Yesterday began well. Was invited to a middle school on the Upper East Side of New York. One of the parents teaches at WestSide HS and became aware of the work we do there and the results that we’re getting so she told the Principal of the middle school and he invited us in to talk to the staff. The school is only 18 months old and you can tell when you walk through the door that it’s not your average, no even one of your run of the mill New York public schools. There’s a special atmosphere when you walk through the door and the entire staff have been recruited with great care and attention.

Showed Sahaja Meditation to some forty teachers in much the same way we show the students. At the end, I asked, “How many really enjoyed this?” About thirty seven said they did. “How many aren’t sure what they feel?” About two. “How many either didn’t feel anything  or really don’t like this experience?” None.

This morning the Principal emailed the parent and said, “I just wanted to thank you for sending Alan along to our school. First, I have to say that my staff was utterly receptive to his work and message, and many of them are eager to follow up on learning more about meditation and getting better at it. Second, he’s a great guy, a jazz and good book fan, and Michael and I thoroughly enjoy his company.”

After the presentation, one teacher wanted to write down the qualities of the spiritual centers on a diagram of the hand. There were many excellent questions afterwards and since the staff are really interested in meditation and mindfulness, the probability is we’ll have a weekly class for the keenest teachers who will start teaching Sahaja Meditation to their students straight away and we’ll see where it goes from there.

Last night saw us present Sahaja Meditation to a group of some twenty five young doctors via Webcam. This was a new experience. A very nice doctor presented a program of Mindfulness and meditation and some research data to support it. It was informative and well presented. That took an hour or so. Then it was my turn and I began by letting the group experience Sahaja Meditation. Over the years, I’ve found it not a good idea to then ask, “how do you feel?” for the people who start talking are usually the ones who didn’t get it, those who got it are in a state of bliss and who wants to discuss that as opposed to just enjoying it?

So I explained the three stages we teach to high school students, meditating in thoughtless awareness, balancing the energy channels in the spine, and knowing from signals on the hands, which energy centers are out of balance and how to put them right.

But then I was stuck. The fact is, my (conditioned) approach relies on two things a) that I engage with the people I’m speaking to, by asking them questions throughout and reacting to the answers and b) that I’m spontaneous and vary what I’m saying depending on the responses I can see, either on their faces or in their body chemistry. On a webcam neither was possible and I was quite lost since I had no way of gauging anything except I could feel the cool breeze on both my hands.

So having explained the three basics, we did a longer guided meditation up the center channel and meditated for nearly ten minutes.

One young doctor said he felt the cool breeze above his head and asked what it meant. Good question. The lady doctor who presented before me said she felt heat above her head.

It’s satisfying that over sixty people experienced thoughtless awareness and Sahaja meditation.

What would you do differently if you were presenting on a webcam, specifically given you can’t engage or assess the responses?

I like snowdrops and in this morning’s New York winter sunshine, while walking our dog Bija, we saw these, our first snowdrops of the year. There’s something about them, my heart always opens with the sight of snowdrops, just look how beautiful they are, and consider too, that all their beauty is focussed totally, exclusively downwards for the pleasure of their mother, the Mother Earth that gave life to them.

A couple of weeks ago, I awoke at 4.30 am and read this poem by William Blake:

It’s an unmitigated joy it is to be as one.

Oops, get thee to the dictionary – unmitigated means absolute or unqualified – and in this case inappropriate - for joy is a word that’s not improved by an adjective – joy is joy, pure and simple, it cannot be embellished, polished or improved, it has no opposite – who ever heard of unjoy? And when we are as leaves on a tree, one harmonic whole, albeit on closer inspection, each one different to the other in some way, shape form or color. How pleasing is that to our maker and to us?

Debbie Eckman sent this last night from the United Kingdom:

“In guiding the creation of an atom into this complex universe, and in planning the evolution of a single cell into this wonderful human being, there is a hidden hand of a very great artist because through this creation, He expresses Himself.  He sings, He dances, He paints, He acts and above all, He compels the spectators to reflect.  Yes, He created this world because He wanted to reflect Himself, His truths, His beauty, His grace, His compassion, His sweetness, His righteousness and all that can be termed as culture.” Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi from a talk called Heralding a New Age of Joy and Spiritual Fulfillment 

Last night, for the first time in some weeks, (we’d been away in Florida and had returned to New York with bad colds), we meditated with some sixty or so people at the Sahaja Meditation center on West 34th Street in Manhattan.

