Sajad : The next morning

The next morning was Saturday .Sajad awoke in a happy , tranquil mood .He felt as if his sleep had been complete ; he felt fully rested and regenerated . He flung open the shutters of his window and gazed out at the clear blue sky . There were only a few small clouds ,far ,far above .

Within his soul he felt the joy of creation , the innocent, serene joy of nature ; he felt happy like a child with a present .

Later he went to have breakfast in his favourite café. He sat down at a table outside under a large red parasol . The waiter brought him a milk coffee and a croissant .

As he was having his breakfast gazing out across the plaza at the sunlight playing in the leaves of the trees, making some leaves glow a bright vivid green contrasting with the darker green of the leaves in shadow , he began to remember the great emerald forest in the land where he was born , and then memories suddenly came flooding back to him of an experience he had had many years ago .

The memory of the experience had seemed to have got silted over with the layers of every day life , but now it was as if someone had suddenly flung the doors of memory wide open.
He remembered how he had met an Indian man who had spoken to him of the Primordial Mother , the Adi Shakti.


He recollected how at the time it had felt a little strange to him when this man had spoken of God as a female personality , as a Mother, and not as a Father as he was accustomed to .The Indian man had explained to him how he should pray to the Primordial Mother for Her to manifest within him, to awaken Her dormant energy within him, the energy known as the Kundalini ; a small part of Her energy within him, which resides in every human being , just waiting to be awakened.


He had then shown Sajad an old black and white photo of an Indian lady sitting in a meditation posture with one hand raised with open palm . He had then explained that this lady was an avatar of the Adi Shakti , an incarnation of the Primordial Mother on this earth , and that she had found a way to awaken the Kundalini en mass by means of a simple method. This state of re-connexion with the All Pervading Primordial Mother was known as Self Realization, or the state of yoga or union with the Divine.
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The Indian man had asked him if he would like to have this experience and Sajad had accepted . He had closed his eyes and followed the guided meditation exercise lead by the yogi. At first, as they had begun the exercise , he had felt as if there was some kind of tension within some areas of his being , then towards the end of the meditation he experienced his Kundalini rising as a strong column of cool vibrations within him .His physical body had felt less real , less solid than this wide column of powerful , soothing vibrations which seemed to have replaced the centre of his body and poured out from the centre of the top of his head , cascading all around his head like a majestic fountain. The yogi had named the area at the top of the head as the fontanel bone area , suddenly the name fontanel as referring to this area at the top of the head became very meaningful .

Later that evening he had returned home in state of total bliss. He somehow knew without needing words or concepts that he had arrived at the destination of his seeking. He had felt completely whole , completely satisfied ,so much so that he hadn’t even felt the need to eat or drink.


However, after this initial experience , whenever he had sat down to meditate , in the early morning and in the evening , as the Indian man had indicated , although he had felt peaceful , happy and relaxed , he hadn’t had a reoccurrence of the initial experience; he had simply felt calm and at peace with himself.

But that had all been a long, long time ago , and since then he had gradually stopped meditating , for no particular reason that he could remember . And then the daily clouds of the illusionary world , the “ maya” , as the Indian man had called it , and the sands of time had done the rest.

Then he fell to remembering how Ajit-Atta , the shaman of his people had predicted this meeting shortly before he had departed from his home in Al-Ghadir , the hidden city in the great emerald forest .He had told him he would meet a man of a darker tone of skin than theirs , and even though not of his tribe , he would be able to call him brother ; a man not moved by greed or the need to make money, a pure soul he would be able to call an elder brother ; a man that would give him the key to unlock the true meaning of his life that he was seeking; a man that would give him the vidya, the pure knowledge, the sacred knowledge of the Tree of Life , the true knowledge of all things , bad and good .

And he had told him that this man would give him the Usma-Ata ,the supreme gift , the Meraj ,as their forefathers had named it .

At the time Sajad had not been able to understand, but now with a flash he suddenly realised the significance of that experience he had with the yogi ; it was indeed the fulfilment of the prophecy of the shaman , but at the time he had not realised the connexion…

Sant Jordi ‘s Day ( Saint George’s Day ) in Catalonia

On the 23 rd of April the streets of Barcelona and any Catalan city , town or village are filled with red roses and book stalls . The tradition is for the men to give their fiancé or their wife a red rose, and for her to give him a book .

The popular medieval legend tells how Saint George slays the dragon who is about to devour a princess . And how a rose bush bearing red roses grows out of the blood of the dragon. Thus the tradition of giving women a red rose.

