Online Workshop Invitation
We warmly invite you to join us for an online workshop on Saturday, February 24 at 9–10:15 a.m. San Francisco time. This is a 75-minute workshop on the theme of Putting Others First. Many members of our eSatsang will be taking part, so it’s a chance for some real-time satsang!
Reading Study
It has been wonderful to hear all of your thoughts and reflections about Easwaran’s definition of love. Thank you for sharing!
This week, we’re continuing our reading study from Passage Meditation, on Putting Others First. In the excerpt below, Easwaran shares the lofty purpose for all of our efforts to reduce self-will and put others first: “unitary consciousness.” It can be helpful to have this reminder if the situation you find yourself in is a difficult one.
How does keeping your grandest purpose in the forefront of your mind help with your practice of the eight points in your daily life? We would love to hear your comments and reflections on this topic.
This is an excerpt from Easwaran’s book, Passage Meditation.
This almost miraculous capacity is beautifully illustrated in the lives of the great men and women of God, though people like us are not expected to go so far. The extravagant young gallant, Francis Bernardone of Assisi, had always loathed and feared leprosy. Wandering about in his costly garments, he would never touch the lepers around his village, could scarcely bring himself to look at them; when a leper came to beg alms of him, though he would give, he always sent someone else to make the gift. He used to pass the leprosy sanatorium with averted face, his handkerchief over his nostrils.
But a powerful force was already working within Francis. One day he seemed to hear a promise deep in his consciousness: “All that you used to avoid will turn itself to great sweetness and exceeding joy.” Soon after, riding on horseback across the plains of Umbria, he came upon a terribly disfigured leper. For an instant, the old, powerful revulsion swept through the young man. But then, from a deeper level, came a flash of realization: This is my brother!
Francis climbed down, went up to the pitiful figure, and offered alms. As the leper reached out to take them, Francis knelt and kissed the fingers so wasted by disease: and as he did so, the chroniclers tell us, he felt flood through his being that promised sweetness and joy.
We began with the ego-bound human being; we have come to the man or woman who has risen above separateness to become universal, on fire with love for all. My plea is that none of us cease striving until we reach this unitary consciousness, when we live in the certitude that all life is one and that whatever we do has an effect, for good or ill, everywhere. This is the realization John Donne conveys in those haunting lines:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.