Ganesh Baba

Dreams and Everyday Magic: the Fairy Godmother costume

Eve Neuhaus 2 Comments

Early this morning, at about 4:30, I was woken by a dream.

Someone is knocking at the door. I know it’s still night and at first I resist answering. The knocking persists, so at last I get up and go downstairs. At the door is the UPS man who shows up periodically in my dreams. He’s in this one, for example: https://eveneuhaus.com/2017/04/22/the-changing-room/) In the new dream, he hands me a soft package wrapped in white paper.

When I unwrap it, I see that it’s a fairy godmother dress, complete with folding wings. I am delighted.

As I wake up, my inner eyes still on the sparkling costume, I realize that I’d been blessed with another gift from Alice O. Howell, the third powerful vision she’s blessed me with.

The first came in a dream too, the night before I had my first of our long interchange of e-mails, talks on Skype, and occasional visits. In that dream, the central image was a telescope or kaleidoscope that I found in my pocket unexpectedly. When I looked into it, my own eye looked back.

The second was a vision in a meditation a couple days after she passed. In it, she was flying back and forth past me merrily, calling out “Look! I’ve left that troublesome body!”

And now she sends me a fairy godmother costume right when I need one. Oh my goodness, I am grateful beyond words.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been busy preparing my talk for the Seekers Compass on November 16. Deadlines suit me. I like to work intensively on a project, and I have been working very intensively on this one. Day and night.

The talk is titled “Everyday Magic- synchronicity, symbols, and in-sight.” I gave it the name before I had any real idea about what I’d be saying, but I trust my intuition in matters like this. I planned to began the research by looking up the word “synchronicity.” I wanted to now what people are saying about it now.

Imagine my pleasure when the first thing that came up, before I even opened the search, was an announcement of a podcast, just released, in which someone I knew briefly about ten years ago is interviewed on the very subject. It was Laura London with Christophe LeMouël on “Speaking of Jung” speaking of his recently released book, Conversations with Marie-Louise von Franz on Synchronicity and Numbers: Insights and Amplifications.

I was off. I spent at least a couple of weeks down that rabbit hole.

Somewhere along the way, an app for recording and analyzing dreams, Temenos, was recommended. I downloaded it and immediately began having a series of dreams related, not surprisingly, to my upcoming talk. Using the voice recorder is much easier than writing down dreams. And, as these things go, the more you pay attention to your dreams, the more you remember them.

Weeks pass. I begin an outline of my talk but it’s uninspired. I start over, this time using images. Since it’s an online presentation, I pull up Keynote, which I haven’t used for many years, and start to play with it. As those of you close to me know, I’ve always been drawn to computer technology. It runs in my family. Alice gave me permission to love it when she explained that the waves of the symbol of Aquarius are energy waves, not water waves. Aquarius is an air sign. She eagerly embraced electronic communication.

The images I came up with soon coalesced into a detailed breakdown of the diagram Ganesh Baba drew for me on a paper napkin in a diner in Watkins Glen, New York, in 1979, the first full day I spent with him. It’s a diagram of the cosmos. At the time that he drew it for me and pounded the numerology associated with it into my head, we thought we only had that time together, so there was a strong sense of urgency. “This is your work,” he told me. Study it, remember it, and pass it on.

Ganesh Baba the day we went to Watkins Glen

It took me about two weeks to get an explanation of his diagram into images and language that I hope will be intelligible. Yesterday afternoon I decided that part of my presentation was finished.

When I went to bed I asked for a dream to guide the rest of my presentation, which is, after all, about Everyday Magic: Synchronicity, Symbols, and In-Sight.

I got a Fairy Godmother costume from Alice.

To top it off, I had a related vision about it in my meditation this morning, but I think I’ll save that for the talk itself.

Now I’m off to work on that presentation again, feeling very grateful indeed.

Getting through hard times: a timely message from Ganesh Baba

Eve Neuhaus 26 Comments

Last Friday a friend and I went Emmaüs, the big thrift store in Carmaux, an old mining town near here. All thrift stores are magical, but this one has a particularly good record.

I headed straight for the bins of old framed pictures. I was hoping to find something to hang in a niche in the bathroom. I found it, and I also found this:

It’s a framed, hand-painted postcard. The delightful Indian gentleman riding right out of the frame is Ganesh Baba, the scientific psychedelic kriya yoga guru. He appeared in my life late in 1979, intending to stay three days. Instead, he stayed in my orbit for three years, staying three days at a time, until the dream was over.

Now, he roared back into my life on a motorbike to remind me of his core message.

Ganesh Baba was the real thing. Look him up. The Wikipedia entry is good though outdated. There is a newer, much more explicit book on Ganesh Baba and his teachings available now. Written by another student of Baba’s, Keith Lowenstein, it’s called Kriya Yoga for Self-Discovery.

