Karmageddon is a personal examination of the spiritual journey featuring 1960s counter-culture icon and chanter Bhagavan Das and Jeff Brown, former lawyer turned spiritual author.

We are ‘most often than not’ resistant to life as it is,  in out individual uniqueness. The mental and emotional mind, visible in our disorientation and confusion, will always be seeking for meaning and analyzing life apart.  We abdicate and negate our own lives when we are not effectively responsive to  our own inherent dissonance arising. The dissonance is the golden nugget, the opportunity, to genuinely receive and accept life in us emerging.

In the movie KARMAGEDDON I deeply appreciated Jeff’s and Bhagavan Das’s transparency and openness as they expose themselves to endure our collective inquiry. The film beautifully tells their unique stories and we become their captive audience.  In Karmageddon, the seeker in all of us is shocked, as there is nothing to hide and nowhere to hide it.

In the film their teacher /student pathos and polarity become apparent.     The enmeshment of the egoic constructs in both Jeff and Bhagavan Das becomes clearly visible.  Their pathos of mutual neediness invested in the other is apparent and a gift for all of us to see. As an audience, Karmageddon, is a sweet offering to examine our own need for belonging and specialness. The convoluted stickiness in their relationship is a clear indicator to where they have both abdicated the responsiveness to attune to the apparent dissonance in their own lives.

Bhagavan Das is uncannily direct and open with his intentions.  He is simply stating life as it is in him, and what is broken and un-integrated in him becomes evident.  It is shocking to observe his justification for his usury behavior, and it is appalling to observe the lack of accountability for his actions.   Nonetheless, I sincerely appreciate the journey of the soul, evidently disoriented and confused, observable in him.

Karmageedon is surely a collective vehicle to examine the smorgesboard of ideas concepts, beliefs and preferences we may have individually and collectively about spiritual realities and actual reality.   Bhagavan Das is so apparently a seeker negating to examine his own urges, impulses and desires.  He is statically enamored and entrenched with the seductive story of Kali, and is transfixed by the accompanied spiritual practices. This is a very genuine reflection of the perils and difficulty of the spiritual inquiry.  It is so easy to become fixated and entrained by spiritual myths and metaphors’, as the mind and emotions are ‘spellbound’ analyzing the stories for meaning and applicability.

Our conventional reality is also hypercritical and inflexible as it questions the value of such a rigorous spiritual inquest.  Cultural values that are traditionally informed are holly relics.   Our societies have become inherently self policing and deep spiritual inquiries have little merit in the modern world.

The many conventional impressions that inform the thinking and feeling constructs have entrained us to assume that our lives are personal.  It is simply not so. It is much bigger than that.    The assumptions we make that this is a personal journey informs an enclosed system of limited perspectives, where the inherent and competitive need for specialness and rightness becomes obvious.

The detectable need for specialness in Bhagavan Das is no different than in most of us.  It just becomes more potent in his unique expression exposed on the big screen. The need for specialness is ‘symptomatic’ for the prevalent collective cancer of invalidation. None of us are immune to it, as it is transfixed and woven into the fabric of our society. We have not collectively understood how to sustainably attune to our individual distinctiveness, to self-correct and surrender,  to genuinely embrace, accept and nurture our uniqueness and differences.

It is easy to be critical of Bhagavan Das, nonetheless,  it is laughable to assume ourselves equipped to assess his pond of supposedly superficial mush, within the difficult context of understanding our own biases and our own self negation. We basically disassociate from our own origin when we avoid our individual dissonance, pain and suffering.

It is plainly impossible to make assumptions informed with clarity, if we are not able to see our own profound biases right up and down the whole process, and especially if we can not recognize we are writing from within the dream itself.

Every human being is steeped in interior complexity through socialization and conditioning that creates universes all until themselves.  To assume any definitive knowing of another, when it is difficult enough to discern our own biases, is the epitome of delusion. 

If we have any intelligence at all, it will become visible through our tenderness to life, as we may choose to love Bhagavan Das and ourselves, in our shared mire and brokenness. Often, we abdicate and negate the responsiveness to life in us through the teacher.  It is much easier to become transfixed by a great oratory overture, that to buckle down and get real with our own shit.   The teacher and our cherished ideals are ‘most often’ the very blankets we insert between ourselves and reality.

We must examine our own blankets, the infinite impressions visible in our treasured concepts and beliefs, if we are so inspired to uncoil our own false misconceptions about reality.  Maybe then can we uncoil our personal and collective wounds, the layers and layers of mental and emotional misconceptions, and finally come home to what has always been.

Life is love, you and I, in form dancing.  Life, here, simply doing the best it knows how, often perceived with flaws by the other, but does it really matter?  Making assumptions about life in the other is the cosmic joke. None of us are perfect beings. We are one being playing, here-now, in infinite forms, maybe we will come to understand more of the mystery and develop tenderness for ourselves in the other.  Maybe, then, will we start to ascend individually and collectively with our feet on the ground.  May we all journey from complexity to simplicity, presencing into the edges of our personal dissonance, embracing our innate wholeness, a genuine acceptance of life as it is in us.

We are the mystery! OM MANI PADME HUM!