| Revision as of 19:16, 21 August 2006 edit69.106.61.178 (talk)No edit summary← Previous edit | Revision as of 20:26, 21 August 2006 edit undoGoethean (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Extended confirmed users40,563 edits rv copyright infringementNext edit → | ||
| Line 3: | Line 3: | ||
| Eknath Easwaran developed a method of ] that he called "]" — silent repetition in the mind of memorized inspirational passages from the world's great religions. As Easwaran says, "The slow, sustained concentration on these passages drives them deep into our minds; and whatever we drive deep into consciousness, that we become." | Eknath Easwaran developed a method of ] that he called "]" — silent repetition in the mind of memorized inspirational passages from the world's great religions. As Easwaran says, "The slow, sustained concentration on these passages drives them deep into our minds; and whatever we drive deep into consciousness, that we become." | ||
| Easwaran's |
Easwaran's program for spiritual growth consists of eight points: | ||
| * ] | * ] | ||
| * '']m'', or the repetition of a '']'' | * '']m'', or the repetition of a '']'' | ||
| Line 13: | Line 13: | ||
| * Reading the writings of the mystics | * Reading the writings of the mystics | ||
| Easwaran founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation and Nilgiri Press, which published over two dozen books by him. | |||
| Eknath Easwaran is respected around the world as one of the twentieth century’s great spiritual teachers. | |||
| Although he is known primarily through his books, Easwaran has also personally touched the lives of the thousands of people who have heard him speak since 1960 when he began giving regular classes on meditation in the San Francisco Bay Area. By the early 1990s, his meditation retreats were drawing people from around the world. | |||
| Easwaran’s reputation as an author and as a teacher rests largely on the practical appeal of his method of meditation, which enables ordinary people to translate lofty ideals into daily living within the context of any religious tradition – or, equally well, with no religious commitment at all. | |||
| He often quoted the words of Mahatma Gandhi, who influenced him deeply: “I have not the shadow of a doubt that every man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.” | |||
| Sri Easwaran’s method of meditation consists in going slowly in the mind through the words of inspirational passages that express one’s highest ideals, chosen from scriptures and mystics of all religions. To everyone, regardless of faith, he recommended beginning with the Prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love . . . .” | |||
| Sri Easwaran’s Eight-Point Program provides tools for translating St. Francis’s high ideals into everyday behavior. Each step is a practice followed in every major religion: meditation, repetition of a mantram or “prayer word,” slowing down, one-pointed attention, training the senses, putting others first, spiritual companionship, and spiritual reading. | |||
| Sri Easwaran’s life’s mission was to extend to everyone, “with an open hand,” the spiritual disciplines that had brought such rich benefits to his own life. For forty years he devoted his life to teaching the practical essentials of the spiritual life as found in every religion. He taught their universal message that although the body is mortal, within every creature there is a spark of divinity that can never die. And he taught, and lived, a method that any man or woman can use to reach that inborn divinity and draw on it for love and wisdom in everyday life. | |||
| Whenever asked what religion he followed, Sri Easwaran would reply that he belonged to all religions. His teachings reached people in every faith. | |||
| Eknath Easwaran was born in December 1910, into an ancient matrilineal family in Kerala state, South India. There he grew up under the close guidance of his mother’s mother, Eknath Chippu Kunchi Ammal, whom he honored as his spiritual teacher. From her he learned the traditional wisdom of India’s ancient scriptures. An unlettered village woman, she taught him through her daily life, which was permeated by her continuous awareness of God, that spiritual practice is something to be lived out each day in the midst of family and community. | |||
| Growing up in British India, Sri Easwaran first learned English in his village high school, where the doors were opened to the treasure-house of English literature. At sixteen, he left his village to attend a nearby Catholic college. There his passionate love of English literature intensified and he acquired a deep appreciation of the Christian tradition. Later, in Hyderbad, India, contacts with the YMCA enriched his sense of the universality of spiritual truths. | |||
| Sri Easwaran often recalled with pride that he grew up in “Gandhi’s India” – the historic years when Mahatma Gandhi was leading the Indian people to freedom from British rule through complete nonviolence. As a young man, Sri Easwaran met Gandhi and the experience of sitting near him at his evening prayer meetings left a lasting impression. The lesson he learned from Gandhi was the power of the individual: the immense resources that emerge into life when a seemingly ordinary person transforms himself completely. | |||
| After graduate work at the University of Nagpur in Central India, where he took first-class degrees in literature and in law, Sri Easwaran entered the teaching profession, eventually returning to Nagpur to become a full professor and head of the graduate department of English. By this time he had acquired a reputation as a writer and speaker, contributing regularly to the Times of India and giving talks on English literature for All-India Radio. | |||
| At this juncture, he would recall, “All my success turned to ashes.” The death of his grandmother in the same year as Gandhi’s assassination prompted him to turn inward. Following Gandhi’s inspiration, he became deeply absorbed in the Bhagavad Gita, India’s best-known scripture. Meditation on passages from the Gita and other world scriptures quickly developed into the method of meditation that today is associated with his name. | |||
