Ivor lives in Ireland and is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, University College, Dublin. He has published widely in academic journals since the 1960s and has also written two books, Music and Madness (2008), and The Writings of Ivor Browne, the Evolution of a Slow Learner (2013). He established the Irish Foundation for Human Development out of which grew the North West Centre for Learning and Development and the Inner City Trust, which became a model for the Prince of Wales’ urban village development project and other urban renewal developments around the world. His current work focuses on stress management.

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Ivor Browne

<h4>
 IVOR BROWNE is a psychiatrist living in Dublin, Ireland. He shares with
 us his experience of the spiritual journey, from childhood to old age.
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 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.

<hr />
<h5 style="text-align: center">
 Every seeker has his or her own pace. 
 It is a life-long journey, starting with a single meditation. 
 It is a spiritual adventure.
</h5>
<hr />

 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.


 <img alt="a-journey-of-discovery" width="834" class="lazyload w-100"
 src="https://cdn-prod-static.heartfulness.org/a_journey_of_discovery_img2_d82ab8e710.jpg?updated_at=2023-03-31T06:49:38.736Z" />


 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.

<hr />
<h5 style="text-align: center">
 I have found this practice 
 to be of great benefit to me personally, 
 even though the going is rough at times.
</h5>

<hr />


 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?

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<h5 style="text-align: center">Article by&nbsp;IVOR BROWNE</h5>
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