We have arrived at the week of our Celebration of Easwaran’s Life and Teachings! You can read details of how to participate this Sunday, October 23 at www.bmcm.org/celebration.
Here in the eSatsang, our study of the Fall 2019 Blue Mountain Journal Seeing the Lord in All has been abundant with inspiration. Let’s finish with the brief final article from Easwaran on pages 58–61 and the beautiful passages included in this issue on pages 25, 30, 31, and 55. Here are the final words from Easwaran on the journal’s back cover:
“I don’t have to close my eyes in meditation to see God. I see nothing else. And I see, at the same time, that not only every human being but every living creature, the mountains, the rivers, the seas, the skies, the forests and the earth, are all one indivisible whole.”
We are now one week away from our worldwide celebration of Easwaran’s life on Sunday, October 23 – we hope you will join us! You can read details of how to participate at www.bmcm.org/celebration.
Here in the eSatsang, we have been preparing by studying the Fall 2019 Blue Mountain Journal Seeing the Lord in All. This week we’ll pick back up with Easwaran’s article “Remove the Veil of Self-will,” reading from the bottom of page 35 to the end on page 44. This section is full of tips for reducing self-will. And in practical language Easwaran describes the exalted state to which this work leads:
“Through sheer exercise, over a long, long period, we do not just love Jonathan or Josephine; we become love itself. Our love radiates to anyone who comes within our orbit; we simply lose the knack of doing otherwise. It does not matter whether the person seated beside us has been unpleasant to us for years, perhaps has even opposed us; that is immaterial. What matters is that our very nature now is love. At all times, in every situation, we are at our best with everybody. This is the answer to our most profound prayers.”
We are continuing our preparation for Easwaran’s life celebration on Sunday, October 23. In the meantime, we have a precious opportunity. Every day, we each can infuse the spiritual renaissance with a little more life, a little more love. Let’s all focus on what we are certain of, what we can do from day to day, and how we can join together to strengthen our unity. By giving our best to this five-week program, we can all join hands and build intimacy with our teacher to respond to these compelling times. In all the ways you participate, you are strengthening your own practice as well as supporting our beloved community. Your daily meditation and your mantram are healing forces in the world.
This week in the eSatsang, we’ll read the short articles from Easwaran on pages 26–27 and 28–29 of the Fall 2019 Blue Mountain Journal, and also start his longer article “Remove the Veil of Self-will,” reading from page 33 to the end of the section on page 35. Throughout, Easwaran helps us see past our differences. He writes, “All our greatness comes from this common humanity, and when we constantly keep our eyes fixed on it, we discover the unity of life which is divine.”
“Only when you have lowered all the barriers between yourself and others will there be no barrier between you and the Lord within,” Easwaran explains in this week’s reading. “Deliberately, then, from the very first, you begin to chip away at those walls in consciousness. You do it in little ways, throughout the day, by trying to see the needs of others as clearly as your own and to act in harmony with them.” We are studying the Fall 2019 Blue Mountain Journal in support of our annual Celebration of Easwaran’s Life and Teachings. Let’s pick back up on page 12 of this article, titled “Seeing God Everywhere,” and read to the end on page 22. May we each be inspired to follow his example, realizing this truth in our own lives!
Our worldwide celebration of Easwaran’s life is coming Sunday, October 23. You can read details of how to participate in the Life Celebration at www.bmcm.org/celebration.
As we do each autumn, we are now entering into our annual Celebration of Easwaran’s Life and Teachings. You can read details of how to participate at www.bmcm.org/celebration.
Here in the eSatsang, to deepen our connection with Easwaran, we will be studying the Blue Mountain Journal Seeing the Lord in All issued in Fall 2019. We’ll thus pause our book study of The Mantram Handbook, and resume after the Life Celebration. Let’s begin by studying the short articles on pages 2 and 3 and starting the first extended article from Easwaran, reading pages 5–11. Here Easwaran writes:
“In all the world’s great religions, this is the purpose of human life: to realize God in the depths of our consciousness. It means discovering that we are not physical creatures that can be satisfied with physical gratifications, but spiritual beings made in the image of God. This supreme discovery brings a complete transformation of personality that cannot help making profound changes in the world around us.
“That is why I say that as I present it, religion is the solution to all the problems that burden us today. In a truly religious country we would have no wars, no violence, no exploitation, no pollution of air and water — for the simple reason that when you realize God, you see God in everyone.”
“[W]e can learn to deepen our will, to strengthen it immeasurably,” Easwaran assures us in this week’s reading, pages 151–155, to close chapter 10 of The Mantram Handbook. And our desire to achieve this is itself a sign of grace:
“The desire to go beyond desire is the longing for freedom rising from deep within us. In the language of Sri Ramakrishna, the Divine Mother has looked upon us from the corner of her beautiful eyes, filled with love for us. When that glance falls on us, there comes the desire to be free, and the will to practice the disciplines which will set us free.”
Easwaran explains that in the early days grace may come as restlessness and dissatisfaction. “If any of this kind of dissatisfaction leads us to turn inward and take up the practice of the spiritual life, that is a sure sign of grace.” Indeed, we feel sure that practicing together with you and this strong community is testimony to that grace.
