Thanks to all of you for sharing your introductions and joining as you can in our “bring a weeklong retreat home” theme. Your reflections are always inspiring because they are a testament to how Easwaran speaks to each of us differently and in just the way we need. This week, we’ll revisit Easwaran’s teachings about how our meditation practice helps build our will.
Also, you might like to meditate with others this week as another way to bring the retreat home. Perhaps you have an in-person satsang to facilitate this, or another place to meditate with others.
As an optional alternative, you might try joining us for a virtual meditation next Saturday morning at 6:30 a.m. San Francisco time. This is the same time of day that you would meditate in the morning if you were in Tomales, at the retreat house.
We'll start the virtual meditation with a volunteer reading a passage from God Makes the Rivers To Flow aloud. Then we'll meditate silently together for 30 minutes. We’ll ring a bell to signal the end of meditation, and ask for another volunteer to read aloud Easwaran's "Thought for the Day". Then we'll end by asking for any mantram requests.
We use Zoom software which allows us to videoconference with each other. We'll start promptly at 6:30 a.m. every Saturday and meditation is from 6:35a.m. to 7:05a.m.
Reading Study
This week, we’ll continue our reading study in which Easwaran reminds us that no effort is lost on the spiritual path. Please feel free to share particular lines or sections from the reading that stand out to you, and tell us how they might apply to your own life, and to building your will. We’d love to hear from you!
This is an excerpt from The End of Sorrow, volume 1 of The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living by Easwaran.
41. When such people die, they go to other realms where the righteous live. They dwell there for countless years and then are reborn into a home which is pure and prosperous.
In this verse Sri Krishna tells us that if we give up meditation after some years because of overpowering sense-desires or self-will, he will carefully store our sadhana for us so we can pick it up later. The Lord is a good storekeeper, and he will keep our sadhana in a packet carefully put away on the shelf until we come and reclaim it the next time we enter the human context. When we return to the store and ask him, “Will you look for something I forgot last time? It’s a packet of six years’ meditation,” Sri Krishna will say, “I’ve kept it very carefully up on this shelf. It’s a pretty good packet; weighs a good bit, you know.”
As proof of this he tells us we will be born next time into a family with good parents, who will help us by their personal example to be patient and forgiving and to lead the spiritual life. This is perhaps why I had the great blessing to be born as the grandchild of my Grandmother. If you ask my mother how she accounts for her boy, who led such an ordinary life, becoming aware of his real Father, she will say that I have been looking for Him for many centuries, practicing meditation and calling, “Where are you, dad?” all the time, until one day He said, “Here I am, son.”