There are similar legends and traditions in various European countries . What I find most interesting about this tradition is the archetypical value of this legend and its deep symbolism : My interpretation would be that the dragon is the archetype that represents the darkness of ignorance and negative tendencies, which is defeated by Saint George , the archetype also known as the archangel Michael in Christianity or Shri Bairava in Hinduism, representing the light of goodness and bravery, and the pure desire to protect the purity , the chastity and the goodness of the principal of the eternal feminine , represented by the princess.
I would suggest that this archetypical battle takes place within each human being in the area of our consciousness which in yoga is known as the left side channel , or ida nadi , representing of our desires and emotional energy that culminate in our subconscious plane, the area of our “ shadow “ as described in Carl Jung’s psychology.


The dragon then represents the type of energy that is primitive , brutal , dark that clouds our awareness and pure desire to evolve and become a higher being and can manifest also in the form of the ugly anger of frustration to fullfill negative tendencies or desires .

The way the blood of the dragon , the very sap of his existence , turns into beautiful flowers would symbolise the potential of the energy of the left side channel, the energy of our desire to manifest as beauty and Love, to transform the human being into a fragrant flower .

The fact that the man gives a flower to the woman would seem to acknowledge that this represents the battle within man to bring out the best in him . The offering of a flower being one of the most valid ways for man to approach a woman . A woman being the archetype of love and beauty , and evolution. It is the desire power of a woman that can move the man to defeat his negative tendencies and uncover love and beauty within himself , and thus evolve .

She gives him a book , which would be a symbol of pure knowledge, knowledge of universal values , that can help trigger the pure desire power within his left side channel , and dispel the clouds of ignorance ; kindle the desire to grow into a beautiful being .

And Heaven in a Wild Flower ...

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,

And heaven in a Wild flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour.

poem by William Blake

From here to Divinity

Open Minds: Both scientists and theologians need a new way of understanding God, argues Tim Lott.

As soon as I lost my faith in God at around the age of 14, I started looking for something to fill the God-shaped hole. Just a few years later I discovered the spiritual possibilities of science after stumbling on a remarkable book called An Index of Possibilities. Eschewing equations and textbook pedantry in favour of cartoons, humour and wild graphics, the book explained in layman’s terms the remarkable philosophical and theological implications of relativity, quantum theory, gravity and other science fundamentals.

Index suggested that what I had thought a tiresome academic discipline could actually stimulate the imagination rather than murder it. Over the decades that followed, I joined in the growing public fascination with popular science, and it occurred to me eventually that the real question was not “Is there a God?”, but “What does science tell us about the modern meaning of the idea that the word ‘God’ points towards?”

For there can be as much narrow-mindedness in scientific circles as there is in religious circles. Many scientists are not only reluctant to acknowledge that there might be valid forms of knowledge outside the scientific method but blind to the godlike implications of what modern science has revealed to us. Perhaps because new-age “magical thinkers” have misinterpreted much of the evidence to come up with spurious and irrational conclusions. However, the new-agers are right about one thing. The universe is profoundly weird, and even godlike. The Big Bang itself, entirely inaccessible to the tools of scientists, is an extraordinarily theological phenomenon — a whole creation emerging out of nothing in an instant. And why should there be anything at all, rather than nothing, for ever? It would be much less trouble to have no events, no stuff. Yet here we are, millions of years on, evolved from that formless energy into you reading and me writing. Why? Science is silent.

The queerness of the universe goes much further than this. For instance, it isn’t really there in the sense of which we think of it. The amount of actual “stuff” in the human body, for example, can be contained in a grain of salt — the atoms and molecules that we are made of consist almost entirely of space. Of course, we feel solid, but at the most fundamental level there’s almost nothing there. We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

Furthermore, at a subatomic, quantum level, matter springs in and out of existence in a kind of “quantum froth”. Something all the time is coming from nothing then reverting to nothing again. And it is scientifically unquestionable that the mighty cosmos, from one distant corner to another, including the particles that make up you and me, is all made of the same stuff/energy — the same stuff/energy, down to the last infinitesimally small particle, created all those millions of years ago in the Big Bang. Not a single iota has been destroyed or created since. We are, literally and factually, both all one and eternal.

Since all is one, the universe is you — or at least expressed through you. The universe is dead without human beings to conjure it into life — to give it colour, meaning, shape. In that sense, we are still at the centre of the universe. Science, in its constant breaking down and measuring, obscures the truth that there are not multitudes of events — just one event. Not many things — just one thing. And that event, that thing, could be described as the unfolding of “God”. It’s a God that has nothing to say about morality, or judgment, or heaven. But it is unquestionably real — and it is evidenced in our ability to imagine and perceive. We are the universe become conscious of itself.

