IVOR BROWNE is a psychiatrist living in Dublin, Ireland. He shares with us his experience of the spiritual journey, from childhood to old age.
I think my first awareness of spirituality came from my mother. She was a simple, gentle woman who was herself genuinely spiritual without even being consciously aware of it. She was Church of Ireland because of her upbringing, but had no prejudice.
My mother and father were married in the Church of Ireland, not because my mother wanted it, but because of his insistence. He decided his sons would be raised as Catholics, and the girls as Protestants. So on Sundays my brother and I would head off to mass with my father, while my sister and mother went to the local Church of Ireland. This seemed clear enough until one day, after attending mass for several years, I was glancing dreamily around the church and, lo and behold, I became aware that there were woman and children there! Until that day I had assumed that all men were Catholics and all woman were Protestants.
Every seeker has his or her own pace.
It is a life-long journey, starting with a single meditation.
It is a spiritual adventure.
My first experience of Holy Communion was a spiritual awakening for me. I recall the strong feeling, as the Host melted in my mouth, that Jesus was inside me. The experience was tainted with all the guilt and nonsense about not touching the Host with your teeth, fear of it sticking to the roof of your mouth and not touching food and water for 24 hours beforehand. Still, that experience of communion lasted for years; the clear, raw feeling of the morning air when attending mass early, and the experience of Jesus was, in some sense, a genuine spiritual awakening.
As a child, particularly when I rested in bed in the daytime, trying to be sick to avoid going to school, if I heard church bells or the sound of children playing in the distance, I would be overcome by a strange, wistful sadness that seemed to come from another world. To this day, when I hear church bells far away, I still get this feeling, although it is now not so intense. This feeling does not accord with any experience from this life, and my impression from this and other experiences is that I must have been in some sort of religious order in a former life.
From my father’s individuality and eccentric way of doing things, I learned to think for myself and be my own person, no matter what criticism I encountered. When I reached adolescence I went through the usual disenchantment with organized religion. Then, when in medical school I contracted TB and was put to bed for a year, I had time to think and read. I once again went into a religious phase, which lasted for several years, but gradually the irreconcilable contradictions in orthodox Catholicism left me disillusioned, and I felt quite lost. I still felt the need for spiritual direction, but did not know where to turn.
In 1973 I finally reached a critical turning point. I can remember the day quite clearly in the church. I was still attending mass, for the sake of the children, my marriage was breaking up and I was sitting there feeling quite hopeless and lost. In desperation I began to pray from the heart, asking Jesus to show me the way to go, what direction to take. I did not know it then, but I have learnt since, that in those rare moments when we really pray for what we need, not simply for what we want, our prayers are answered, and I have no doubt my prayer that day was answered, although it took some time for it to happen.
In 1978 I heard about Sahaj Marg, which means ‘the natural path’. The chance of my hearing about this spiritual practice at that time must have been one in a million. The Guru, Ram Chandra, who was affectionately called Babuji, was a humble old man living in Shahjahanpur, a remote rather primitive town in northern India. This was a place seldom visited by Europeans, and in a country where there are hundreds and thousands of gurus and spiritual teachers, many of them charletans. Although Sahaj Marg had already spread quietly to a number of countries outside India, it was unknown in Ireland, but an Indian I knew introduced me to the practice.
As I say, this appeared to be an extremely unlikely coincidence, but I believe these things do not happen by chance. My conviction is: if you are genuinely searching for a spiritual path, it will find you. My desperate prayer in 1973 was answered, and I was shown the direction I needed to follow.
I think it is important to stress that Sahaj Marg is not another religious practice imported from the East, lock, stock and barrel, like so many before it. With the general disillusionment with mainstream religion and also the failure of science to deliver the promise it held out at the turn of the twentieth century to solve the problems of mankind, there has been an extraordinary upsurge of spiritual longing among people in the West.
As a result, ever since Vivekananda made his extraordinary journey to Chicago in 1893 to speak to the World’s Parliament of Religions, there have been wave after wave of Eastern spiritual practices, like the various forms of Yoga, Buddhism and Taoism, flowing into the West from India, China, Japan and elsewhere. These eastern practices have been adopted by many westerners, along with robes, mantras and other rituals.
Carl Jung, whose thinking was deeply influenced by his studies of eastern mysticism, was acutely aware of the danger of unthinkingly taking on the trappings of ancient eastern culture, of what he describes as the attempt “To put on, like a new suit of clothes, readymade symbols grown on foreign soil.” He continued, “If we now try to cover our nakedness with the gorgeous trappings of the East, as the theosophists do, we would be playing our own history false.”
Although originating in India, Sahaj Marg is no more Indian than it is French, Irish or American. Indeed, in many ways it is closest to Christ’s original teaching, with its emphasis on working through the heart. It is probably the first truly international modern spiritual movement that brings a simple heart-based practice to people all over the world, with no dogma or belief. The only requirement to begin is to be human and to want to do it.
I have found this practice
to be of great benefit to me personally,
even though the going is rough at times.
The extraordinary thing about this practice is its simplicity. Babuji was a gentle, humble man, living in a primitive, remote town in northern India, but has this not been the very characteristic of great incarnations like Lao Tsu, Kabir and the Christ, who was an obscure carpenter from a tiny village in Palestine and yet shook the very foundations of the Roman Empire? Babuji personally carried his spiritual message to both the West and the East. This movement has spread quietly, without any publicity, to virtually every country in the world. Nowadays, with the Heartfulness approach, it is spreading like a wildfire.
Babuji perfected an ancient spiritual practice, which he remodelled and simplified for modern-day life, based on the transformative effect of yogic transmission and the cleaning of past impressions. But he also took this spiritual science further than had been done before, so that the possibilities for human evolution are currently remarkable.
I have found this practice to be of great benefit to me personally, even though the going is rough at times. I began practicing almost forty years ago, and still feel as if I am only just beginning, but then is it possible to gauge the ground covered in a journey toward infinity?
It is impossible to give anyone else my understanding of the journey. To know its benefits you must experience it. In the experience is the hope of spiritual development. The pace at which one journeys is irrelevant. Every seeker has his or her own pace. It is a life-long journey, starting with a single meditation. It is a spiritual adventure. What more is there to say?
Article by IVOR BROWNE
Ivor Browne