| Sri Easwaran was Professor of English Literature at the University of Nagpur when he came to the United States on the Fulbright exchange program in 1959. Soon he was giving talks on India’s spiritual tradition throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. At one such talk he met his future wife, Christine, with whom he established the organization that became the vehicle for his life’s work. The mission of the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, founded in 1961, is the same today as when it was founded: to teach Sri Easwaran’s Eight Point Program of meditation aimed at helping ordinary people conquer physical and emotional problems, release creativity, and pursue life’s highest goal, Self-realization. | |||
| After a return to India, obligated by the terms of the Fulbright program, Sri Easwaran came back to California in 1965. He lived in the San Francisco Bay Area the rest of his life, dedicating himself to the responsive American audiences that began flowing into his classes in the turbulent Berkeley of the late 1960s, when meditation was suddenly “in the air.” In January 1968, at the University of California, Berkeley, he inaugurated what is believed to be the first academic course on meditation ever offered for credit at a major American university. | |||
| Always a writer, Sri Easwaran started a small press in Berkeley in 1967 to serve as the publishing branch of the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. Nilgiri Press was named after the Nilgiris or ‘Blue Mountains’ in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where Sri Easwaran had maintained a home for some years. The press moved to an old dairy barn outside Tomales, California, when the Center bought property there for a permanent headquarters in 1970. Nilgiri Press did the preproduction work for his first book, Gandhi the Man, and began full book manufacturing with his Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living in 1975. | |||
| In thousands of talks and two dozen books, Sri Easwaran has taught his Eight Point Program to an audience that now extends around the world. Rather than travel and attract large crowds, he chose to remain in one place and teach in small groups – a preference that was his hallmark as a teacher even in India. “I am still an educator,” he liked to say. “But formerly it was education for degrees; now it is education for living.” | |||
| ===Quotations=== | ===Quotations=== | ||
Revision as of 20:26, 21 August 2006
Eknath Easwaran (December, 1910 – October, 1999) was an Indian-American professor, author, translator, and religious teacher. He was born in a village in Kerala, India. His translations of the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and the Dhammapada are critially acclaimed. His best-selling book is called Meditation: A Simple Eight Point Program for Translating Spiritual Values into Daily Life. He was influenced by Gandhi, whom Easwaran met when he was a young man.
Eknath Easwaran developed a method of meditation that he called "Passage Meditation" — silent repetition in the mind of memorized inspirational passages from the world's great religions. As Easwaran says, "The slow, sustained concentration on these passages drives them deep into our minds; and whatever we drive deep into consciousness, that we become."
Easwaran's program for spiritual growth consists of eight points:
- Passage meditation
- Japam, or the repetition of a mantra
- Putting others first
- One-pointedness
- Training the senses
- Slowing down
- Satsang, or a spiritual fellowship
- Reading the writings of the mystics
Easwaran founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation and Nilgiri Press, which published over two dozen books by him.
Quotations
"What we think about constantly, we become; that is the secret of meditation and prayer." —The Constant Companion.
Bibliography
- Meditation: Commonsense Directions for an Uncommon Life, 1978
- The End of Sorrow (The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol. 1), 1979
- Like a Thousand Suns (The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol. 2), 1979
- To Love Is to Know Me (Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol. 3), 1985
- The Bhagavad Gita (Translator), 1985
- The Dhammapada (Translator), 1986
- The Upanishads (Translator), 1987
- The Compassionate Universe, 1989
- Climbing the Blue Mountain: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey, 1992
- Dialogue With Death: A Journey Through Consciousness, 1992
- Love Never Faileth: The Inspiration of Saint Francis, Saint Augustine, Saint Paul, Mother Teresa, with introductions by Carol L. Flinders, 1993
- Seeing With the Eyes of Love: Relfections on a Classic of Christian Mysticism, 1993
- The Play of God: Visions of the Life of Krishna by Devi Vanamali, et al, 1995
- The Monkey and the Mango: Stories of My Granny (Illustrated by Ilka Jerabek), 1996
- Original Goodness: On the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, 1996
- Seeing With the Eyes of Love: Eknath Easwaran on the Imitation of Christ, 1996
- The Undiscovered Country: Exploring the Promise of Death, 1996
- Words to Live By: Inspiration for Every Day, 1996
- Gandhi the Man: The Story of His Transformation, et al, 1997
- In Quest of God: The Saga of an Extraordinary Pilgrimage by Swami Ramdas, 2002 (Introduction)
- A Higher Image, 2002
- Love Alters Not, 2002
- God Makes the Rivers to Flow: Sacred Literature of the World, 2003
- Your Life Is Your Message: Finding Harmony With Yourself, Others, and the Earth
- Conquest of Mind: Learning to Think in Freedom
- Take Your Time: Finding Balance in a Hurried World
- Thousand Names of Vishnu : a selection with commentary
- The Unstruck Bell: Powerful New Strategies for Using a Mantram
- A More Ardent Fire: From Everyday Love to Love of God
- Supreme Ambition: Life's Goals and How to Reach It
- The Mantram Handbook: Formulas for Transformation
- The Constant Companion
- A Man to Match His Mountains: Badshah Khan, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam
- Kabir: Stages of Desire
- With My Love and Blessings: The Teaching Years, 1966-1999, in Photographs & His Own Words
- Saint Francis: Becoming an Instrument of Peace