By the end of the 1960s, Westerners were traveling to India to visit Babuji. Among the first were the Danes, who all fell in love with Babuji and were instrumental in bringing the spiritual practices of Heartfulness to the West. One of these pioneers was THOMAS MOGENSEN, who first visited Shahjahanpur in 1971 with his wife and some friends. Here he shares the value of 50 years of Heartfulness.
In my Guide and Guru, Ram Chandra, Babuji as we called him, I found the help I needed – mentally, physically and spiritually. I also found a person who, in all his silent simplicity, became my friend and the very breath of my life, as is the current Guide, Daaji today.
Back then, they called our system of meditation Sahaj Marg – the Natural Way. And what is more natural than breathing? We all breathe. Without it we are dead. Without a beating heart and a breath there is no flow of anything.
That was the condition in which my Guide found me, not I him, 50 years ago. He was and still is “the finder.” He finds us and leads us on to find our true natural way of life. He breathes it into our hearts. Hidden to us, it is something we already are every second of the day, and the night as well. We sleep and we breathe. We breathe and we live. So, why yoga and meditation if that breath of life is not there?
Who wants to struggle with a lifeless yoga? Who cares to meditate for hours, breathe in certain odd ways, recite endless mantras, or fall to their knees with non-stop praying? The only thing we really need is to forget ourselves. Forget who we are. Forget who we think we should be, so that we can become what we have always been, a breath of life.
Such a method sounds so easy. And it is easy. You don’t need to sit with a straight back and legs crossed for hours and hours suppressing yourself into some sort of mindset. That is what practitioners of yoga have sadly often done, and some of us still do, because we still live in the past.
In my Guide and Guru, I am daily found. By someone who doesn’t live in the past. He is not hanging onto anything. He doesn’t expect anything, not from you and not from me. He doesn’t remember yesterday and before, cling to it, or get stuck in it. He is always here, now, urging us to forget and become. A new way of breathing. A new way of moving through life. That is meditation in a nutshell. That was what I needed back then, still now, and tomorrow as well.
So, dear sisters and brothers, whoever reads this, I wish you peace, tranquility, and prosperity. We all worry about our lives, children, grandchildren, pandemics, and wars.
Apart from the methods themselves, what have 50 years of Heartfulness Meditation given me to tackle all these worries and my own inner turmoil? In the most simple terms, the Guide gave me a friend. One who doesn’t want to teach me anything except to breathe in the most common natural way. In such a breath of life, a mere possibility to move on, we can all be, and become unknown to ourselves. We can know the Unknown. For that I am forever thankful. For that I am forever on the road.
Thomas Mogensen
Thomas was one of the first Heartfulness practitioners in the West, visiting Babuji in Shahjahanpur, India, in 1971, where he filmed Babuji for the first time. He has written three books, and his latest, In ... Read More