Note that next week we’ll pause our book study and begin a special curriculum in preparation for our annual Celebration of Easwaran’s Life and Teachings.
Welcome back after our pause to celebrate the life of Christine Easwaran. If you haven’t seen it yet, you might take a look at this special message honoring Christine Easwaran to learn more about Christine and her contribution to Easwaran’s work.
Here on the eSatsang, this week Easwaran highlights the necessary role of detachment for attaining the goal of life, as we continue chapter 10 of The Mantram Handbook, reading pages 144 to the top of 151.
The topic of detachment continues a theme from earlier in this chapter, titled The Goal of Life: “When we overcome our identification with the body, the mind, and the ego, we are living in freedom.” Now Easwaran describes those stages of detachment from body, mind, and ego as a progression, and gives fascinating details of the tasks and rewards at each stage.
Here is one clue that inspired us: “[W]hen we turn our will against the ego, taking advantage of the innumerable little opportunities throughout the day to reduce self-will, then the will is helping us to grow to our full stature.” May we each learn to turn our will against the ego!
Dear eSatsang members,
In honor of Christine Easwaran’s recent passing on Sunday, August 28th, the BMCM will be holding an hour-long special Satsang Live at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on September 4th. We are temporarily pausing our eSatsang curriculum until September 10th when we will return to our normal schedule and format.
We look forward to seeing you on September 4th.
Warmly,
The eSatsang team
Easwaran addresses some of our biggest questions in this week’s reading, pages 139–144 of The Mantram Handbook.
What does spiritual experience of the ultimate reality mean in practical terms? Easwaran gives an infallible test:
“You may have a bumper sticker that says All Life Is One, but if you do not have some measure of control over your thinking process, if you cannot drop a job at will or juggle with your likes and dislikes, if you cannot bear patiently with those who oppose you, then you have not yet realized the unity of life for yourself.”
What is the goal of life, and what is its realization?
“What we are all looking for, even though we may be searching in the most improbable places, is infinite wisdom, infinite joy, infinite love. And this is our real nature. At the very core of our being is a spark of purity, of perfection, of divinity, because the Lord is enshrined in the heart of each of us. When we learn to identify less and less with that which is subject to change and more and more with this core of perfection, we are gradually waking up to our true nature.”
We are so happy to be studying Easwaran and his lofty message with you.
The mantram at the time of death is our focus this week, with implications immediate and profound. Last chapter Easwaran instructed us to conserve our energies and harness the power underlying our desires, to realize the indivisible unity of life. Now he elucidates how that realization can enable us to go beyond death.
“[A]s long as the mind has not been stilled through the practice of meditation and the repetition of the mantram, consciousness will remain in the mind at the moment of death. We will still be identified with the ego, and our last thought will be I, I, I. To repeat the mantram at this stage is impossible if we have only been saying it on the surface level of consciousness, for there is no surface level any longer. To be able to repeat the mantram at the actual moment of death, the mantram must have sunk very, very deep into the mind – so deep that instead of our last thought being I, I, I, the last thought will be of God, whose symbol is the mantram.”
We look forward to hearing your comments on this week’s eSatsang reading, chapter nine of The Mantram Handbook, pages 129–138.
Over the past several weeks as we’ve studied chapter 8 of The Mantram Handbook, “Harnessing Fear, Anger, & Greed,” we’ve seen Easwaran move from detailing the specifics of transforming those negative emotions, to the nature of desire itself, which underlies them.
Now he leads us to a forceful conclusion:
“Desire is power which we can harness or let go to waste. We have all been given this power for one purpose: to realize the indivisible unity of life; as the Buddha would put it, to cross from this shore of separateness to the far shore of unity.”
Easwaran tells us, “Begin conserving your energies to undertake the really big adventure we were all born for. Don’t postpone a day.”
As we read pages 125–128, let’s draw on the support of our teacher and the strength of this group to renew our enthusiasm for this adventure.
“Burgundy Cherry Ice Cream” is the heading of Easwaran’s section on the dynamics of desire in this week’s reading, pages 121–124 in The Mantram Handbook. And he uses that delicacy to show why satisfying the desire for something physical cannot lead to lasting happiness.
“It is the nature of a desire to exhaust itself, the mystics say. Even if eating that burgundy cherry cone gives you satisfaction – and no one is denying that – how long does this satisfaction last? More than that, if you keep on eating ice cream, cone after cone, satisfaction soon turns to satiation, and then eventually to revulsion. But this hasn’t helped to get rid of the desire: when you are hungry again, the desire will be back, and no amount of indulgence on the physical level can root it out, because desire is in the mind.”
We look forward to hearing about the insights you gain from this week’s reading, and how you put them into action.
“The simple solution I would suggest to the problem of anger is repetition of the mantram,” Easwaran affirms in this week’s reading, pages 117–121 from The Mantram Handbook. “This is how we can become slow to anger and quick to forgive.”
As usual, along with this simple solution, this section is replete with specific suggestions for how to put the mantram into action. And Easwaran gives us the quiet assurance that we can do it.
