As we do each autumn, we are now entering into our annual Celebration of Easwaran’s Life and Teachings. You can read details of how to participate at www.bmcm.org/celebration.
Here in the eSatsang, to deepen our connection with Easwaran, we will be studying the Blue Mountain Journal Do You Know Who You Really Are? issued in Fall/Winter 2018. We’ll thus pause our book study of Take Your Time, and resume after the Life Celebration. Let’s start the journal by reading pages 5–13. As usual, Easwaran masterfully weaves together story and metaphor. And he draws us into a theme of intimate importance to each of us: our real identity. “Like everybody else,” he writes, “I grew up believing that I was purely physical, a collection of biochemical constituents. What has changed for me since then? Everything. Not two or three things but everything. Through meditation, with the help of the demanding disciplines I followed every day in the midst of a busy life, that belief in myself as a purely physical creature has fallen away completely. Today I do not look upon myself or anyone else as physical. I identify with the Self, pure spirit, the same in all.”
What is the most important thing that Easwaran said to you in this reading? How can you apply it in your life?
Let’s also start a personal reflection process for Sri Easwaran’s Life Celebration. This is a tradition for many of us at BMCM. We keep our notes from year to year to re-read and reflect on, as a record of our own spiritual journey. Each week over the next month we’ll give one prompt to guide you through this process. If you’d like, you can use this reflection worksheet to keep your notes. To begin, think back on the last year, particularly on the benefits you have received from your practice of passage meditation. Write down your observations.
To complement this study, please join us for BMCM Satsang Live this week.
As special spiritual treats this month, we’ll end each eSatsang post with an excerpt from Quietly Changing the World. These videos include rare archival photos and recordings of Easwaran and his wife Christine, together with interviews with longtime students. (If you’d like more, you can access these videos here on our website).