spiritual philosophy. Thanks for reading :)

Process entry 21st March 2015

After a long period of intense struggle Ken Wilber has saved the day. Stuck in a cycle of non-stop meditation experiencing an extreme kind of spiritual emotional pain that was rendering my body unusable I turned back to Ken Wilber for help (through video form). One particular video he has on youtube about state pathologies with reference to spiritual emergence has been of immeasurable use. Indeed after a serious bout of psychosis last September (a typical seasonal time for that to happen thopugh it had been about two years), I  was struggling alot to come back down from the experience and was trying to integrate and embody a new found connection I had with God in personal form - this attempt to hold onto that connection proved very difficult however and it has taken me about 7 months to stabalise the relationship to God in refence to that state and finally come down from the experience into what (with reference to Ken Wilber) I am calling my finate self. I actually had a second bout of psychosis not too long after the first one but the second was less severe. In a humourous but slightly cruel irony the first psychosis was brought about in an honest attempt to integrate my preivous psychotic experiences into a functional ego. The basic idea was to categorise all the various 'trips' into one narrative that kind of tied all the experiences together. I was doing this in a fictionalised form making all the trips into a master work fictional tale about a character who has a relationship with the feminine of God. However the attempt to internalise and integrate such a vast amount of content proved mentally fatal as by the time I was ready to write the story having structured it I began to trip on the content all over again. This lead to a two week full-blown psychosis where I psychically wrote the entire story and even went to the extent of acting out various parts in real life and then carried the story on with a sequel that lead me into ecstatic states of spiritual ecstacy that I just couldn't come down from. Primarily this involved the ecstatic symptom of ecstatic laughter (as mentioned in Nectar of Devotion (Prabhupada)), sometimes so intense that I was rolling on the floor and actually physically hurting my stomach. Although I came out of the psychosis eventually I continued to experience ecstatic symptoms which grew in intensity (crying, bliss etc) as I explored an intimate relationship with the feminine aspect of God (going right back to the book). This proved to be both amazing and exciting and completely terrifying and damaging to my finate self. Eventually I was stuck in a state of continual meditative chanting that I couldn't seem to stop myself from and experiencing something which I indentified as separation (ecstatic symptom nectar of devotion) I was on the brink of suicide. Examing my chakra points for answers I noticed that a major problem was occuring somewhere between the third and fourth chakras - right where Ken Wilber says psychosis effects one (or bipolar). I seem to be exerting an excessive force of repression on the lower three chakras - I was stuck in a dual state, I was either operat6ing completely from the lower three chakras - in which case I was sociable, happy, basically a normal state of consciousness, or I was stuck up in the upper three or four chakras experiencing intense intuitions and psychic activity. I seem to be able to get one or the other but the bridge in between has some kind of damage (presumably the psychosis) in it. What really saved me was looking at this video of Ken Wilber where he discusses the need to develop BOTH the infinate and the finate self. Although I had made great progress in developing and developing a relationshipship WITH the infinate self I had grossly left out my finate self and failed to deal with remaining aspects of the false self (leading to things like projection, fear, paranoia) out. What Ken explains so clearly is the need for therapeuitic process to get at the relationship between the false self and FINATE self, stabalising the finate self at whatever chakra it is situated at (structures of consciousness) and then also using meditation techniques in order to develop the INFINATE self (or/and ones relationship with it). Having this information I finally managed to come down out of my meditaion into the finate self and could actually observe it to be relatively finate and then look at ways of healing and recooparating after the long trip. On an up note I seem to have advanced in my meditation through a stage into what Ken refers to as deep formless meditation which began happening spontaneously as a response to the intense pain. Being stuck meditatating and in intense pain I found a deeper form of meditation that I could enter into which the pain ceased and I could sit for long periods of time, so although I am excited to explore this new meditative domain I am mostly going to focus on my finate self for a while and see if I can root out some of these more psychological areas with more theurapeutic methods. Have Ken Wilbers 'Integral Psychology' next to me ready to read, looking forwards to it THANKS KEN.

Report after one week spiritual emergency - summary of some of the 'trips'

17 February 2015

I'm back on the natural level again, had a shave. [noname1] was showing some syptoms of non-physical relationships, namely he was saying [noname2] was his girlfriend however that is not physically true. Spiritual emergence. I had a large spiritual emergency just recently, was out for about a week. Was all about Radha and what was happening in the spiritual world and how that transforms the entire material creation through time. Also alot about the Chakra (gyroscopic image) and how that works as an explanation of the cultivation of love - the dance of masculine and feminine polarities and how it made everything 'come true'. True Love etc...

Was also alot about travelling through dreams and subtle bodies, transforming bodies, the operation of life in living things. Also the body being a vechicle and how to use it in different ways that correspond to consciousness on different levels. Alot about vibrations and tones and memory. How constant remembrance works and how memory has a vibration and resonance that 'sticks' for a while. Largely the trip was about being Radha's boyfriend in order to seal the Madhurya Rasa and live it while having adventures. I almost drowned myself in what I understand to be pain of separation but my body seemed to float and I saw this as Divine Intervention.

I went alot into what is the internet and travelling on 'inner-net' and making the relationship with Radha real. There was alot about going up into mystical dimensions and 'downloading' information to earth in order to save it, which the Lord showed me he had already done; in eternity looking down at Prakriti. I looked in Babji thing and lots to do with transforming material lust in the Gopi world. This lead me into some very sexual places and I was trying to ascertain if sex & lust is the highest thing spiritually, in other words, an exact reversal or relection of this material world where sex and lust are the lowest thing.

This is in coordination with that ones desires are cleansed and transformed by engaging them in the Lords Transcendental Service.

I got quite involved in the face of Radharani and why her eyes dance and look sideways, interestingly [noname1] is also talking about 'the corner of his eye' and how he stores memories there, so there may be more to know about that haha.

Working on the Christian aramaic mantra, in line of this work from the advice of Bhaktivinode so adopt a mantra of the same quality as the maha-mantra to ones own religion. The mantra as I have been chanting it; Eashoa Marsheekha Eashoa Marsheekha, Eashoa Marsheekha. Eashoa Marsheekha Eashoa Marsheekha, Mary Magdala. Adapting to include John the Baptist as indictative of the 'prayer for the Love of the Neighbour' - Youkhanna Subba.

Natural Level - aids to help with over-internalisation.

My Prayojana or goal is Divine Love of God and my shelter is my heart. I encountered a problem with my natural-level functioning, too far internalised. The Lord has lead me to a problem of internalising when my father died. I did not discover this until I investigated subjective 'I' states, as in a different quadrant (Integral Quadrants), from 'We' where the personal form of the Lord is related to. Also focus on Love to the Neighbour being a way to branch out of internalisation. 'It' will bring ones consciousness to the natural level, also, in particular, understanding natural phenomena and cognizing social situations and conversations.

Note: Was interested in the meaning of the physical body becoming transcendental.