Announcement
We welcome you to join us today for our Online Workshop and explore Spiritual Reading in the company of other passage meditators. We’d love to share this live satsang with you, today on November 10 at 9:00 a.m. San Francisco time. It’s not too late to register for the event, and you can pay on the sliding scale from $0–25. (The standard fee is $10.)
If you’re unable to attend the Online Workshop live, don’t worry – register below and we’ll send you the recording in a few days.
Reading Study
In the reading below, Easwaran describes our need for “transcendent companionship.” He describes the richness we can find in reading the mystics and meditating on their words in order to bring their presence into daily life through the eight points.
We look forward to hearing your comments about the following questions!
What are some of the ways that you could apply some of the eight points to Spiritual Reading?
What benefits have you seen or could you see in making Spiritual Reading a regular part of your week?
The excerpt below is from the Blue Mountain Journal, Spring/Summer 2016, by Easwaran.
On the spiritual path, we all need the human companionship of others following the same disciplines. But we also need transcendent companionship. The highest form of spiritual association is with someone who embodies our highest ideals and aspirations, someone we want to be like in every possible way. It might be Jesus or the Compassionate Buddha; it might be a great saint like Sri Ramakrishna, Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, or Thérèse of Lisieux.
In the Indian tradition, the human soul in its search for God is represented as a beautiful woman named Radha who is always meditating on Sri Krishna. When the Lord appears to her one day, Radha is so overwhelmed that she tells him, “I love you so much, I meditate upon you so passionately, that one day I am going to become you!” And Sri Krishna replies delightfully, “Radha, I love you so much and think about you so much that the day you become Krishna, I am going to become Radha.”
This is the real principle of satsang: we become like those we love. If I can in any way account for the small measure of spiritual awareness that has come to me, the only explanation I can offer is that I loved my spiritual teacher, my mother’s mother, so deeply that I made it possible for her to convey to me a small part of her awareness of God. Today, in a very small way, I have become like her – not because of any special virtues I might have had, but because I loved her so utterly that I absorbed some of her consciousness through a kind of spiritual osmosis. In this sense, spiritual awareness is not taught; it is caught.
This does not require a physical presence. Jesus, the Buddha, great sages and saints like Sri Ramakrishna, Mahatma Gandhi, Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, all continue to guide us. They are not dead. Their bodies are gone, but their spirit moves about freely in the world, helping those who turn to them with a unified heart.
Similarly, my teacher is much more real to me today than she was when I was a child. And for Francis and Teresa, Jesus was a friend with whom they conversed intimately, just as Sri Ramakrishna did with the Divine Mother. Even for people like you and me, luminous figures like these in every religion can be living companions – much more real, much more influential, than flesh and blood friends whose lives are scattered. By reading about them, thinking about them, meditating on their words, we can bring their presence into our daily lives.
Whenever our confidence ebbs – for most of us as frequently as the ebbing of the sea – we can turn to the words of these men and women of God and renew our hearts, draw fresh breath, and bring back into sight our supreme goal. Their trials put our obstacles into perspective, and their triumphs give us courage. We see just what we can be as human beings: our capacity to choose, to change, to endure, to know, to love, to radiate spiritual glory. Personally, I never tire of reading these precious documents. How blessed it is to be in the holy presence of a Saint Teresa or a Sri Ramakrishna!