Since the 1980s Easwaran has been calling on his students to take care of the earth, because he could see a crisis ahead. This climate and environmental emergency is now confronting us both at our front door and around the world. Here at the BMCM, we’ve experienced three years of devastating fire seasons in our area. We know that many of Easwaran’s students around the world are also seeing unprecedented changes. Sensitive people everywhere feel deep sorrow at what our Mother Earth, our children, and our children’s children will be facing now and in the future.
In times of great crisis throughout the ages, great mystics have appealed to their students to call out to the Lord for help with all their heart – by constant repetition of the mantram.
Surely Easwaran is calling his students to join together to give our hearts and souls to this prayer from the depths of the unconscious. What better way to start the New Year of 2020 than in a concerted effort to keep our mantrams going throughout that day, and then to keep increasing our mantram repetition even more as the year proceeds?
Join us for the Mantram Relay on January 1, 2020! Help our worldwide BMCM community to keep the mantram going collectively for all 24 hours of January 1 and start the New Year with a positive force to deepen our practice and spread peace to the world.
This month, we’ll focus on giving the gifts of time and attention through the points of Slowing Down and One-Pointed Attention. In our first reading for December Easwaran sets the tone with the following statement: “If we want freedom of action, good relations with others, health and vitality, calmness of mind, and the ability to grow, we have to learn to slow down.”
As this holiday period begins around the world, many of us will be thinking about the gifts we can offer to our families, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances. In the eSatsang, we’ll also consider the generosity that is expressed through the gift of our time and one-pointed attention. This is a gift we can give every day, in any season. We’ll sharpen our focus on how we can slow down and give gifts of time and attention more often.
In this week’s reading excerpt Easwaran gives us some fundamental instruction in the repetition of the mantram. These instructions are well worth absorbing no matter how many times you have encountered them. He finishes this excerpt by assuring us that “you… are repeating the name of the Self, who is waiting to be discovered in the depths of your consciousness.”
In our fourth week together we explore with Easwaran a world that offers a treasure trove for spiritual aspirants: the world of night and sleep. Easwaran often tells us that nighttime gives us the opportunity to go forward on the spiritual path.
This week we have the opportunity of viewing a video from an Easwaran talk on this topic.
Each week Easwaran gently but firmly nudges us along in our great journey with the mantram. Can we discover, as he suggests, that “The mantram soon becomes a familiar friend of whom we never grow tired.”
To make friends with anyone you typically spend more time with them. What’s more, a true, very loyal friend will stick with you through thick and thin.
This past week we worked with the mantram in routine times. There is no end to the possibilities, and hopefully you found this task quite approachable. This week we will feature the mantram in challenging situations.
In the reading excerpt for this coming month, Easwaran makes a big claim: “The mantram is the living symbol of the profoundest reality that the human being can conceive of, the highest power that we can respond to and love.” And yet, he assures us, “It is absolutely practical, and it can appeal to our common sense.” It might well take the rest of our lives to explore the synthesis of these two statements.
Let’s continue savoring the joy and inspiration which emerged out of the past month’s celebration of Easwaran’s life and teachings. We can make use of the unified effort and energy of that time and shift our focus to Easwaran’s very practical presentation of Repetition of a Mantram.
Easwaran states in the preface to The Mantram Handbook, “You can begin using and benefiting from this simple spiritual practice, called a mantram, right now.”
Let’s get started and see what he means!
Thank you all for such a rich month of celebration and re-dedication to our eight-point program practice and our Teacher. It’s so wonderful to hear from our worldwide BMCM community! This is a special time to absorb yourself in Easwaran’s talks and writings, as our worldwide passage meditator community joins together in reflection and re-dedication. We have a number of suggestions for you to choose from during this weekend of celebration, honoring Easwaran’s life and teachings. Please check them out and share your reflections with us! We always love hearing from you.
On Saturday, October 26, a local group in Tomales will gather at Ramagiri Ashram with Christine Easwaran to share readings, watch a video, and meditate together. We invite you to set aside time for your own celebration – whether that be a special dedication of your morning meditation, taking a day for a personal retreat, or organizing an event with passage meditator friends. You could do it on October 26 or find another day and time that works better for you.
How would you like to take part in the worldwide celebration of Easwaran’s life and teachings? Create a plan! Check out this week’s post for some ideas, and ways to connect with your fellow eSatsang community around this event.
Thank you all for your wonderful engagement and sharing about our Life Celebration curriculum. We’re so pleased to be together in spirit around this special month. This week, we’re encouraging you to read the passage "The One Appearing as Many” from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad which you can also find on p.192 of God Makes the Rivers to Flow. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad is dedicated to Lord Shiva as the bestower of immortality. We’re pleased to also share this seven-minute video of Easwaran explaining what it means to experience “the One appearing as many.”
How does Easwaran’s commentary add to your understanding of the passage? You might continue last week’s experiment, keeping your eye out for the divine core in people, creatures and nature throughout your daily spiritual schedule. Can you glimpse the divine even in those who rub you the wrong way? We look forward to hearing from you in the comments section.
Throughout the month of October, the worldwide BMCM community is celebrating Easwaran’s life and teachings by reflecting on the theme of “Seeing the Divine Everywhere.” We’ve created a special curriculum, and are sharing it here on the eSatsang.
We will be spending four weeks working through four modules of the Celebration curriculum. Anyone who wants to participate and discuss the material will be welcome to join in the eSatsang conversation. This will be the online hub for meditators and others who are following Easwaran’s teachings around the world to come together for sharing and satsang. We’re hoping that, collectively, we can all take some time to dive deep and reflect on the impact that Easwaran and his teachings have had on our lives.
