We’d like to share one last reminder with you about our online workshop tomorrow: Saturday, June 23 at 2:00p.m.–3:15p.m. San Francisco time. We look forward to enjoying the satsang with you! Even if you’re not able to watch the workshop live, if you register now we’ll send you the recording afterwards.
Also, we encourage you to introduce yourself in the comments section below, if you haven't yet this month. It benefits our community of new and not-so-new eSatsang members if we reconnect with one another. You’re always welcome to write in without sharing your name or location, and you can just share what passage meditation or Easwaran’s teachings mean to you.
In tomorrow’s online workshop we suggest creating an experiment to extend the theme of spiritual fellowship into our daily practice of the eight-point program. Even if you’re unable to participate in the workshop, we’d like to try this experiment as an eSatsang and explore what we can learn from each other.
There are lots of ways we can get spiritual fellowship within our communities at large. It’s helpful to remember that the eSatsang offers something unique in that we're all passage meditators. Here, we’re drawing a conscious focus to the unique aspects of satsang with other passage meditators.
Spiritual Fellowship Experiment
Can you identify some ways in which you currently enjoy fellowship with other spiritual aspirants? Is there another time during your week that might offer an opportunity for satsang? Think of a small experiment you’d like to try for this purpose.
Here are some suggestions to get you started:
Join the Virtual Meditation on Saturdays
Write a comment to the eSatsang to connect with others
Read and discuss Easwaran’s books with friends
Take a mantram walk with friends.
We’d really love to hear your ideas for cultivating satsang opportunities this coming week! Next week, we’ll ask you to share any results you experienced. Your comments will inspire others, so consider sharing as a way of putting your eSatsang friends first!
Reading Study
Easwaran concludes this chapter by conveying the power and the meaning of spiritual fellowship in the context of recreation. Have you experienced the enjoyment of simplifying your choice of entertainment? Do you have any reflections on how to enjoy satsang during recreation?
This is an excerpt by Easwaran from Passage Meditation.
Recreation
In their earnestness, some people who take to the spiritual life devalue recreation. But the spiritual life should not be grim. It should be lighthearted, and recreation has an important place. If we have been working hard, the body needs to be renewed and the mind refreshed. When we spend leisure time with our family or friends on a picnic or a trip to the beach, that is spiritual fellowship. But it is not necessary to go as far as the beach. Why not go for an evening walk repeating the mantram? You will probably see a few things you had never really noticed; perhaps you will have a chance to talk a bit with the neighbors or their children too.
If a good movie comes along – always at least a possibility – go together to see it. A play, especially a musical that the children will enjoy, is ideal, even if the company consists of local high school students who haven’t perfected their talents in singing and dancing. The lights, costumes, sets, and actual presence of the performers will give the children, and the grown-ups too, what the silver screen never can. We share something special when the audience and the performers come together in the same place at the same time.
We don’t even have to leave the house to entertain ourselves. For millions, of course, entertainment at home means only one thing, television. How we have let ourselves be enslaved by those alluring displays! I suggest that you turn it off, consider getting rid of it, and try some participatory recreation in your own home or backyard. Especially if there are children in your household, try reading aloud from stories and plays. Memorize a few lines or hold the text or just improvise – add a few old clothes, some makeup, a wig, a mustache or two, and you’re on stage. But however you do it, be active. Let us not accept as entertainment those half-hour, prefabricated television programs and lose our capacity to entertain ourselves.
Spiritual Seedlings
The transformation of personality is so difficult that to accomplish it we cannot afford to dedicate ourselves to other objectives and try to practice spiritual disciplines on the side. In the early days, however, this often means a change in some of our familiar activities. Old acquaintances may gradually fade from our circle. To rebuild our lives, we have to change our associations and our ways of living.
When I say we need to be selective in our company, I am not talking about withdrawing into a little group and refusing to have any contact with people who do not do as we do. We should be courteous and friendly with everyone, aware of their feelings and points of view, and avoid being judgmental. I am stressing the need to build deep relationships with those who welcome the changes we are trying to make and who will help us make them.
“When a seedling is planted in the countryside, it is fenced in so it will have some protection. Similarly, as spiritual seedlings, it is a good idea to surround ourselves with the protection of others who are spiritually minded. In time, of course, when our new ways of thought, speech, and action have taken a firm hold, we can stand in any company without being uprooted. Far from returning to our old patterns of conditioning, we will influence others by our personal example to change their patterns as well.
This can be painful at first. When I took to meditation I made a number of far-reaching changes in my life, which naturally baffled a lot of my friends, who began to look askance at some of these changes. They were fond of me and thought perhaps I was losing my ambition and my drive. What I did was to try not to be affected by this, not in any way to be apologetic or to impose my views on others. In a few years’ time they saw the changes I had been able to bring into my daily living and one by one they would seek my company, perhaps even to ask my advice on daily problems.
If you are following my eight-point program, therefore, my practical suggestion would be to make time to meditate as often as possible with others on the same path. You may read together for a short while or watch one of our videos, but the most important part is meditation. Wherever people meditate together, a healing force is released that deepens the experience for all. As Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am present in the midst of them.”
One of the important reasons for our Blue Mountain Center retreats is to provide this kind of rendezvous, where people who are searching for the supreme purpose of life can support one another and share companionship on this demanding journey. I am always pleased to hear from friends that our retreats are like an oasis for them, where they can find living waters and return home refreshed.
Lofty Companionship
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.
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.
Wherever people gather for selfless ends, there is a vast augmentation of their individual capacities. Something wonderful, something momentous happens. An irresistible force begins to move, which, though we may not see it, is going to change our world. In this lies the power and the meaning of spiritual fellowship.