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.

Over the holidays we drove from New York to Florida – or rather I did. My wife has too much sense to want to drive, so I’m grateful she hasn’t bought me a chauffeur’s cap. Do you think it was possible to buy healthy food anywhere on or just off the Interstate? Apart from baked potatoes in Wendy’s, the answer is no. What about the law of supply and demand? Does no one want to buy healthy food along the 1300 miles of road? Apparently not. Where are the fresh vegetables? Go somewhere else, but where?

When I went to see Dr. Richard Morel, our esteemed primary care physician, he was talking about the difference between portion size between when he was boy and now. You can see it in the diagram above. Whereas the average now is about 1600 calories – and most of us need about 2000 in an entire day, twenty years ago, the portion size for the same crap food was only 693 calories.

And when they tell you that the market self-regulates, ask them where’s that reflected in the fool on offer on the i95.

And in the run up to the GOP nominations, in all the discussions you’ll hear from the potential candidates from President, have you heard a mention of the fact that one in three homeless people in the USA are children? If not, ask them, or your Congressman or Senator, why not?

A sad way to start the New Year? Yes, if that were all, but it isn’t and here are some comments from students who meditated at Wings Academy today at 180st in the Bronx:

“Meditation is a good way to forget and wash away what’s bothering me.”

“Meditation really helps calm me down and it is very soothing.”

“Meditation relaxes me.”

Before we began, 20% said they were stressed – afterwards 6%.

Onwards and upwards.

Mickey is 11 and his poem won first prize across all ages in his school in Surrey, UK. I really like it, it’s got strong images and it gives the reader a warm glow, that’s not easy to achieve. From a proud Granddad:

The harsh of winter approaches through time

Christmas time is with us in December

We share our stories and we share our rhymes

And warmness flows through like a hot ember

Giving and taking is what we do now

The festive spirit is back within us

The snow falls down again, and the trucks plough

Putting up the tree we all make a fuss.

Rush Christmas shopping for your family

They say it is the thought that matters most

Put the presents under the Christmas tree

Christmas morning, “Want a slice of hot toast?”

I love Christmas time it is so warming

Giving and getting, family morning.

Saw this in a sari shop in Jackson Heights, New York. You can see the validity of the intent, who would want balls of chewed up gum on their beautiful silk saris, especially if you’re trying to sell them? But, as is often the case, good intentions fail at the execution stage. The difference between doing it and not doing it is – doing it.

Me? I have to lose 30 lbs and exercise five days a week. How will I fare? How long can I keep it up?

Visited WestSide HS yesterday on W102 and Amsterdam. I really wasn’t feeling like it, and on the way there was thinking “What on earth am I going to say to these students to try to help them improve their experience of meditation?” At my age, I’ve been around the block a few times and you learn to surrender to spontaneity. As a last resort I could always use Nicole Riley’s dictum to her students “Fake it till you make it”.

None of this proved necessary. Esther, the arts teacher opened the Family Group by asking everyone to share what they did for their holidays and she did it brilliantly, every student, no matter how reluctant at the outset, said something.

We went straight into the Sahaja meditation. I asked them to close their eyes (three teachers and about twenty students). Most did – I keep mine open and made a joke to the few with their eyes still open that I’m the MNYPD – they got it, and for those of you outside this great and fair city – the Meditation New York Police Department. A few more closed their eyes. About sixteen were meditating, and, par for the course, one young man was spreadeagled in apparent sleep across his desk.

We began at the heart, attention in the center of the chest and we said, “Please take away my stress, please make me fearless”. In the pause that followed, I explained the reason we usually start here is that I can feel on both my pinkies a strong tingling, every week, and that this indicates a problem with our group, on a subtle level with this spiritual center. A teacher and a couple of students involuntarily nodded to show that they could feel this too.

Then attention was moved to the center of the forehead and the explanation offered that tingling on both ring fingers indicated that we had a similar problem here to, at least on a subtle level. We duly said, “I forgive everyone and I forgive myself.”

Finally, we meditated at the tops of our heads, at Sahasrara for a few minutes and one could feel that most of us were in deep meditation.

