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Summeer Bajpai

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Shri Chakra - For Prosperity

My Sahaj Yoga Diary
Summeer Bajpai, Jaipur, India
The Founder of Sahaja Yoga
Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

Life as a Sahaj Yogi- The River of Contentment

Of late I heard about the 'knowledge' being spread by people 'committed' to anti sahaja yoga. And it came to me as a surprise - can we be anti-spirit and anti-soul? Can we be anti-something which recognizes Jesus, Prophet Mohammed and Lord Krishna all as a manifestation of divine will. Nevertheless I ventured on one of their website and after going through it realized that my friends could not mention for even once that Shri Mataji was not divine or her message was untrue. I would possibly join forces with my anti sahaja yogi friends once they convince me that spreading the message of universal love & compassion and exhorting people to purify their character and be fearless humans is a misleading message. Thus I would attempt to define my experiences as a Sahaja Yogi - the final decision would of course be of the discerning spirit and one who believes in the divine power.

In one word I could attempt to describe my experiences as a sahaja yogi, it would be - peace. Peace not just as a state of mind , but of spirit, of soul and of my surroundings. The calmness which flows out of this omnipresence of peace clears all the cobwebs of mind and shows the path for realizing the complete potential of human existence with the clarity of a crystal. I would offer one more word to complete the picture - strength. Day in and day out this strength has given me the courage to stand up to negative forces which had been a rarity earlier. As these forces manifest themselves in form of events and people - there is a continuous discovery that the fear to get involved with them is not because these people and event are too powerful and overwhelming but that there still lies somewhere a whiff of nervousness. It is a humbling experience too, but the grace of Shri Mataji is infinite and one that eradicates the fringe existence of nervousness. The strength is drawn from character - A character that stands like a mountain, in its sublime purity, beauty and toughness. The realization that character and spiritual ascent are interrelated is the primary force that cemented my ties with Sahaja.

Before I attempt to elaborate all that sahaja has offered me and all that I have accepted , there needs to be present a foundation on which I received my realization. It was not dramatic or a one off event that was the turning point. Rather it has been a journey through several turning points , the road often uphill for a while but most of the journey has been an easy downhill. I have had a fair share of doubts and confusions, trials and tribulations and all of them have purified me like the fire purifies gold. I had been somewhat spiritual and philosophical since I attained maturity. All through my school years there was a suppressed need to discover myself , my world and the urge to answer why people behave the way they did. That urge got vent in my writings and in my discussions. The concept of divine power being worshipped in many forms was intuitively not very appealing as did the many rituals that accompanied such prayers. But the whole experience of prayer was very soothing and took me to a new realm of existence, though for a very short span. In due course my material life progressed and I found myself facing a new environment at my college. During that time I got hold of a summary on Gita. Even before I had interest in such readings there was a realization that such great compilations of wisdom and truth cannot be interpreted completely. Thus there was a very cautious optimism whenever I got hold of such a treatise. So, even though I very guarded while reading the book yet that summary gave me a completely new perspective on my life. The philosophy of Karmayoga appealed to me a lot. I re-read that summary twice and now that I had already filtered the truth and the poetry, the realization came to me that Gita would be guiding light for me - as the statement of Lord Krishna. During those four years at engineering my faith in a universal divine power reached a culmination. There was and is no doubt in my mind that such a divine power controls and guides the universe. And that we, as humans are manifestations of that divine power - a reflection of the supreme personality albeit in a cloudy mirror. I must confess here that I never read and understood the whole Bhagwad Gita completely. For me it has been an on going process. It's an effort of a lifetime for many people to understand it and even then they get deviated from its prime objective. But after Sahaja even Gita has become simpler to understand. Concepts that required days of pondering and occasional discussion now get cleared in moments - and in a very elegant and simple manner, they fit into the order of all spiritual knowledge.

Some times I believe that my introduction to and subsequent adoption of Sahaja Yoga is a divine gift. It has been the end of all journeys and quests to achieve more satisfaction and peace. It has been a grant by the divine power in response to my fervent prayers for finding my true existence. I was philanthropic in my actions during college when compassion started growing as a result of the realization that helping a human for a noble cause is the only prayer, but sometimes I lacked moral will to take these actions. Sahaja has given me the required strength of character to face all adversity while helping people. During my college I happened to read a book on Kundalini - a real life account of a yogi who awakened his Kundalini through rigorous mediation. That book opened a new aspect of my existence - a discovery of a power that resided within us and was omnipotent. If this was true then my quest had gone in complete vain, when all that I had required was a search within and the answer was buried inside me. I read some more about the concept of Kundalini and slowly became convinced about the qualities and manifestations of this supreme energy - a trigger put there by the supreme soul by which we humans could clear all the dust on our mirror and see our full glory : The reflection of God.

