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 :)