Baba’s essential teachings can be encapsulated into four actions. He reminded me in my meditation today is that practicing the four will get you through the hardest of times. The full system is more complex, at least eight steps if not twelve. But the first four are what’s needed today.

Posture

Hold your head high, your spine straight, rib cage open.

There’s a reason the military and the old aristocracy made the straight back essential. It changes your perspective, among many other benefits. Your spinal cord is your antenna.

Reconnect with the physical world.

Breath

Your breath is your connection to the life force. The more air you can breath in and out, the better you will feel.

Reconnect with the biological world.

Attention

Practice controlling your attention. Meditation does this particularly well, but any serious practice, spiritual, mental, or physical. can achieve it. Those who can direct their attention are better able to maneuver in worlds beyond the physical.

Reconnect with the mental/psychological world.

Mantra

Using a mantra, a sound or phrase repeated internally or aloud, is a time-tested method for changing one’s vibration. Now more than ever, the world needs humans to raise their vibration.

OM on the in breath, OM on the out breath is simple and potent.

Reconnect with the spiritual world.

That’s it, and it’s enough. Practice each one separately and do them in combination and all together. It’s efficient and effective.

In fact, it’s magic.

Ninety days outside the Schengen area – sacred geometry in Morocco

Eve Neuhaus 2 Comments

It was in the Nejjarine Museum of Wood Arts in Fès that the thought struck me. The chaos of the crumbling medina, the vibrancy of the souks, the noise, the pollution, the exploding energy of the colors, and the sheer quantity of stuff –

Souk, medina, Marrakech

– is beautifully balanced by prevalence of the purposeful geometry, sacred geometry, everywhere.

That’s why Morocco is so enchanting.

Souk, medina, Fès, Morocco

Doorway, Marrakech Musèe

Wall, Palais el Mokri

Islam takes the prohibition of worshipping graven images seriously, and discourages figurative art. Like all of life, art should be dedicated to God, and God is only describable as essence. Geometry is essence.

Fountain, Palais Glaoui, Fès

Who can resist being centered by such design?

All my years of studying sacred geometry, beginning even before my Ganesh Baba days, and then Dan Winter and most deeply with Alice O. Howell, peaked at that moment in the museum. I stood at the center of a ideally proportioned room surrounded by mandalas, exquisite symmetry, perfect curves, rhythmic repetition, and profoundly satisfying rectangles and squares.

I wanted to take dozens of pictures, but photography was not allowed, so I was forced to confront the serene beauty of that room face on. It was transformative.

Since then I’ve consciously attuned myself to noticing and letting the geometry take me in.

Palais el Mokri

Medina, Marrakech

Palais el Mokri, Fes

Pastry, souk, medina, Fès

Even contemporary Moroccan design uses the elements of sacred geometry to create beautiful calm spaces, as exemplified by our current Airbnb in the new part of Marrakech.

Magical!

Detail, lamp, Marrakech apartment

Detail, lamp, Marrakech apartment

Dining room table and chairs

Dishes

Bedspread

Gate to new apartment building

Light fixture in our Airbnb apartment in Tnine, Ourika

Neighborhood magic: community

Eve Neuhaus 5 Comments

The city of San Luis Obispo from Monterey Heights

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.  Aldo Leopold

“The greatest lack in contemporary society is community,” someone at the SLO Soiree last Sunday said, and it struck me as true.

FileItem-57643-SteynbergGallery_fullThe setting in which the statement was made completely belied it: the guests at that gathering form a deliciously civilized community. At its heart is a group of friends who’ve been coming to soirees facilitated by Dr. David Hafemeister, physics professor and expert in nuclear policy and foreign relations, for many, many years. Now held at the Steynberg Gallery on Sundays from 7 – 9, participants enjoy wine and cheese before sitting down to a presentation of some sort and a lively Q&A session. Last Sunday a couple of retired lawyers debated whether America is in decline. They were wise and erudite and the discussion was both profound and very much fun.

0421test_ban_treaty_hafemeisterThe sense of community one finds in a group like the SLO Soiree is rare; it takes a rare human being like Dave Hafemeister to draw it together.

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.   Bertrand Russell

Not so long ago, every neighborhood was a community. Small businesses served the neighborhood and kids went to the neighborhood school. A neighborhood was an ecology, a complex set of relationships, that took up the greatest part of our time, energy and attention.

Neighborhoods, small towns, villages, tribes, and families are all ecologies, for better or for worse, and more or less sufficient unto themselves. Cities are made of neighborhoods – fortunately, or they’d be cold places indeed – but all neighborhoods are not communities.

