Announcement
Throughout the month of October, the worldwide BMCM community is celebrating Easwaran’s life and teachings by reflecting on the theme of “Seeing the Divine Everywhere.” Learn more about the Celebration curriculum in our BMCM News Story.
The eSatsang will be spending four weeks working through four modules of the Celebration curriculum. Anyone who wants to participate and discuss the material will be welcome to join in the eSatsang conversation. This will be the online hub for meditators and others who are following Easwaran’s teachings around the world to come together for sharing and satsang.
In November, the eSatsang will return to its regular content focusing on the teachings of Easwaran’s eight-point program of passage meditation. At this point, and at any point, you are welcome to unsubscribe, but if you’re finding the community helpful to your practice of the eight points you’re welcome to stay.
Reading Study
Thank you again for your insightful comments about Easwaran’s teachings on Gandhi and his transformation. This week, through Gandhi, Easwaran imparts a precious reminder about the uniqueness of our practice of passage meditation: “we become what we meditate on.” Can you see this aphorism illustrated in the story below? You’ll see when you read the excerpt later in this section that it illustrates this aphorism.
Let’s absorb Easwaran’s message of transformation together by sharing in the comments section below. For instance, you could:
Type a line or two from the excerpt that really stood out for you
Share an overall message from Easwaran that resonates with you in some way
Write any thoughts or questions that come up for you as you read Easwaran’s words.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this timely conversation. Your contributions are very encouraging and they take our collective understanding of Easwaran’s message to a deeper level!
We’re also thrilled to share four passages read aloud by Easwaran and Christine. The first three are passages by Gandhi, and the fourth is “The Way of Love” from the Bhagavad Gita which Easwaran saw embodied in Gandhi. They are all recommended for meditation and we hope you enjoy them.
This is an excerpt from the article entitled “Gandhi’s Message” by Easwaran in the Blue Mountain Journal, Summer 2019.
Visiting Gandhi
Graduate studies took me to a university in central India very near Gandhi’s ashram, the little community he called Sevagram, “village of service.” For the first time for me he was actually within reach. One weekend I decided to visit him and perhaps find answers to my questions.
I had to walk the last few miles from the train station, and the sun was low on the horizon when we arrived. A crowd had gathered outside a little thatched cottage where Gandhi had been closeted in urgent national negotiations since early morning. My heart sank. He would be tired after all that, tense and irritable, with little time for guests like me.
But when the cottage door opened, out popped a lithe brown figure of about seventy with the springy step and mischievous eyes of a teenager, laughing and joking with those around him. He might as well have been playing Bingo all day. Later I read that a journalist once asked Gandhi if he didn’t think he should take a vacation. Gandhi had laughed and replied, “I’m always on vacation.” That’s just what I saw.
He was striding off for his evening walk and motioned us to come along. But after a while most of the crowd fell away. He didn’t simply walk fast; he seemed to fly. With his white shawl flapping and his gawky bare legs he looked like a crane about to take off. I have always been a walker, but I had to keep breaking into a jog to keep up with him.
My list of questions was growing. This was a man in his seventies — the twilight of life by Indian standards of those days — burdened daily with responsibility for four hundred million people. He must have lived under intense pressure fifteen hours a day, every day, for probably fifty years. Why didn’t he get burned out? How was he able to maintain this freshness? What was the source of this apparently endless vitality and good humor?
Verses from the Gita
After the walk and a meal it was time for Gandhi’s prayer meeting. By this time it was dark, and hurricane lanterns had been lit all around. Gandhi sat straight with his back against a tree, and I managed to get a seat close by, where I could fix my whole heart on him. A Japanese monk opened with a Buddhist chant and then a British lady began one of Gandhi’s favorite hymns, John Henry Newman’s “Lead, Kindly Light.” Gandhi had closed his eyes in deep concentration, as if absorbed in the words.
Then his secretary, Mahadev Desai, began to recite from the Bhagavad Gita, India’s best-known scripture, which is set on a battlefield which Gandhi said represents the human heart. In the verses being recited, a warrior prince named Arjuna, who represents you and me, asks Sri Krishna, the Lord within, how one can recognize a person who is aware of God every moment of his life. And Sri Krishna replies in eighteen magnificent verses unparalleled in the spiritual literature of the world:
They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them, whose love for the Lord of Love has consumed every selfish desire and sense craving tormenting the heart. Not agitated by grief or hankering after pleasure, they live free from lust and fear and anger.
Fettered no more by selfish attachments, they are not elated by good fortune nor depressed by bad. Such are the seers.
A living dialogue
Sanskrit is a sonorous language, perfect for recitation. As Arjuna’s opening question reverberated through the night air, Gandhi became absolutely motionless. His absorption was so profound that he scarcely seemed to breathe, as if he had been lifted out of time. Suddenly the Gita’s question — “Tell me of the person established in wisdom” — became a living dialogue.
I wasn’t just hearing the answer, I was seeing it, looking at a man who to the best of my knowledge fulfilled every condition the Gita lays down:
That one I love who is incapable of ill will And returns love for hatred. Living beyond the reach of I and mine And of pleasure and pain, full of mercy, Contented, self-controlled, firm in faith, With all their heart and all their mind given To me — with such as these I am in love.
Not agitating the world or by it agitated, They stand above the sway of elation, Competition, and fear, accepting life, Good and bad, as it comes. They are pure, efficient, detached, ready to meet every demand I make on them as a humble instrument of my work. . .
Who serve both friend and foe with equal love, Not buoyed up by praise nor cast down by blame, Alike in heat and cold, pleasure and pain, Free from selfish attachments and self-will, Ever full, in harmony everywhere, Firm in faith — such as these are dear to me.
I had always loved the Gita for its literary beauty, and I must have read it and listened to commentaries on it many times. But seeing it illustrated by Gandhi opened its inner meaning. Not just “illustrated”: he had become those words, become a living embodiment of what they meant. “Free from selfish desires” didn’t mean indifference; it meant not trying to get anything for yourself, giving your best whatever comes without depending on anything except the Lord within. And the goal clearly wasn’t the extinction of personality. Gandhi practically defined personality. He was truly original; the rest of us seemed bland by comparison, as if living in our sleep. He seemed to have become a kind of cosmic conduit, a channel for some tremendous universal power, an “instrument of peace.”