Silence

In silent moments
a presence sublime
fills the void
between my breaths
and a certain grace
the calyx of my self.
Let me be
an empty flute for Thy breath to pass through
the clay in the potter's hands to be moulded
the misty clouds that dissipate in the light of dawn
the tall grass that sways to the rhythm of the wind
the clear lake that reflects the mountains
the leaves that flow gracefully with the stream.

To be a yogi?

There's no question that it's hard trying to be a yogi in the modern world. But to an extent that is true of any modern religious devotee. We are blessed and cursed to live at a time when religion is a forbidden topic, either through fear of ridicule or fear of offence. We are taught by our society to keep our personal views hidden, unless they are strictly conventional, libertarian or conservative societal norms. We can worship, but only on a Sunday (or Friday, or Saturday or...?) The rest of the time we are expected to be good citizens, on a sliding scale where good constantly shifts towards some indeterminate definition that our current civilisation accepts. No wonder it's hard trying to be spiritual!

The problem is compounded by the fact that, if you are brave or stupid enough to pin your flag of God to the mast in a non-orthodox manner, you risk being thrown into the pit of disdain along with all the other holistic, weirdo wackos and quickly dismissed and forgotten.

Sahaja Yogis learn this lesson early on, I think. From the moment we first mention it to our friends and family, often to face uncomprehending confusion, we learn what it is to be thought of as [insert your favourite label of derision here]. Of course it's all part of the test, but it's a tough place to be, misunderstood or worse. All the more so when we know inside that we're not extra-ordinary so much as super-ordinary. Not befuddled as much as just plain lucky.

So we struggle to balance our outward 'conventionality' with an inner turmoil. For let's not beat around the bush here, folks, trying to improve oneself through such a powerful spiritual practice as this one is kind of like sticking your head in a dishwasher on full cycle. Actually not just your head, your whole mishapen, lumpen, crinkly body. Twice.

We talk about our practice in simple terms, but in reality what we are trying to describe is beyond description. Not because we're extra-special, 'too high level for you' type people, but because there are no real definitive terms in which to discuss a real relationship with God. Hey, so everyone who has an ounce of devotion in them will claim some connection with the Almighty in one way or another - through prayer, introspection on mountaintops, through transcendant experience. But the uniqueness of the Sahaja Yogi, is that this conversation is both two way, and more importantly perhaps, accompanied by real physical interaction in the form of sensations on the subtle system and within the environment.

It is this latter part which perhaps can cause so many people to fall at the first hurdle of our particular yoga - how to explain to someone who is just starting out that the sensations they may feel are real? Or more crucially, that the sensations they are NOT feeling will be along soon, if they're patient and diligent? The problem is that once we cross this particular line, we begin to look suspiciously kooky. No matter how well mannered we appear on the outside, believing that we can 'chat' to the substance of the universe at will is just plain nuts. Isn't it?

And so, inevitably, we are labelled and dismissed by those for whom reality must be solid, visual and ever so rational. It's a shame, of course, but the greatest sadness is that we find it so difficult to explain the truth without digging ourselves even further into our pit of gooey looking kookidom. How can we explain that reality is nothing more than vibrations when we don't have a Doctorate in Quantum Physics? Or even a certificate in theology?

And so, as typical yogis we retreat to the cliches, we revert to the easy, simple answers; non-contentious, non-challenging. The platitudes, smiles, waves. The shake of the hand as we show you the door, knowing what you're walking away from is the most important thing that has ever crossed the threshold of your existence. We wave goodbye with a tiny tear of despair inside, trying desperately to wish it all better - wish you all better - so that you'll return with determination to join the party.

Yes it's hard being a yogi. But hey, it's the only game in town worth playing. That's the real fact of the matter.

Innocence - virtue or incumbrance?

One of my favorite business contacts is John Simmons. I just took delivery of his book, Dark Angels - How Writing Releases Creativity at Work. John, as will be quickly seen from his writing, is an intelligent fellow, well read and articulate. From my experience of him over many years, he is a good and decent man at heart, and I would guess, a humanist. Here’s something from the beginning of Dark Angels:

“It’s a commonplace observation that descriptions of evil are most fascinating than descriptions of good. So, John Milton, writing Paradise Lost, makes a heroic figure of the fallen angel Satan even though the objective of his work was to demonstrate the power of God’s goodness. There is an aura about Milton’s Satan that none of the ‘good’ characters achieve. And part of Milton’s message, part of the attraction we feel as readers, is that Satan is an angel still: he has extraordinary powers of resourcefullness, invention and persuasion.

The question arises: would he have these powers, would he convey this attraction, without the opening up of his mind to other possibilities? Satan dared and failed, he had been ambitious for himself, seeing greater opportunities for personal achievement that those circumscribed for him by God. God condemns him for his overweening pride and ambition. But really, as a management consultant might suggest, was he just ‘thinking outside the box’?