These are all extraordinarily godlike ideas, and yet as factual, as “real”, as the dinner you eat or the road you walk upon. The trouble is that science gives us no way to feel these miracles as lived realities. The human soul is left unnourished by equations and syllogisms. Science needs a dose of humility before it can start working out what a scientific God might look like — and feel like. Science hates God because it shows that scientific powers are limited in the face of an ultimately unfathomable universe. But scientists need to take note of the Zen nostrum, “If you ask where the flowers come from, not even the god of spring knows.” Or, as Sir Arthur Eddington put it when talking about fundamental particles, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”

Science respects ignorance and “the cloud of unknowing” in a way that religion based on sacred scriptures often does not. But we shall not move towards a new vision of God until science acknowledges the limits of its own disciplines and makes the poetic leap from measurement and analysis to meaning and synthesis. This is perhaps a job more for poets than scientists. If so, poets need to read science books more — and scientists need to understand what poetry is for and the irrefutable realities of which it, too, speaks.

Article by Tim Lott published in The Times Online , 05 April 2009

The Native People's Grandmothers : The need to respect Mother Earth

We just returned from a public meeting with one of the Native People's Grandmothers, Agnes Baker Pilgrim from the Takelma nation, who is touring the world with their message of peace and hope. She spoke about the Mother Earth and the need to respect her, and about water how we all come from it and that it is sacred and has a spirit. She stressed the importance of not only respecting our elders but also that we should grow into respectable elders.


Afterward Angela went to speak to her and asked her if she ever heard of self realization. She said no and Angela told her that her Mother taught her about this very energy Agnes had been speaking to us about and that her Mother taught her to feel the earth's heartbeat and to recognize the spirit in the water, the air and the fire. Angela thanked her for going all over the world with her beautiful message and asked Agnes if she could share with her this gift of self realization. Agnes said yes, and upon touching her Sahasrara Angela told her that from now on they would be one and Agnes embraced her.

Herbert Reininger at 02:39 on 06 March
More on the international council of thirteen indigenous grandmothers here: http://www.grandmotherscouncil.com/

The angel and the cup of tea

Amjad went into the café and sat down at a small square table . He felt tired , the old loneliness and emptiness had crept in again .
He ordered a cup of tea with milk , and waited . He looked at the people sitting at the bar , at the people coming in, at the people going out ; the head waiter talking to one of the other waiters . They were playing one of the songs from the latest CD of La Oreja de Van Gogh.
The waitress returned with his tea. She set the tea cup , the tea-pot and the milk down on the little table . As she put the tea-pot down on the table he thought he saw tiny little stars gently showering down on it from her hand . She smiled at him with understanding eyes , full of compassion , and said , “This will make you feel happy again ; I have vibrated it “ . Then she walked away .
Amjad poured the tea , added some milk and sugar and stired it absent mindedly. He picked up the cup and began to drink the tea. As soon as he drank the tea , he suddenly felt the amazing sensation of cool vibrations surging up his spinal cord and flowing out from the top of his head and above his head .The column of cool vibrations within him made him feel satisfied, complete , tranquil and happy. What the waitress had told him was true. It felt like when the Lady had given him the marbles of all the colours of the rainbow .

The waitress walked past and smiled a radiant smile . He looked up at her in gratitude .
“ Are you an angel ? “, he couldn’t help asking her . She smiled , looked down shyly , and nodded almost imperceptibly . Then she gave him another generous smile and walked away. There seemed to be something like a hallow of gentle white glow around her .
Amjad marvelled , she was very beautiful, but in a different way somehow; her beauty was uplifting , it was innocence , and he felt loved and looked after as if she were his sister . At that moment he heard a loud crash of thunder , and saw a flash of lightening outside in the square . Then he suddenly felt it : it was the sister quality he had never felt before ; he felt a sudden clearing in his left shoulder , a powerful surge of cool vibrations . There seemed to be an energy centre whirling on a horizontal plane at the base of his neck, on the left side . He felt a strong joyous feeling of relief, a strong clarity ; a feeling of strong , powerful , pure brotherly love toward a sister .

As he left the café , and walked out into the square, he looked up at the sky : there was a beautiful delicate rainbow under the dark greyish blue rain clouds.

The little boy left outside

Amjad was walking along the dull streets of the city borough, the sky was grey , he felt depressed . He passed by a house with loud, vibrant music coming out of it. He peered through the window , people were having a party , people dancing, people talking animatedly with drinks in their hands , beautiful girls, some serious, looking sophisticated, some rewarding the boys who were trying to entertain them with their appreciative smiles and laughter.

