Yesterday my wife and I felt a deep peace filling our nervous systems and I heard the same from friends in various parts of the world. There is definitely a general change of frequency taking place on Earth which is fine tuning, but also exposing embedded corruptions, individually and collectively. For over forty years I’ve been advising others to develop subtly by meditating (long before most doctors discovered its usefulness).
Please take a few minutes a day for this. The only way out of all this mess created by human beings is in-and-up. Otherwise the shaking and quaking is going to be experienced more and more intensely, and the roots of the chaos in us cannot be replaced by harmony.
Two weeks before May 5, 1982, I learned how to meditate (really meditate, in thoughtless awareness, feeling the benevolent effects of my very own kundalini energy in me). Now Sahaja Yoga is celebrating 50 years of establishing global transformation, from a time when meditation was viewed as an esoteric hobby, to the present when it’s recommended worldwide by health experts for its universal balancing and integrative effects.
How time flies. Today it’s been half-a-century since that crucial sprouting that’s since risen into this majestic tree. Then, for me, it was still a 12-year-old sapling that has gradually lifted me into reality.
It’s so peaceful and fulfilling up here. Thank You, Shri Mataji, and everyone that has dedicated their lives to establishing this essential metamorphosis. 🦋🌳
Everything we’ve generally accepted about human beings is quickly changing. As soon as we discover that we are much larger and more precious than our familiar shells, all the Game rules change. Our limited perception is expanding out into beautiful reality. This is what it’s all been leading up to.
More about the mysterious, enlightening ‘cool breeze’ appearing in our modern culture, and forgiveness that enables ‘thoughtless awareness’:
Sarayu = Wind: The name is the feminine derivative of the Sanskrit root सर् sar “to flow”; as a masculine stem, saráyu- means “air, wind”, i.e. “that which is streaming”.
36 years ago today I crossed an essential threshold and embarked on an epic journey …
into enlightenment.
Almost every day since the 20th of April, 1982, I’ve been able to attain clarity, and briefly glimpse blissful Reality through the instrument of my central nervous system, and the state of thoughtless awareness.
The upward spiral unfolds, with wonderful surprises arising just around every curve.
More than anything else, I wish this for you.
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(for full-size headphones or bass intense speaker system!)
In separation have I suffered long, But now am glorified in the eternal bliss of Union.
And from my core, That once was small, The sound of Light Expands to all.
Never will I shrink again Into a ball of doubt and pain. Forever forth, in inner sky, I spread my wings and upward fly.
All Life pulsates within my breast.
I have become The hollow drum.
~Ed Saugstad 20 April 2018
—special thanks to Linda Dzus (wife of one of my old best buddies, Doug) who took this amazing photo in their neighbourhood on Mayne Island, British Columbia, the oasis that I briefly took refuge in after attaining self-realisation, 36 years ago—
… In Sahaja meditation, there is no deliberate effort to “concentrate,” and certainly, you do not need to focus your attention on a specific object. In fact, the goal is to avoid concentration or mental activity altogether. There’s no need to be mindful of or engage with your thoughts and feelings while meditating.
In fact, you won’t want to. Engaging your mind in such mental noise will only drag your attention back down to the first floor — that mental plane — rather than remaining in the state of thoughtless awareness. Thoughtless awareness is not simply a thought vacuum or state of thoughtless emptiness on the mental plane. It is a whole new dimension of awareness, higher awareness that is difficult to describe to someone who has not yet experienced it. We cannot fully conceive of its depth or describe it with language we’re accustomed to using on the ordinary mental plane.
For the period of about a year-and-a-half after I finally found out how to actually meditate in April 1982 (having put in much effort already for eight years, without benefit) and I moved away from the party neighbourhood of my youth, there seem to be no photos of my amazing progress. Now, by chance, I saw THAT Ed, exactly thirty-four birthdays ago, strolling along with a wedding procession in the heart of New Delhi!
I had arrived alone at 2:00 a.m. in humid Bombay two weeks before, after an exhausting series of flights, with an overweight suitcase and a phone number. It was the first international journey in my quarter century of life on Earth. (Little did I guess then that I would return to India more than twenty times!) Someone back home in Vancouver had just bought my ’65 Chevy panel van, enabling me to join my new yogi friends on the India tour. A kindly airport police officer helped me reach the others, already a huge, international group of pilgrims, and that very evening I met Shri Mataji, the founder and teacher of Sahaja Yoga meditation, on the first of many joyful occasions over the coming days, years and decades, in various countries.
Among the many memorable events in Delhi was our viewing of the new Gandhi movie in the cinema that it had world premiered in just nine weeks before. (As a girl, Shri Mataji had spent time with Gandhi at his ashram, where he would sometimes implement Her advice on spiritual issues.) I remember walking out of that air-conditioned building and looking up at the hot, wide blue sky, realizing that those historic happenings had taken place not long ago under this very canopy.