I had always been a loner, never fitted in to any group, be it family, school, city or society. The loner, a state that came with the built-in bonus offer of ego inflation. I came to relish it, my uniqueness, despite the fact that anyone with half a brain could see that it was a state that was patently absurd – the loner was an artificial construct, a creation of Mad Men, the advertising gurus on Madison Avenue, they made up the story, we bought it and the junk they were selling too – you’ve seen it a thousand times – one man against the world in a stream of Hollywood movies, the drifter on the open roads of America. Back in the fifties we were even asked in school to write essays such as “Compare and contrast Colin Wilson’s The Outsider with Albert Camus’ L’Etranger” 

That we weren’t alone was staring us in the face, we, like it or not, and countless millions of us didn’t, were as leaves on a tree.

To see the world in a grain of sand  and heaven in a wild flower – is to see reality, beyond the twists and turns, the artificial constructs of our oh-so-clever minds.

And the joy of being, of being connected to the whole, surpasses the pleasure of doing your thing, be it booze, drugs, the high of being dolled up and out on the town, looking for action on your four inch heels and bare skin, oblivious to the cold wind whipping down Eighth Avenue on a Saturday night while a few, in the natural high of the drop becoming the ocean, make our ways back home.

Courtesy ASCAP

“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”
- Plato

“Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.”
- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

“Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.”
- Ludwig van Beethoven

“Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.”
- Alphonse de Lamartine

“When you reach your spiritual heights you become one with the music and the enjoyment of the Spirit is felt within.”
- Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

“Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself.”
- Henry Ward Beecher

“Music is an outburst of the soul.”
- Frederick Delius

“Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.”
- Ludwig van Beethoven

“Without music, life would be an error.”
- Nietzche

“Music is the universal language of mankind.”
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Music is what feelings sound like.”
- Author Unknown

“A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.”
- Henry Giles

“If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.”
- Gustav Mahler

“What passion cannot music raise and quell!”
- John Dryden

“Where words fail, music speaks.”
- Hans Christian Andersen

“We know an age more vividly through its music than through its historians.”
- Rosanne Ambrose-Brown

“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”
- Maya Angelou

“Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
- Berthold Auerbach

“A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.”
- Leopold Stokowski

“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.”
- Confucius

“The creators of music deserve to be paid.”
- Dean Kay

“If music be the food of love, play on.”
- William Shakespeare

And, thanks to my dear friend Tom Cole from Santa Cruz, CA

“ The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought.”
- Sir Thomas Beecham

“Music has charms to sooth a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.” 
- William Congreve 

“Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.” 
- Lao Tzu 

“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.” 
- Ludwig van Beethoven

“My father used to sing to me in my mother’s womb. I think I can name about any tune in two beats.” 
- Yancy Butler

Walking along St. Nick’s Avenue in Harlem with Shawn Hayes of HealthCorps – Shawn spotted this intriguing entrance. The sign reads “Promise Land” – one wondered was a “d” dropped off the Promise or what? It looked as thought it could be the entrance to a magic portal – admittedly unprepossessing but perhaps that was to deter the cynical, those with lost innocence or the faint-hearted?

We strolled along chatting with the enthusiasm of schoolboys, Shawn, as well as being an academic, knows a lot about construction and was fascinated by the ornate workmanship of the buildings we passed by, e.g. the hand carved in sandstone around a doorway and explained how it was done, with a template as a guide. We passed the apartment building where Coleman Hawkins lived, nondescript and hardly worth a second glance, unlike the Hawk, who walked through the streets of Harlem, a giant among men, a god amongst mere mortals. This is the land of aristocracy, the Duke (Ellington), his main residence for Mrs E and the little E’s, just by the A train subway, and it’s not hard to imagine the crowd or twenty or so disciples in the street listening as Bud Powell practiced piano in his first floor apartment – Sonny Rollins, colossus of the tenor sax, used to travel all the way from Brooklyn just to hear the great genius, mostly still unrecognized even now seventy years later, Bud, with the impossibly long fingers who could sight read anything, who’s influences ranged from the the great classical composers, to the modernists, Schoenberg etc, not to mention every genre of jazz.

And before we leave the Hawk, listen to his multi-million selling hit single Body and Soul where he doesn’t, apart from the first line, articulate the melody once in the three minutes or so that the take lasts – can you imagine that happening today? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q7J4PgrRsY

Sean and I talked about innocence and the power of innocence. Yeats’ The Second Coming sprung to mind:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned – how well does that sum of what we see in public high schools across the nation? Alice Maples, the HealthCorps coordinator from Manual Arts HS in Los Angeles was saying only this morning how you could see on the faces of some students the process of the loss of innocence over the course of a couple of months. What a tragedy, unremarked, unnoticed, unmentioned by the candidates in the race to be the nominee to challenge Obama in the November election.

