One gloriously sunny, spring afternoon in the year known as 2000 CE, there was an unexpected ring on my doorbell. Since I wasn’t expecting anybody and my wife had just left our flat on a lengthy shopping expedition, I assumed that the bell had been pressed by a Jehovah’s Witness, a dishcloth salesman, a mischievous child or by mistake, so I ignored it. Then it rang again, but this time with energy that was more insistent.
I opened the door to reveal an elderly Indian gentleman with long white beard and hair and a saffron turban. He also had blue, sparkling eyes and wasn’t wearing anything on his feet. “I have traveled many miles from India to see you…” he said, with disarming sincerity.
Having initially allowed my pre-programmed cynicism to stifle my intuition by refusing to believe that my visitor was not attempting to procure money that I didn’t have in either my wallet or a bank account for an as yet undisclosed purpose, I hastily pronounced that he should just cut to the chase and tell me what he was selling. Then he wrote down three things about my life, including the unusual spelling of the name of the woman who had caused me the most pain and two places I was intending to visit, so I invited him inside for a cup of tea.
“I am here to lift the curse of a woman who wishes to prevent you from performing your role in the fulfillment of a divine prophesy….”, he said with undaunted conviction. My atheist default setting kicked in with a vengeance and I wondered if I had made the right decision inviting him into my home. “Listen mate, I don’t even believe in God. What could that possibly have to do with me?” I asked, genuinely considering whether or not I was experiencing an acid flashback. “You ask too many questions instead of having faith in God…” he replied, with an unblinking smile, before removing something from his pocket. I looked down and saw a huge, orange stone set atop a thick gold ring. It became clear from his benevolent facial expression that this was something he really wanted me have.
Needless to say I refused to accept the ring under any circumstances, since I felt entirely disinclined to wear such a protruding, ostentatious object and I didn’t have any money to offer him in payment. I even refused to accept it in return for the shoddy cup of supermarket tea he politely drank. “If you do not accept the ring your progress will be very difficult. The ring would protect you from the woman who cursed you. Without it, you will continue to be attacked by demons. But even if you do not accept it in return for this cup of tea, many people will still be praying for your success.”
The woman of the curse in question is not known to me, although at the time I wrongly believed it was a former girlfriend who claimed to be a generational black witch, which span my formerly confident, pseudo-rational mind into a blind panic, such was the power of the truth resonating in my visitor’s words and the inadequacy of my flimsy universal perspective. Moments later, he left me with a reiteration of the promise that many souls would be praying for my success, in which endeavours I had absolutely no idea, but my formerly entrenched philosophical position experienced an immediate pole shift, as I watched him disappear into the ether.
Two weeks later to the day, my Indian friend returned to ascertain the effects of his first visit. We sat and talked for about thirty minutes, but this time without the interruptions of my temporarily slumbering atheism. “Are you going to ask me to take the ring again?” I asked, almost hoping for an affirmative response. “No…” he replied, smiling. “I do not have it with me this time, since I have already fulfilled my role in this ancient prophesy.”
I have since perceived that the ring was offered to me as symbol of the path of least resistance, which the prophesy appears to have correctly predicted I would not accept, probably on account of a lifetime largely spent swimming against the tide of established norms and presumed authority. Upon further reflective study and contemplation, I also began to comprehend the complexity of the divine magnetism that reawakened my physical being to the soul purpose of the present incarnation: to found the Universal Community of Self-Realisation for the purposes of helping to facilitate the emancipation, upliftment and self-realisation of Mankind.
Every experience which brought me to this point in the elliptical solar arc of time of the material world was a necessary part of the process of purifying my consciousness, opening my heart and enabling my mind to remember the very essence of my immortal being.
Suffice to say, the transformation from a life lived under the shadow of egotistical concerns in a world that I perceived as unjust, random and godless, to one lived in the knowledge that Everyman is a fragment of divine consciousness, with the ability to master the very nature of existence, was so intensely cathartic following my dark night of the soul, which seemed to last for three solid years of painful reflection upon how I was the sole architect of my own suffering, which I had previously attempted to blame on those upon whom I imposed my egotistical burdens. In the immortal words of Lao Tzu: to understand the limitation of things, desire them.
Nevertheless, having blindly stumbled through the barren spiritual wilderness that I created for myself by living an ego-driven, passionately hedonistic life of sensory excess, during which time I often perceived my existence as bereft of unconditional love, compassion and forgiveness, a deep cleansing then took place in my heart, after I stripped my life of every external thing that I had worked so hard to accumulate, until I was left nothing but myself and those who love me for who I am, even at certain times when I’d forgotten exactly who that is. The inevitable effect of this period of chaotic and dramatic superficial decline was that I finally stopped yearning for the trinkets of rank materialism that Mankind has been programmed to regard as evidence of a life worth living.
Just like the rational mind is disabled by mistaking the ego for the inner voice, the human heart is burdened by eight potential bondages:
1. Grief. 2. Shame. 3. Familial pride. 4. Tribal pride. 5. Fear. 6. Smugness. 7. Condemnation. 8. Hatred.
In helping to replace these bondages with kindness, compassion, humility, magnanimity, grace and unconditional love, the miraculous benefits of Kriya Yoga, the mastery of the breath through Prananyana and the persistent, disciplined practice of silent meditation should never be underestimated.
Through the transcendental contemplation of the nature of being, through the study of the works of the divine personages known as the Siddhars of India, I have perceived reflections of my self in everything and reflections of everything in my self; the microcosm reflecting the macrocosm and vice verse; as above, so below. I have also been able to comprehend that everything in the material universe is made up of electrical and magnetic energies, which exist in a perpetual elliptical cycle of evolution and involution, to which every thought, word and deed of Mankind contributes, whether we are cognisant of that fact or not.
I do not ask anybody to do as I have done or to think what I think, feel what I feel, know what I know; but I do grant to every Man, Woman and Child upon the Earth an open invitation to become grantors, trustees and beneficiaries of Universal Community Trust, in the celebrated names of freedom, peace, equity, truth and unconditional love.
