From My Soul to Yours: the Poem Journeys of a Mystic Mind

On the time-yellowed first page of the manuscript for these poems is the date March,1971, and from where I am today that’s more than 50 years ago. I wrote them during my ten-year long mystic period when I was a totally devoted disciple of the father-mother creator of everything before, inside and after the universe we call God. Like Apple founder Steve Jobs, who called Paramahansa Yogananda the secret to his success, along with millions of other people I had also became a devotee of Self Realization Fellowship. I was meditating four to five hours a day, attending a half dozen services and meetings a week and led my own meditation group. I was crazy for God. I eventually opened enough that my soul could speak to me, and these poems were like helping hands it used to guide me on my journey of realization to reach what Jesus called the kingdom of heaven within and Einstein called the impenetrable. Puccini said Madame Butterfly was composed by God and he just wrote it down. On his deathbed Bach said to his wife – ‘don’t cry for me for I go where music is born’. I feel the same way about with these poems. They came from somewhere else, my own intuition, sometimes five or six one right after the other. They came from my soul as it was helping to shape me for my life-journey one step at a time. I look at itlike this. “For me, finding God is a journey. Life is the journey and God is my travel agent as well as the destination. When you go on a trip you take photos of scenic points along the way. These poems are the scenic heart and mind points that my travel agent God had me take along the way.” I’m sharing them now to do my part in bringing some love and inspiration into our hurting world. As Jesus and Einstein agreed, God is not some kind of bearded senior citizen, God is an energy, God is love. Einstein said love is the ‘quintessence of life’. Jesus said: ‘those who lives in love live’ in God and God in them’. Love invigorates everything. It is what we are here in our human lives to find and share. Love is the only ticket Home. We are all going to die from this human-brain simulation dream that to us is a human life in a physical body in physical universe. What is next? Is there a next and if so, how do we prepare for it? I hope they can become part of your own life-journeys so when you head home, your last words will also be: “Oh wow…oh wow…oh wow…” I want to thank my roommate of that time, fellow devotee of Yogananda’s, musician and friend Keith for his beautiful watercolors. Without my knowing it, he took the manuscript and gave it back a couple of weeks later with them in plastic sleeves inserted by the poems where he wanted them to be. Keith was married at Lake Shrine and our lives of course went different ways. But the memory of our friendship will live always with these poems and Keith’s beautiful watercolors side by side. I think of them also as poems, just in another format. Thank you, Brother Keith. For more information, photos of Yogananda’s Lake Shrine, and a page with all the watercolors, please check out the website at www.word-songs.org. And BTW, you’re probably wondering why share the poems now after more than 50 years? As the Byrds sing in their song Turn Turn Turn – ‘to everything…there is a season…and a time to every purpose under Heaven’ It is their turn now, the season for their purpose under heaven – to help bring some love into our hurting world. Thank you. Happy journeys!