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy explores these issues too. There struggle there is between an exhausted ancient deity known as the Authority - represented by the repressive forces of the established Church - and the life-affirming, humanistic impulses of those in opposition. Again, the angels are divided and our sympathies are engaged by the flawed dark angels. The struggle is against the good angels of the Church that seeks to keep people in a state of ‘innocence’ deprived of ‘experience’. Innocence is a state that deprives us of the possibility of making a choice between good and evil, or actually between thinking and not thinking, between feeling and not feeling. Having the choice is what matters: without it we are creatures without a real moral dimension. We remain creatures without experience, without the ability to think, reason and create.

We live in a world where the dark angels have lived. Perhaps we have become like dark angels ourselves. As a result, we have the ability to express individual personalities. Dark angels are symbols of that ability; they are not symbols of evil. If we fail to respond to their challenge, we retreat into a life of meek, unquestioning acceptance of our innocence role. We follow the unwritten rules of the organisation’s custom and practice, and we leave our emotional engagement for other times and other places. We fall into the working life of accepting that we have a limited desire or ambition to influence things, to imagine other possibilities, to fulfill ourselves, to achieve intellectual goals.”

Amazing stuff. The writing admirably illustrates the problem we have in communicating our message to the non Sahaj world, for without the direct experience of the bliss of Self-Realization, how can such people see for themselves the utter confusion and conceit within this kind of reasoning?

John refutes the desirability of innocence, and clearly he has no sense of its true meaning nor of the extraordinary powers it confers on people who are innocent. He is however, right up to a point, for the Garden of Eden myth, is not a story of good and evil, with the serpent being the devil come to corrupt the innocence of Adam and Eve, but rather a story of the feminine aspect of the divine wanting human beings to have the freedom to choose between right and wrong, for only in that way would we be in the true likeness of God, and of the male aspect, the logos, chronos form, wanting them to remain in the animal state. Presumably, the desire of the Adi Shakti power was that given a choice, they would choose good. But innocence, as I understand it, has nothing to do with remaining blind to reality, in fact, only through being innocent can we see reality, without it, all is illusion. John is widely off the mark in thinking that thinking ‘outside the box’ would necessitate an exploration of evil. In point of fact, of course, at heart, he doesn’t believe that there is evil, or if he does, he doesn’t appear to regard it as something inferior to good. He doesn’t seem to understand the respective differences, for how could one agree with the description of the angels of the Church that seeks to keep people in a state of ‘innocence’ deprived of ‘experience’ as good? The sad fact is, that in the 20th century, ‘good’ has had a bad press. Let’s hope that things will change for the better in the century to come.

In such chaotic thinking, the negativity gets into the heart of things, and turns the knife. For it is through such confusion, that its seeds are insidiously sown. Philip Pullman, is a well-regarded writer by the literary establishment, who writes ostensibly for children. He is also very popular amongst adults too. However, in this writer's opinion, he is the Western equivalent of Salmaan Rushdie, whose novel, The Satanic Verses, uses the fact that the prophet Mohammed, who could not read or write, dictated the Koran to a scribe, who playfully at first, starts to change the words of Mohammed. Pullman’s views are by far the more dangerous, for the effect of his writing is to attack the innocence of young minds.

Are we, as Sahaja yogis, “creatures without experience, without the ability to think, reason and create“? Clearly we are not the former, indeed the plethora of our extraordinary experiences, if we can find a way of expressing them in a form that would communicate them to the rest of humankind, could play a role in creating the environment that would bring about the desire for human beings to be enlightened, thence transformed. We don’t think too much, at least not in the random uncontrolled fashion of most people, but maybe we have to be able to find a way to express ourselves effectively to the rest of humankind? Can we reason and create? It is to be hoped that in time, yogis will produce works of art that will trail-blaze the new Jerusalem that our children will undoubtedly see. I am reminded of a comment, by Grégoire de Kalbermatten, that we are the foundation of the building, and foundations are always a bit roughly finished and eventually buried under the ground. But what goes on top of the foundations, the finished and polished work, is what people will see - our children and grandchildren.

I hope that some of us will write and offer a description of the joys and power of innocence and of thoughtless awareness.

I don’t think that the way to answer the inadvertent silliness and nonsense within writing such as the above, is to deal with it line by line, but instead, as Grégoire has so valiantly attempted, with his novel The Legend of Dagad Trikon, and now recently, Linda Williams with the first volume in her Keys of Wisdom trilogy, we need now to ‘set out our stall’ in the mainstream of society and to publicly stand up for what we believe in, what we know as truth, through the grace of our Holy Mother, Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, the living God.

Jai Shri Mataji

Alan Wherry