“Here it is that I value Gandhi’s example very much, because it shows that we all have the choice to undertake this transformation ourselves. This was pointed out with keen insight by the Compassionate Buddha. When people used to go to him complaining that they were upset, telling him, ‘Our children upset us; our partner agitates us,’ his simple reply would be, ‘You are not upset because of your children or your partner; you are upset because you are upsettable.’ The choice is ours to make ourselves unupsettable.”
So let’s keep our mantram on our lips, and keep building our determination to become unupsettable.
In this week’s reading, pages 113–117 of The Mantram Handbook,* Easwaran describes how the mantram can help with our litany of worries and anxieties, as well as our bigger fears. Here’s an anecdote he shares that inspired us:
“A friend of mine works as a doctor in the intensive care unit of a local hospital, and she had as a patient an elderly woman who was seriously ill, so ill that she wasn’t even able to breathe except with the aid of one of those breathing machines, a respirator. The patient was a Catholic, so my friend suggested that she repeat Hail Mary. She began doing it and her condition improved considerably. In this case, the mantram helped more than anything else that had been tried, because it helped the patient deal with her fear.”
Let’s continue working together to transform these negative emotions and drive the mantram deeper into our consciousness.
“[T]he key to intentional living is in gaining mastery over the mind,” Easwaran advises at the start of chapter 8 of The Mantram Handbook. And yet:
“Most of the time, the vast majority of us live on the surface level of consciousness, not suspecting the storms that rage in our unconscious. We get some hint of the tremendous power of these storms when they break through to the surface in the form of fear, anger, and greed. When these get out of control, they can pick us up and hurl us about as they like, exactly as if some force takes us over and makes us do things, say things, that we would not ordinarily do.”
It is a fearsome reality. Yet, once again, “[h]ere is where the mantram is an invaluable ally.”
“It can harness all this destructive power that is going to waste and transform it: fear into fearlessness, anger into compassion, and greed into the desire to be of service to those around us.”
We look forward to hearing your comments on this week’s eSatsang reading, pages 109–113.
Chapter seven of The Mantram Handbook has focused on excitement and depression, and as it ends, Easwaran makes a fascinating connection to spontaneity. The very same qualities that lead to the pendulum swings of excitement and depression – a racing mind, compelled by likes and dislikes – make spontaneous living impossible. Surprisingly, “[t]he secret of spontaneity is training; this is how we undo our conditioning.”
Happily, all the training we’ve been doing is taking us toward the goal:
“Any effort we make to keep the mind steady helps on all fronts. … Even if we do nothing more than try to keep the mind steady during the ups and downs of the day, we are deepening our awareness of life far more than we know.”
This week’s eSatsang reading is pages 105–108 in The Mantram Handbook.
In this week’s reading, pages 100–104 from The Mantram Handbook, Easwaran starts by distinguishing between clinical depression, which may need the help of an experienced physician, and what he calls “garden-variety lows.” He lays out a systematic strategy for when we find ourselves feeling mildly depressed.. For his third tactic, he writes: “Another bit of advice for coping with depression is simple, difficult, and extremely powerful: always act as if you were not depressed. … Before you know it, you will find that you are not pretending to be cheerful any longer; you really are cheerful, because you have forgotten yourself.”
The description “simple, difficult, and extremely powerful” applies well to the skills we have been practicing in our book study.
Last week Easwaran showed us how a racing mind underlies both excitement and depression. This week he continues exposing the mental dynamics behind those states and leads us to a solution: “[U]nder no circumstances should you let praise or blame throw you into agitation. This is where the mantram comes to your rescue.”
As this skill develops, the wild pendulum swings of the mind will be dampened, consolidating our joy, and enabling access to discernment.
This week’s eSatsang reading is pages 97–100 in The Mantram Handbook.
Easwaran begins chapter seven of The Mantram Handbook, titled “Excitement & Depression,” by explaining the mental dynamics behind those states, tracing them both to a racing mind. And he advises that to avoid feeling depression, “[w]e need to learn to keep our mind on an even keel.”
“Our culture places such a premium on excitement that this advice is most unwelcome. ‘Don’t let yourself get excited’ has an unpleasant, puritanical ring. But that is simply because we believe the only alternative to excitement is a flat, monotonous life. In fact, there is a third state which is neither excitement nor depression, but far, far above both: a quiet sense of abiding joy which is our real nature.”
This week’s eSatsang reading is pages 93–97, and as usual we look forward to your comments.
To close our current chapter on overcoming likes and dislikes, Easwaran emphasizes a fascinating connection with freedom in personal relationships. In our modern age of loneliness, he writes, “Being able to go beyond your own likes and dislikes helps immensely in restoring the personal relationships that make life worth living, for it enables us to be patient, cheerful, and loving with those around us.”
Again the mantram can come to our rescue: “If we can repeat the mantram when we find ourselves falling into competitiveness and invidious comparison, it will help greatly to keep our minds calm and our relationships secure.”
Our reading this week is pages 87–91 as we finish chapter 6 of The Mantram Handbook.