Be sure to set aside some time on Saturday, October 26 to join our worldwide celebration of Easwaran’s life. More details later, but for now, please save the date! For this week’s reading study, please read and savor the article below, “Seeing God Everywhere” from the Fall 2019 Blue Mountain Journal. Choose one or two sentences or paragraphs that speak to your heart. You might capture them in a way that makes sense to you. Please share your thoughts with us!
Gratitude to all for sharing insights and encouraging messages throughout September. We spent the month exploring spiritual transformation through the impact of Gandhi’s example on Easwaran. We hope that our in-depth reading study of the Summer 2019 Blue Mountain Journal has given you new ways to envision and strive to transform anger into compassion.
Is there one thing you’ll be taking away from this month of reflection and practice? Do you have something new you can incorporate into your practice of the eight points?
This week, through Gandhi, Easwaran imparts a precious reminder about the uniqueness of our practice of passage meditation: “we become what we meditate on.” Can you see this aphorism illustrated in the story on the eSatsang site? We’re also thrilled to share four passages read aloud by Easwaran and Christine. The first three are passages by Gandhi, and the fourth is “The Way of Love” from the Bhagavad Gita which Easwaran saw embodied in Gandhi. They are all recommended for meditation and we hope you enjoy them.
We’re continuing to learn from Gandhi’s example of transformation seen through Easwaran’s eyes. This week, Easwaran highlights the mantram as a tool for transformation – and one that became Gandhi’s greatest support.
We’d also like to suggest a practical exercise for this week. Try giving extra effort to applying the mantram to negative thoughts or feelings as they arise. You might consider ways to catch the negativity with the mantram – before it grows. Perhaps you might do some mantram walking , or notice new opportunities for mantram moments throughout your day. You might look at this as another pathway into understanding how you can contribute to your own spiritual transformation.
Thank you for your inspiring reflections on last week’s reading from the Summer 2019 Blue Mountain Journal! We’re continuing our conversation as a community on cultivating an understanding of Gandhi’s transformation, through Easwaran’s eyes.
This week, we’ll delve into exploring his transformation in South Africa by reading further in the journal. After reading the next excerpt, please share your reflections on our eSatsang site (link below). We’d love to hear from you, and by offering your ideas you’ll inspire others to do so, too! You might try:
Typing a line or two that really stood out for you – one you’d like to remember
Typing an overall message from Easwaran that resonates with you in some way
Sharing how this story from Gandhi’s life applies to your own context.
In the month of September, we’ll reflect on the Summer 2019 Blue Mountain Journal, “Gandhi & Nonviolence: Love In Action, Transforming Anger.” This special issue was published in honor of the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth and the 20th anniversary of Easwaran’s passing. Its focus is Easwaran’s unique message on the significance of Gandhi’s example: that even ordinary people like us can transform anger into compassion, through the practice of meditation. Over the course of this month, we’ll explore a series of excerpts from the journal through a reading study. We encourage our eSatsang community to share reflections with each other every week so that we can deepen our understanding of Easwaran’s teachings, and gain insights together that we might not have become aware of just from reading these excerpts on our own.
Thank you all for such a rich period of immersion in the eight-point program these past two months. Each of your contributions and endeavors at home has helped us get a better collective taste of “bringing a Tomales retreat home”. We hope you have been deeply inspired by this satsang together. At the same time, we know that attending a weeklong retreat can take your practice and your dedication to a new level. For that reason, we offer sliding scale fees as well as financial aid for our Tomales retreats. If this is your hope, even if it feels like a wild dream today, don’t lose sight of that dream. As Gandhiji says, “What is impossible for man is child’s play for God.”
To close, we’ll have an opportunity to hear from Easwaran. In the 6-minute video below, Easwaran summarizes the insights of the sages of ancient India, and discusses how these insights can transform our daily life and our world.
This week, we’ll focus on the last of the eight points: Spiritual Fellowship and Spiritual Reading. These are topics that are typically experienced in person during a weeklong retreat in Tomales. For us here on the eSatsang, we have the following opportunities to experience these virtually as a community. You might consider joining fellow meditators for a virtual meditation next Saturday morning at 6:30 a.m. Pacific Time. you might join Thomas à Kempis and your fellow eSatsang friends, by spending time with “The Wonderful Effects of Divine Love”. Feel free to just enjoy being with this passage. Is there something you would like to you try? Let us know if there’s already something you do to familiarize yourself with passages in an enjoyable way, and then share your ideas with us!
This week, we’ll look at Putting Others First, one of the more nuanced of the eight points. How you put one person first is not necessarily how you will put the next person first – and it will even vary with the same person from situation to situation. Putting others first is a direct way to reduce our self-will. You may already be putting others first in many ways. This week, see if you can take the opportunity to do one focused selfless act. Perhaps you can help a friend or family member with a physical project in the yard or garden. Or maybe, you’ll take some time to write the mantram for someone going through a difficult time. Decide what is right for you. Give it a try, reflect on the experience, and let us know how it went!
This month we will continue “bringing a Tomales retreat experience home”, by focusing on this year’s BMCM Weeklong Retreat theme of “Deepening Our Meditation.” We’ll suggest ways in which you can get a taste of a weeklong retreat from wherever you are.
This week, we will explore some of Easwaran’s teachings on sense training in a reading study and a practical activity. He shows how we can use simple sense training activities as a means for gathering and focusing our energy so we can direct it towards life’s bigger challenges. In this way, he links sense training to grand qualities like freedom, joy, and loyalty.