Afterwards we discussed just how powerful forgiveness was, and Esther told a story of her sister that illustrated this beautifully. One young man, Cory, who before the break was interested in a book I had published on the IRA called Provos, by Peter Taylor, had researched it online over the holidays, and I told a story about a man I knew in Belfast, who was eaten up inside by hatred and for whom forgiveness was never on his agenda. We had a great discussion about the power that forgiveness confers on us and for those who doubt it, it was suggested that the next time someone does us wrong, let’s forgive, as an experiment and see how it feels.

America is a country that has tried, more than any other, to make its citizens free – by its Constitution, and although we have a long way to go, we still lead the world in this regard. But, we aren’t free, we are slaves of our desires and our opinions.

A vital step on the road to individual freedom is forgiveness.

Some people have been pondering the use of the terms thoughtless awareness, or mental silence or stillness. At various times I have seen the respective merits of both, and by the way, I wouldn’t want to give offense over an issue like this.

Shri Mataji once gave me permission to change what She’d said in Her talks. She had been discussing a) that there can be factual errors e.g. in one talk She says that the indigenous people of Australia are Maoris – when of course, Maoris are the native people of New Zealand b) She said with some emphasis that spoken English is quite different to written English and if we were to publish Her talks in written form, some corrections would properly be made. In fact, when it came to it, I never ever did. The reason was that as an experiment I tried several times to see if I could, but when I left the edit overnight and looked again the next day, in my edit, the change had resulted in me eliminating some subtle meaning that I hadn’t quite seen or understood the first time of looking at it. Surprisingly to an outsider, there are often two, three or even four meanings there in one sentence. This is often found in literature, for example, when Hamlet says “To be or not to be, that is the question etc” he is speaking of whether to commit suicide or not but there are other levels of meaning too, e.g. as a human being we have a choice of whether to live in the present, or in the world of our ego or superego. However, to encounter such layers and subtleties in spontaneous, unplanned speech is truly exceptional. As a result of this realization, I came to have profound respect for what She’d said, even casually, without thought. And She repeatedly used the term “thoughtless awareness” and not mental silence or stillness.

One has to ask the question, are the two terms the same, or even similar?

“Mental silence” as a phrase has no resonance, it sounds ordinary, comprised as it is of two everyday, commonplace words. Thoughtless awareness by contrast however immediately arrests the attention, the use of the two together surprise the listener, and therefore have greater impact. Moreover, thoughtless is usually a word that’s usually heard as negative, it implies, for example, doing something without proper regard for the feelings of others, whereas in the context of the term thoughtless awareness, it is entirely positive. Perhaps this is why some tend to shy away from it and prefer the more bland term mental silence. But using a term in a way it is not usually heard has impact on the listener, it focuses their attention.

“Mental silence” and “thoughtless awareness” mean entirely different things. The key is in the grammar. “awareness” and “silence” are nouns – and miles apart in meaning. The adjectives which qualify them, “thoughtless” i.e. without thoughts is quite different to “mental” which by dictionary definition is to do with the mind. Therein is the difference – to silence the mind, i.e. mental silence is not at all the same as thoughtless awareness, which is awareness beyond the mind. One happens in the mind, one happens beyond the mind.

For me, the use of the term thoughtless awareness is the one I use, it has impact, the other doesn’t have as much and when someone experiences thoughtless awareness for the first time, there is no need for explanation, they get the meaning at a level deep within themselves and they understand it in a way that the mind cannot, silent, still or otherwise.

Just had a post from Walter Lerchner from DC whose insight is excellent:

Very nice post! I always felt mental silence was useful in the context that Dr. Ramesh Manocha uses it – in scientific language and publications. In our programs we used the term “mental silence” for some time as an initial step towards thoughtless awareness (first you have to experience the stillness, then you get into meditation and growth in awareness …) but even then I never felt the audience connecting to it fully. So I have to agree with you. Love, Walter

I think Walter makes an important and valid point, if you are in a community, in this case, a scientific community who use the term “mental silence” and this term means something there, it makes little sense to impose another term which is, in the language of that community, without meaning.