I was lucky to be among those few of us from Canada (at that time there were only a handful of people practicing Sahaja Yoga in North America) that were invited to stay for a few days with Shri Mataji in Her daughter’s house. Several massive public programs were held throughout the city, and I attended my first puja, which celebrated Shivaratri at that time. At the compound where we all met each day, someone organized a cake and candles 🎂, and some new friends sang Happy Birthday to me that third day of February … so long ago, now! I drank lots of yummy chai there, discovering too late that the caffein was brutal on my sensitive liver. We also travelled up to the Himalayan foothills, where I saw some Indian girls enjoy snow for the first time. I spent that wonderful month in India without getting sick, a bit of a miracle (although as soon as I got back to the West I cleared out quite thoroughly!)
I still feel all that as a solid building block in my evolution, and this unexpected window view now brings a fresh breeze to grownup Ed.💨
(And, adding an interesting twist to the perspective: I happen to be turning 59 now, the same age Shri Mataji was when we first met back then!)
Shri Mataji gave each of us a present that afternoon (6 Feb 1983)
They were original Indian artworks. Somehow I managed to hold on to mine (the only thing I have left from my early twenties). It now hangs in my little art-studio in our homestead in the Vienna Woods:
In a suburb of Vancouver thirty-four years ago, when people would look at you like you just flew in from Mars if you mentioned meditation or yoga, I was very lucky to find an authentic technique for attaining thoughtless awareness — that natural state that has now been proven to bring on essential equilibrium. My daily experiences with all that are still improving, with no end to all the delightful surprises in sight.
Here’s a little taste. Hope you can also enjoy that.
A letter from a friend today: We were invited yesterday by a charity group specialized in offering services to families (one of the oldest and most respected in our region) to their monthly event. We were the highlight and we meditated with about 25-30 people, parents and children. The children LOVED it. Many came from mental problems, nothing really disturbing, but evidently very heavy atmosphere: adults looked really sad and hopeless, some of them; children had ADHD (“my kid cannot sit still not even for two minutes”). Children, stayed for the entire program, fifty minutes, and they didn’t want to go outside to play. They wanted to talk to us. They wrote us thank-you cards and amazing feedback. We even have it on tape and hope the parents will agree to have it posted on the website. And the “two-minute-only kid stayed in meditation all the time. He told his parents that he wants to meditate in the car, that he never felt so calm and in control, that he was sooo stressed out from school and now he is happy. He asked us to come to his school because his teacher is under a lot of stress, then he told his mom to do this meditation because she is under a lot of stress. His mom could not thank us enough, and also the other parents. But the children, they were ANGELS, and the parents were worried sick about “them not being OK” 🙂
Even as the world seems to be getting drained of peace and happiness, don’t forget to spend a few minutes today filling your inner cup (by first emptying it)
It’s been ages since I wrote anything besides quick smileys in emails and Facebook comments. A dark and distressing winter lies back between me and the completion of my novel last year. This blog has faded with neglect in those internal snowdrifts. Even the beginning of spring brought no respite from the penetrating cold. But now, as if by some secret orchestration, the first beams of 2013’s warmth and a new inner sunniness are suddenly arriving simultaneously.
It began last night with a dream.
I dreamt we were living in a future post-greed era in which powerful corporations and religious and political organizations had become curious matters of history. People lived in harmony with grassroots means. The world was not however primitive, as many practical tools were developed through advanced technology, but these were devices of the highest quality of craftsmanship produced for decades of daily use, not solely to turn over a profit. Unlimited energy and communication were free and universally available. Individuals could feel the fulfilling beauty of their own selves, and the same in others, so there was no more violence based on ideologies or standards of living.
When I woke up, that life seemed so sensible and easily, naturally attainable, that I felt like a child on a holiday morning who wants to quickly go wake up all its friends to play. Then I remembered the present state of our world. Surprisingly, I was not discouraged. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in this life, it’s that for every plunge into hopeless darkness there is an equally intense spring up into light. Or, to put it as literally as possible, at the same time that human beings swing to the furthest left and right extremes on the pendulum of indulgence and suffering, the more our deepest, sincerest collective desire to know absolute goodness opens the central spiral of enlightenment. Of course, there’s much more to it than that, including a specific, built in mechanism that propels us into that higher state of understanding, as I’ve experienced daily in moments of meditation most of my life, but that basic principle is constantly at work. We reap what we sow, but pain often causes us to take firm hold of the helm of our ship to deliberately, through our renewed desire and focus, steer our life in a better direction. And that’s usually when a person discovers that wonderful link to reality within.
I’m not so naive as to expect everyone to get this, certainly not all those tyrannosaurs reincarnated as humans, bent only on a thrill and a kill, but most people surely can. Maybe the world’s human population will reduce some day when the animals go back to incarnating only as animals (replenishing all those dwindling species?) allowing those of us remaining to advance in more subtle ways.
So, now before I ramble off onto even more unpredictable trails of evolutionary speculation, allow me to bid you a very good day or night. May your trials be deep, and your achievements high.
Self-Help 