I vowed that the quest for knowledge to unlock the mystical energies of this force would become the final one for me.

As this spiritual evolution was taking place, I passed out of engineering and found myself at a B-school. The cultural upheaval of my personality was a hair-raising experience. The effect of the cutthroat competition and the never ending race to prove your worth sucked me into a cycle of indulgence. Many changes came to my personality under the effect of an rigorous existence. But maybe I was not left alone. There was something working besides my materials actions that despite neglect and abuse to my character still kept the quest alive and at the right moment I was offered the chance that would completely change my life - indeed it was re-birth

The instrument of this divine gift was a friend @ MDI. Indeed I came to know that he had a great deal of knowledge about Kundalini and he suggested me the path of meditation for awakening the Kundalini. He told me about Shri Mataji and Sahaja Yoga, and eventually I took my realization. To be truthful I felt nothing extraordinary even after my realization apart from a sense of peace which lasted for a few hours. I also brought the picture of Shri Mataji back with me. For years I could not accept any living person as a guru - a person who could guide me to ultimate spiritual realization, under the impression that no human is perfect enough to infallibly lead me on this path. And thus I decided that only a divine soul would guide me on the path of spiritual existence. So even though I regarded Shri Mataji highly because of her gift to me, yet I could not bring myself to offer Shri Mataji my devotion, materially or spiritually. Little did I know about my short-sightedness in realizing Shri Mataji's complete spiritual opulence. Gradually events, people ,all of whom I saw as obstacles of my ambition, started transforming themselves into instruments of achieving spiritual enlightenment. All that I desired materially - Money, power, influence started coming my way. Earlier I fretted and fought to gather all of these but now they were being offered to me at my doorstep. The flow of my existence became so streamlined when my state of meditation was good that it was clearly amazing. Coincidences, luck and all possible explanation floated in my mind but all of them being of too fickle nature to sustain the power living that was slowly becoming a characteristic of my existence. Clearly there was some other force at work. And I discovered that force in a very ironical manner.

Achieving all my material desires slowly inflated my ego. I gradually started falling in love with all that had been materially bestowed in so short a span of few months. And surely enough I gradually started missing my meditation. And suddenly things started getting complex. There appeared sharp edges in an earlier streamlined existence. But I was fortunate. I had seen many of my batch-mates who had taken self-realization but could not draw the full benefits of the vast spiritual reservoir because of getting involved in securing their lives and asserting their ego. I was indeed very fortunate that Shri Mataji had chosen me to continue as a Sahaja Yogi and always kept beside me a mentor and a guard of my spiritual existence in form of a friend. Even now I do not assert that I am pure enough to see through the wordly temptations- but I am strong enough to follow the path of purity, the strength being drawn from the sense of security that Shri Mataji is always there to bring me back on the path. So when I started fully meditating as I ha done in past, things started to improve, and such is the magnanimity of Shri Mataji that though the decline from a state of purity was along a very gradual slope but the ascent to my previous state was very swift. And now there was no confusion as to what path to take to achieve peace and moral strength and move towards ultimate fusion of the soul with the supreme spirit. The infatuations and the attractions came again but now I can see through to, for most of them.

If there is any single chain that stops our spiritual ascent, then it is ego. It destroys our purity. It is the final frontier to be conquered. We all go forth in our lives with the fanatical belief in our might and intelligence. How many times have we been defeated in trying to modify our surroundings? How many times the quest for worldly pleasures has brought the erosion of our morality? And how many times does that worldly possession given us eternal satisfaction and happiness? But still we chose to neglect the frailty of our existence and personality. I was a complete believer in "Control your destiny or somebody else will- Jack Welch". But after seeing why people who although seem very much materially endowed search in vain for satisfaction in spiritual places, I realized that yes we need to control our destiny - but only one decision is needed, a single page of reasoning and not the whole book. We need to surrender our ego and nurture the compassion and universal love which would make us all powerful - the power of a strong character. But we are very vain, even after seeing ages of humans leaving behind their material wealth for spiritual quest we still believe we can do this on our own - we can strike the right balance between spiritual and material existence. I was no different and got my share my search and pain. But there is no pain in path of true spiritual existence and no search too once we have reached it. Maybe I was fortunate enough but I would truly pray to Shri Mataji to spread this realization to all human beings and wish that this good fortune spreads around.

Jai Shri Mataji