Surely the big unasked question in our media, on our TV screens is this. Which of these men, if any, are fit to step into the shoes of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt? And surely Yeats was right, the best, if we can locate them lack conviction whereas the passionate intensity of the inadequate, the deceitful, at the moment, in this day and age, wins the day.

Let’s go through the unprepossessing door to the Promised Land, or even the Promise Land if by that we promise to stand up for what’s right. Let’s stand up for our convictions.

And here’s Alexander Hamilton’s house in it’s new location, it’s third since it was first constructed in Harlem. He built it as a retreat from the hustle and bustle of life in the lower part of the island and it took an hour and a half by carriage to get to it, located as it was on a high hill with clean air and countryside all around. In the background you can see one of the towers of CUNY, built in 1910 from the schist dug out while excavating the tunnels that would be the NY subway system. Gothic beauty, if you like that sort of thing, and I do, CUNY, the working class Harvard.

Hamilton too, was an all-time great, a man who fought at Fort George in the Revolutionary War against the British, who almost single-handedly created the economic system in the USA that prevails to this day, a man who almost certainly would have been president had he not perished after a duel at Weehauken, NJ with Aaron Burr, who himself later became vice President but whose popularity never recovered having killed the much loved Hamilton.

Before this stroll, at 7.45 am in WestSide HS, on the final day of the HealthCorps PD course, there was an obvious problem. We’d demonstrated over two previous days meditating in thoughtless awareness and balancing the left and right energy channels. What to do about the third technique – how to demonstrate that in a meaningful way to the fifty plus people in the room?

Spontaneity always wins the day. Remembered Tom McGarry’s comment, “If you had a choice, would you like me to describe in detail why the pizza I’m holding is the greatest pizza ever made or would you like to try a slice?”

Ninety nine, point nine percent would prefer to try a slice. That being so, how come most of us, me included until brought up sharp by the following, insist on describing it?

A couple of years ago, when there were few enough coordinators to fit into a small classroom (now we overflow the large music room which is also a recording studio), on my first meeting with HealthCorps coordinators, I began by referring to a chart and describing the subtle system within the human body. Sarkis Kalashian, then a new coordinator, asked a serious of excellent, perceptive and difficult to answer questions, which had the entire group, me included, thinking in overdrive. Eventually I got around to leading the meditation and afterwards, Sarkis grinned at me and said, “If you’d started by just letting us experience this, I probably wouldn’t have asked any questions!”

Today, after a few minutes in thoughtless awareness, we balanced our left and right channels, then meditated another ten minutes or so.

After we opened our eyes, I asked the group why I’d started each day by asking us to silently say inside “Please take away my stress, please make me fearless”. No one hazarded a guess and I explained that it was because with this group, of which of course, I was a part, I could feel a strong tingling on both pinkies. I explained that the third stage, which admittedly very few students are yet at, by which you can decode on your fingertips information and relate it to the subtle energy centres that are place in the spinal column. I cautioned the group that it’s good to be skeptical, for the domain of the 19th century snake oil salesmen is alive and well and making money out of suckers in the 21st century, but that if, like everything else in Sahaja meditation, if they put it to the test, they’ll prove its efficacy to themselves.

Austin Cromartie, coordinator in Riverdale Academy in the Bronx rounded things off nicely by saying that he had congenital blood pressure and had to take medication to control it, and that since he’d started meditating regularly, the dosage had been reduced and he felt the overall benefits of this form of meditation.

I kid you not, I was in Westmed Health Groups offices the other day and the seat on the right is the new single seat size to accommodate the knock on effect of the epidemic that’s with us now. Indeed, as I took the BX7 bus from Riverdale to the A train at W207 last night, I sat in a three seat row with a large lady in the middle seat of such proportions that I couldn’t squeeze in to the seat on either side of her. How much will this cost just to refit the buses, the planes, let alone the health costs of coping with the illness and early death of these poor souls.

HealthCorps and the efforts their valiant coordinators are making is something the nation should be focussing on right now.

See what Dr Oz said in New York this week on HealthCorps Peer Group Mentoring Approach:

  Dr. Oz spoke about HealthCorps on Thursday in New York City.

When he’s not operating on patients, hosting a talk show or authoring books, Dr. Mehmet Oz devotes his time to his charity, HealthCorps, a Peace Corps-like program that sends college grads into high schools to mentor students on health and well-being. We spoke with Dr. Oz at a reception celebrating Evamor water’s partnership with HealthCorps, which will fund his mentoring program in additional schools across the U.S.