But Amjad hadn’t been invited …no-one ever invited him to parties like this , he was always an outsider ; he was poor , he wasn’t handsome , he had no powerful motorbike , no money,…he had nothing to offer , he didn’t even know how to talk about the things they liked to talk about ,….
He felt very lonely, very unwanted , unloved. He had never known his mother or his father ; he had no family ,no real friends …
He felt the loneliness and the insatisfaction within him ferment into envy , and the despair into anger ; anger that swelled into rage and hate ; anger that needed to be expressed somehow , to be noticed …
He picked up a stone and threw it with all his anger against a shop window full of expensive electronic equipment. The window smashed into a myriad of fragments, and a burglar alarm sent out a brain shattering electronic scream into the night .
Amjad’s anger turned into fear. He fled across the road blinded by panic.
Suddenly, a friendly voice called to him .He half saw , a familiar figure standing in a doorway, smiling down at him , it was Father Christmas ! His voice sounded mellow, gentle and reassuring. To Amjad’s surprise he didn’t reprimand him , but instead invited him to come in from the street into what seemed to be some kind of a store house. “I have a present for you”, said Father Christmas , “come with me” . He followed Father Christmas to the back of the store house , behind aisles of large boxes and bales . The atmosphere felt somehow very comforting , and he breathed in the reassuring the smells of wood and cloth, and cardboard packaging . Father Christmas had now sat down. His countenance seemed to be changing , he seemed much younger now , and yet still very wise , he felt like an older brother , grave , wise ,but with the freshness and the glow of joyous innocence of a little child . Father Christmas searched in his big bag of presents and took out a big red marble and placed in Anjad’s hand . As Anjad held it he could see it was more of a glowing dusty orange colour than exactly red, like the planet Mars, or like that amazing rock in the middle of Australia, called Ulurú, he had seen photos of .









As he looked at it, it started to change; it seemed to have become translucent , almost transparent , and inside he saw an orange red flower , it had four petals and it was very beautiful , he stared at it in wonder for a long time .It had made him go kind of silent within and all his anxiety had left him. He felt happy. Father Chrismas looked at him affectionately and told him to keep it very carefully , to not lose it . “So long as you keep it with you and take care of it , I will always be with you when you call my name. And you will always feel happy” , he said to Amjad. “ But what is your name ?”, asked Amjad . “My real name is Shri Ganesha ." And as Amjad gazed at him , he thought his face now looked somehow like that of a kind , gentle , wise elephant ; knowlegeable , old and young and the same time .



"Now come with me , I want you to meet my Mother , who is your Mother too. If you only knew , She has been waiting for you.“ As Shri Ganesha uttered these last words, he remembered the lines of a song he had once written a long time ago :

...On a still silent forest night ,

Of the Lady of the Moon ,

And she said ,

” please come soon ,

for here I have your tune,

if you only knew ,

it is meant for you"

…

He followed Shri Ganesha through a passage and into another room also full of packages and boxes , and suddenly in the mist of everything he saw sitting before him a beautiful lady , she had a very motherly appearance , she reminded him somehow of the Mona Lisa, she seemed to have this kind of dignity and presence; she seemed Indian, but at the same time she seemed from no particular race or nation ; she gestured for him to come closer , she smiled at him and showed him her open hands cupped together . In them he could see many marbles like the one Shri Ganesha had just given him , but these were all the colours of the rainbow. They all glowed with a beautiful light ,which couldn’t be anything else than the light of love . As he approached the Lady, he felt tremendous love emanating from her ; he felt a deep awe , and at the same time her comforting love made it easy for him to approach her . She gave him the marbles and told him all his problems would be solved. As he took them he felt a tremendous coolness in his hands and somehow showering from the top of his head too, and suddenly he was enveloped in a state of deep love and bliss , and joy like he had never felt in all his life. He knelt down in gratitude and awe, and thanked the Lady , but no words seemed to come out of his mouth , they seemed to just flow silently from his heart. She smiled at him reassuringly again, and told him he was welcome, that is was her gift to him, and then added “ Now promise me you won’t get angry any more and not break any more things . I know life has not been very kind to you so far , but now you are reborn in My Love . Take care of these , don’t lose them ; whenever you need me, you can call me and I will be with you wherever you are .You will never be alone again .Now go, and enjoy your Self !“
“ What is your name ?” , asked Amjad shyly.
She smiled her beautiful smile so full of love, and said “I have many names , but you can just call me Mother. “