Online Workshop Invitation
We warmly invite you to join us for an online workshop on Saturday, June 23 at 2:00p.m. – 3:15 p.m. San Francisco time. This is a 75-minute workshop on the theme of Spiritual Fellowship. Many members of our eSatsang will be taking part, so it’s a chance for some real-time satsang!
If you haven’t tried an Online Workshop before, this is a perfect opportunity. You’ll watch a live video stream of BMCM presenters who’ll guide us through a study of Easwaran’s writings and then we’ll watch a video of Easwaran. You can interact as much or as little as you choose and you’ll even be able to type in your comments and questions. If you aren’t able to join us live, you can still register and we’ll send you a recording to watch.
Reading Study
In the excerpt below, Easwaran looks at how all eight points can come into play when we are with other people – both passage meditators, and also family and friends who may not practice passage meditation.
What are some of the ways that Easwaran applies the eight points to satsang, which you find surprising? Is there anything in the reading that resonates with your personal experience? We’d love to hear your comments and reflections about how interacting with others impacts your spiritual practice in positive ways.
This is an excerpt by Easwaran from Passage Meditation.
The Spiritual Household
Spiritual aspirants can share their lives in many ways. To begin with, if circumstances permit, invite friends from other households to join you in meditation. They can walk or ride over in the early morning and take their places beside you. Perhaps they can have breakfast there too, and leave with you for work or school. You might also try having dinner first at one house, then at another; you can stay on together for meditation later. Of course, some sacrifices may be needed. You may have to get up earlier, or skip a few activities in the evening. But the home where this occurs will become a better place to be. It takes some personal experience to understand why. If the neighbors were to glance in and see everybody seated there – still, silent, eyes closed – they probably would not grasp that spiritually those people are moving closer moment by moment.
After a time, the room set aside for meditation will become valued by all. Where before the television room or kitchen was the hub of bustling life, now the meditation room, though only used for a portion of the day, symbolizes the growing harmony in the house. Little by little, that room becomes holy.
Once or twice a week, you might spend an evening with your spiritual companions reading and discussing the scriptures and the writings of the mystics. Most of the spiritual documents mentioned in the next chapter can be used, but I would especially suggest The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living. In this commentary on one of the world’s great scriptures, I have included many practical suggestions for applying the eight-step program presented in this book. I think you will find that it is not an arid or philosophical presentation, but one meant to touch your day-to-day life.
The mantram too fits in perfectly with family and friends. For instance, you can have a brief period of quiet for repeating the mantram before meals, bringing all to a remembrance of the company, the loving preparation of the food, and the divine Giver of it. And why not bring the mantram along on outings, repeating it silently instead of distracting the driver with unnecessary talk? You can watch the scenery while you do; you don’t have to close your eyes. Repeating the mantram will also help overcome the ups and downs of those annual family vacations where everyone piles into the car full of excitement and comes back ten days later hot and tired, drooping and deflated, with a few stickers on the dusty windows proclaiming that they did indeed make it to the mystery caves and the petrified forest.
Slowing down and practicing one-pointed attention benefit from the support of others. When people around you are reading at the table – the sports page, a chemistry text, “Dear Abby,” and the stock quotations – it is difficult not to fall into the habit. But when most are giving their full attention to the meal and the company, we naturally do the same. Similarly, if we find ourselves starting to rush about in the kitchen because special guests are expected, it is much easier to slow down again if the rest of the household is maintaining a leisurely pace.
Mealtime, of course, is the most natural time for good companionship. How fulfilling to eat food cooked with love in the midst of those we love and who love us! Think of that poignant gathering, the Last Supper, the simple scene of Jesus giving his final instructions and bidding farewell to his disciples over bread shared by all. Every meal should be a sacrament, in which we strengthen not only the body but the spirit too.
But if the meal is to be sacramental, the home must be a loving one. Today it has often become an institution where people with different interests take their meals and sleep. Everyone wants to be on the move; no one can find a minute to be with anyone else. We seem to live in giant centrifuges that hurl us out at every opportunity for our shopping trips, dance lessons, club meetings, bowling leagues, and overtime work at the office. I am sometimes asked if I think a woman’s place is in the home. I reply, “Of course. And a man’s place is in the home, too.”
To make a meal a time of sharing, we should avoid all acrimonious talk. How ironic that when the whole household gathers – perhaps only once a day – we often make remarks which drive us apart and spoil our digestion! Mealtime is no time to quarrel about hairstyles or hem lengths, to recriminate with someone for not doing an errand, or to dispute about foreign policy. On the other hand, we are not sharing when we sit in deathly silence, each person entombed in his own concerns, issuing forth only for an occasional “Pass the butter, please.”
Instead of looking at a meal as a chore, as something to be hurried over or an opportunity to settle grievances, we can come to see it as a precious time of communion. We extend this time when all who are able join in preparing the food. If there is a household vegetable garden, and perhaps some fruit trees, everyone can participate in growing the food too. Even small families can plant, care for, and harvest some of what they eat; they share the labor, and they share the bounty. Children of all ages delight in tending living things; it teaches them about growth, nurturing, and the cycles of nature.
When it comes to training the senses, spiritual fellowship is crucial. If you go out with an undiscriminating crowd and pass a dimly remembered haunt, you may well find yourself seated again in your favorite corner with a mug of lukewarm beer and the last few pretzels in front of you, watching the proprietor turn the chairs upside down on the tabletops and wondering where the evening went. It is hard to say no to a group, even hard to say no to one coaxing friend. But if you are with spiritually minded companions, they will know what you’re up against, and vice versa. You can steer right around each other’s temptations and together find some tasty, healthful food to eat, some entertaining, worthwhile things to do.