The Guru

Dancing in a Heartbeat. Whenever a peak experience occurs, it can always be traced back to other significant events that lead up to it. Of course it is a purely subjective perception of how and why peak events happen in the first place, but nevertheless it is a way of finding patterns and themes in one's life that can be useful whether looking back or looking forward. Here is my story of how I became a Dancer in a Heartbeat. After moving back to Greece in 1973, I spent a great deal of time wandering around in Athens. I also kept coming up with every conceivable reason for not continuing my high school education... I refused to cut my hair and was not accepted for school in Greece (it was a dictatorship after all, thank goodness)...

One day I walked past an English language bookstore. In the window prominently displayed was a book, "The Autobiography of a Yogi" by Yogananda. I was compelled to buy it. It is a thrilling story of someone's personal awakening, quite phantasmagoric in nature but nevertheless it captivated my imagination and the expansive realm of what may be possible... there was one Guru he described as a thousand year old still living in the Himalayas, in a semi ascended state. In it he wrote that if you look into the picture and say his name with reverence you will get a direct blessing.

So, with that thought in mind I took the book and sat down cross legged with a lit candle and began to silently call out his name... I had attempted before to sit cross legged and meditate but found it very uncomfortable... this time it did not bother me at all... after a while I stood up and felt no discomfort whatsoever, when I looked at the time I realized I had been sitting there for two hours...

I walked out into a brilliantly sunny day on a very busy street. I saw an old wretched looking bus jam packed with people, with blue smoke that seemed to emanate from its every seam... I began to feel very sad... I felt the weight, the age and the pain of that old bus straining to carry all those people, I looked into the headlights, they looked like human eyes... tears came to my eyes, and I ran back into my house. This can't be right; I thought I was supposed to achieve Nirvana, or feel one with the universal om and all that... but all I felt was the pain of the bus? I cried?

Thus began my long and complex journey to realize that higher consciousness is not a personal experience disconnected from the environment. Higher consciousness cannot exist cut off and detached from one's suffering, or that of others, even if it be a wretched old bus... regardless of how the gurus of the world wish to market higher consciousness as some kind of eternal peace or constant nirvana state... besides how can you fully appreciate the peace, or nirvana for that matter, without the experience of suffering and turmoil?

My conclusion? Always surrender but never give up... Nirvana gives you the inner fortitude, sense of distance and insight to deal with suffering, but in my experience does not remove pain and sometimes even increases it. It then becomes a journey of how much can you handle? The more pain you can deal with, the more Nirvana you can hold. This is just my opinion formed from my personal experience.