Why is peer-to-peer mentoring the right approach to take to teach kids about their health?
Well, part of it is because I have kids. I was asked by their school to give a talk to them once about 10 years ago, and they seemed sort of bored but I gave the talk anyway. The next day, as I got to the hospital, I had probably a dozen phone calls from corporate executives, lawyers [and] other doctors saying their kids had come home that night and had told them things like “If you have a piece of bread, it’s like having a candy bar.” And it began a process in my mind: If we can get these kids to talk with each other in a way that makes it cool to push back against your parents, they’ll do it. I’m not the one to deliver that message, but I can get college kids to do it. I was working a lot with Timmy Shriver and Maria Shriver, and their father, Sargent, started the Peace Corps, so I put the two experiences together. I said, “You know what? We can create an organization where we use the same kind of enthusiastic energy that young college graduates have, put them back in schools around the country and allow for that unique experience when a 21-year-old talks to a 17-year-old.” I’m not the right person to deliver the message, but I can give the 21-year-old the information they need to make it happen. That was the foundation of the concept. And I think the best way of scaling a program, inexpensively building it and touching a lot of lives — mentoring is the way to go. These volunteers are able to go out and do a lot of good. And they only do it for a couple years — they go off to med school or whatever they want to do in life — but it gives them two years of really great experience and it gives us two years of their service, which is hugely valuable.

What are your goals for the program, and what are you doing to reach them?

I want to have HealthCorps schools in every major city in America, and I want to have them in every state. We may not be in every school, and I think one of the things we’re learning is that we can develop [the] best practices from the many schools we’re in that other schools can adopt and begin to use in their own programs. We’re gonna call it HealthCorps University. So either you’ll have one of my volunteers in your school who will teach your kids about health,  and [for] anybody else, health teachers can take the syllabus and use it on their own. It’s written in a way that’s very accessible to high schoolers, and it’s free, so it takes away a lot of the obstacles to implementing it.

How can parents get involved?
The most important thing for parents to do is to get their kids to either use the website and the content on it or, more importantly, talk to their school systems about whether they can have a HealthCorps program there. What makes the school systems great is the teachers and the parents collaborating. We have wonderful programs that we have started primarily because parents went to schools and said, “I see this program, I want to have it.” And then [they] find some kind of a hybrid program that’s affordable and works.

This morning, for day two of the HealthCorps Professional Development Training, Alan Wherry led the fifty plus team of new and old coordinators, head office and the management team in a 7.45 am meditation. Today, for the benefit of the new batch of coordinators, he explained and demonstrated two of the three techniques we teach students in high schools thanks to invitations from HealthCorps coordinators. Stage One, being able to be in thoughtless awareness i.e. being in the present. Stage Two, being able to assess the state of the subtle energy channels in the spine and correcting imbalances – so after a couple of minutes meditation, we balanced the left and right channels then completed the meditation.

Alan then spoke briefly about how meditation inculcates many of the core HealthCorps values for example, respect. You cannot respect others unless you respect yourself and meditation enables one to go deep inside and reach the core of our being. When you touch that, self respect automatically follows. Mental resilience? Well of course there are many ways to develop this quality, but in a work experience going back 43 years, meditation gives you the inner toughness to keep trying until you succeed.

Alan finished by saying that anything of value requires effort and practice to learn, and meditation is no different in this regard. The miracle is that so many students get it so easily, but to become a master of the three techniques needs effort and practice. Professionalism he noted, by definition, is doing your best work when you don’t feel like it.

This morning saw the beginning of the latest HeatlhCorps PD program which will run for three days in New York. At each of the days, the program begins at 7.45 am with a 15 minute Sahaja Meditation. There are now 53 coordinators, including about 11 attending for the first time, from the Bay area and Seattle. None of these people had ever meditated before.

We began with a show of hands.

How many think that meditation is either of no interest to them, or, a complete waste of time? About three people raised their hands.

How many are open-minded to the possibilities of meditation but haven’t as yet reached a clear cut opinion? About half the group raised their hands.

How many know from their own personal experience and from what they’ve seen from students, that Sahaja Meditation is a valuable practice? The rest of the group raised their hands, including Juan Brea, the COO of HealthCorps and Dr. Shawn Hayes from Sacramento CA, the new director of education and research.

Right now, HealthCorps will double to around 100 coordinators within a year and that’ll be it. They can’t see how their peer-mentoring program which sets out to deal with childhood obesity can grow bigger than that. There are 26,000 public high schools and it isn’t possible or practical to cover them all with this program.