David Spangler says,

Some people think they are in community, but they are only in proximity. True community requires commitment and openness. It is a willingness to extend yourself to encounter and know the other.

Today, though there are impressive exceptions like the cohousing movement, communities built on proximity are increasingly short supply all over the world. The oil industry, all those cars and roads to drive them on, is largely responsible.

RQNIn Monterey Heights, my neighborhood, community is on the increase. Neighbors are coming together the way they do when facing a disaster – or the potential of a disaster, as many of us view the new freshmen dorms being built on our doorstep. A clear indicator of community is how long it takes to walk the dog – everyone I meet wants to talk.

Together, we imagine seven four-to-five story buildings looming over our mostly one-story neighborhood. We agree on how hard it is to cross Grand Avenue already. “Can you believe the Environmental Impact Report didn’t take the intersection of Slack and Grand into consideration?!” We visualize roving gangs of 18-year-olds looking for parties on our already student-rental-ridden blocks. A series of meetings is being held, and neighbors, armed with a common cause, are getting to know one another.

Equality comes in realizing that we are all doing different jobs for a common purpose. That is the aim behind any community. The very name community means let’s come together to recognize the unity. Come … unity. – Swami Satchidananda

As climate change, continuing economic instability, shifting values and lack of a common belief system bring more chaos into our lives, finding commonality with others around us is more and more essential.

As Ganesh Baba says,

We must shed our fear of one another, not for some medieval ideal, but as the only practical course to continue as a species.

Let’s make survival of the human race our common goal and take responsibility – individually and together – for our part in preserving the integrity, stability and beauty of the planetary community by preserving the integrity, stability and beauty of our own small part of it, the neighborhood.

Creating harmony amidst diversity is a fundamental issue of the twenty-first century. While celebrating the unique characteristics of different peoples and cultures, we have to create solidarity on the level of our common humanity, our common life. Without such solidarity, there will be no future for the human race. Diversity should not beget conflict in the world, but richness. — Daisaku Ikeda

Thanks go to IdeaArchitects and Moon Magazine for many of the quotes.

 

Slowing down in SLO

Eve Neuhaus 6 Comments

Not long ago I changed the name of my Airbnb listings to Slow Down in SLO. It took a while for me to decide if SLO, San Luis Obispo, really is slow, but I concluded that it’s actually true. Located halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, SLO is a too far away to commute. Imagine: 44,000 people, virtually no traffic, everything you need a few minutes away, year-round access to an extraordinary outdoor environment, and a culture of kindness rooted in a Franciscan heritage and enhanced by a mild climate. I feel immensely grateful to find myself here – it is grace – but slowing down doesn’t happen from the outside. It’s internal.

Nature does not hurry.

Yet everything is accomplished.

– Lao Tzu

It was Lao Tzu’s poem that brought the deeper truth home to me a few years ago. Since then I’ve been reflecting on the virtues of slowing down, so it seemed like an obvious topic to write about  – except that the entire week I gave myself to put this together disappeared into a whirl of activity.

photo 8

Necessary activity. Did I consider slowing down in the midst of the hurly burly? I did – but only for the time it took to laugh at myself and at the lila, divine play, of life – and to refocus on slowing down.

Internal slowing down doesn’t mean doing less. It means doing whatever you’re doing more mindfully, more passionately, more fully, giving it the full focus of your attention. In the long run it’s more efficient – I’m sure your mother already told you this. Indeed, the benefits of being present to a task, whether it’s cleaning the wet leaves off the deck—which I’ve been doing in between paragraphs because a photographer is coming to take pictures of the exterior of our house, a sad mess because of the drought until this week when the rains came and now a much happier mess—or brushing your teeth or talking to your mother, are countless.

Hafiz says,

Time is a factory where everyone slaves away earning enough love to break their own chains.

The key that will let you out of slavery is to love what you are doing, whatever it is: catching your mind when it wanders into the future or the past, or to some place other than where you are, and bringing it home to the moment: celebrating the stillness of the center.

Tom and Lily Bear at the dog beach

Ganesh Baba talks about the four phases of our existence: the physical, the biological, the psychological and the spiritual. Slowing down involves all four: consciously releasing stress and tension in the body, slowing the breath and consequently the heartbeat, lowering the emotional pitch (“Don’t screw up the pitch!” he would scold), and using spiritual practices to find the still center within.

It’s the mind that’s moving too fast, rarely using the power of attention at its true worth, skimming the surface of experience instead to allowing it to be absorbed and processed at all four of the levels of our being. Unless we slow down we sacrifice the richness and beauty of life, of any life.

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. – Plutarch

For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is just an illusion. – Einstein

All life is fleeting. Cling to that understanding, and seek, then, within yourself that which alone endures. – Yogananda