Did you know that at the current rates in the growth of childhood obesity, the ensuing costs will bankrupt the USA? That’s the scale of the epidemic we are facing.

However, a HealthCorps university will be started too, which will produce a curriculum, serious academic research programs and the expertise that will enable any school to run their own HealthCorps program. As things stand, Sahaja Meditation will be part of this.

HealthCorps are partnering with any group or institution that shares their common goals and are now talking to 300 such bodies.

What are the core values of HealthCorps?

Professionalism

Respect

Trust

Mental resilience

Team play

Balance

Sustainability

it’s worth noting how many of these will be developed through the practice of Sahaja Meditation.

In the break between presentations, several coordinators came up to say hello. Joe Blasher from Portland, Oregon, because we have no one in Portland who’s free to participate in HealthCorps activity, has been running his own Sahaja Meditation programs and his students love it. Adler Dorvilus from Miami, Florida was full of praise for Louisa Upadhya, Peter Simone and one other yogi who’s names he couldn’t recall, who recently ran a Sahaja stall in a high traffic area of a busy health fair. Adler said it’s quite a tough school  and his students loved Sahaj and our three people, and were incredibly impressed by Peter, who is a martial arts professional. And, at Aviation HS in LIC, New York, unbeknown to any of us, 140 students have been meditating in one of the school clubs as a result of programs run there by Joan Burress. The CFO of HealthCorps, Fernando, asked for details of the W34st meeting because he wants to start attending programs there.

So far, none of the new coordinators have asked for our help in schools, hardly surprising given they’ve never previously had exposure to Sahaja meditation and hopefully that will now change. However, there is a noticeable decline in the overall requests coming in for regular meditation activity. This will not be helped by the fact that dues to lack of numbers we are now turning down requests for help, for example, Joan and Roni Eldridge are going to Brazil for three weeks and no one can step in here in New York to run the program in Jamaica, Queens.

Let’s hope more of us will be able to step up to the plate, after all, in addition to going deeper, what else can we do better than spreading Sahaj?

Over the years, most of us have pondered on questions such as these. There are no absolute answers of course, but when we listen to people we respect and learn from, we pick up pointers that are helpful. For example, my guitar teacher, Rob Sbar, once said that when you listen to a great guitarist, you can remember bits of what he played a week later.

That rang a bell. I can remember clearly fragments of concerts I heard in London in the later 60s, early 70s, by Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman, the Reverend Gary Davis.

The same is true of any great works of art in my experience. For example, seeing a painting of William Blake, seeing a Mozart opera or, in my case, when I was a little boy, listening to my Dad recite chunks of Shakespeare in our living room in Belfast, a coal fire burning in the grate. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, the good if oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar.” The impact of those words on a six year old has never left me.

This was true for me of reading The Legend of Dagad Trikon by Grégoire de Kalbermatten. And let me be upfront, I am the editor and publisher of this book.

There are many parts of the book that will never leave me. For example, when some of the main characters enter the Bardo, that place between the living and the dead, through the Elephant rock at Delphi in Greece. As they go deeper and deeper, they encounter vast caverns, dimly lit, and covered with unimaginable riches, diamonds, jeweled crowns, orbs, sceptres, precious stone of every hue and color. And amongst all this wealth, strewn as junk on the cavern floors, snake-like creatures condemned to slither for all eternity through this litter. These creatures are the souls of those who lived a life of greed and avarice while alive on Earth. What an image.

And if you can’t get to Delphi, but if you chance to be in Ireland, visit Newgrange in the Boyne valley and see the oldest man-made building in Europe, made 1000 years before the pyramids at Giza. And not the kundalini spirals on the walls, in groups of three.

Here’s what Margaret Merga from Tasmania, Australia said about The Legend of Dagad Trikon

“This is one of those rare books like the masterwork of C.S. Lewis, which draws you in and allows you to participate with the protagonists on their amazing journey. Having heard such great things about the book from friends, I had very high expectations and I wasn’t disappointed. It was so enjoyable to be swept into such a “reality’. Please let there be a sequel!”

A little bird has told me that a sequel is underway.

www.dagadtrikon.com

http://www.dagadtrikon.com/

Thomas Huxley, English naturalist, said that this view was the equal to anything he’d seen in the Himalyas. Well I don’t know about that, not having seen the Himalayas, but from everything I’ve read, seen by way of photos and film, it’s hard to understand what was going through Thomas’ head at the time.

But the New Jersey Pallisades, sheer cliffs of grey basalt, rising from the Hudson River, are spectacular as they are, without the need of comparison to anything anywhere else. They are what they are.

In the early morning, the rising sun paints them orange as here.

Glorious.