I would like a chance to express gratitude to the extraordinary people of Nepal for the most extraordinary experience of my life.
Having lived and gone to school or worked in many parts of the world, and having engaged during various periods of my life in various religious ways searching for spiritual evolution, I have found myself amongst different groups following each time rather specialised spiritual practices.
This year (2012) I decided to celebrate my 78th birthday 20 March in the presence of Mahasambodhi Dharmasangha in Halkhoria south of Kathmandu, since the World Peace Maitri Puja was to start the following day. This was the best present I could ever have given myself.
For in the Jungle with its tall trees and immense, majestic vines that reached skyward like giant elephant trunks intertwining with branches and with each other, everything was charged with sacral life and I became immersed in an energy I had never before known. Peace permeated every cell and every pore of my body, and my heart melded and merged easily into the surroundings, losing itself. Miraculously, it was here that I found the fellows I had been waiting for, now, for about sixty years. The congregation in this jungle, again international and devout, differed from all other spiritual groups I had ever known in that most of them, like myself, had not much sense of boundaries or divisiveness, incredulous and overjoyed, I fell into their midst like a fish finding water after having gasped for air all its life.
During the Maitriya Puja for World Peace, Mahasambodhi Dharmasangha would preside over our meditations and prayers each morning and cast a gentle orb of peace and loving kindness over the entire spacetime. We were each one of us transformed.
“Falling in Love” is understating it. We became drenched, soaked to overflowing with love and inexpressible gratitude for Mahasambodhi Dharmasangha, for each other, for the trees, for the sound of the winds, the air, for the sand and the bare foot prints there of people, dogs, tiny bugs, and elsewhere elephants, snakes, even larger beasts of prey who have stopped snatching villagers’ chickens since He moved in… Everything there is ever so very much alive – and yet at the same time so indulgently still, that one sensed a pervasive awareness everywhere. It was as if not only we became aware of each other as part of ourselves, but also that we were accepted and embraced by the giant trees, the hoary vines, by the butterflies that would land on our heads or shoulders, and by the sand that warmed our feet but would never grate, all radiating awareness of Oneness, of cosmic divinity…
Movement and sudden noise came occasionally from monkeys that would throw tiny pre-ripened figs making a BOK! on the giant tarp spreads on which devotees were sitting. There were nearly fifty foreign visitors behind a hundred or so monks and in front of another hundred or so local families, and on Saturday and Sunday some five thousand devotees from nearby villages would stand in line for hours and hours to file past Guru for His blessing, becoming part of that same grateful awareness that charged the Jungle. Not a sound was heard. Just what seemed like Cosmic Breathing.
In the Halkhorian Jungle, miraculously, a sense of divinity and the sacred pervades, charging every cell of every being, trees, sand, pilgrims, butterflies, birds, in an open structure where through the leaves the heavens themselves join in and take part in the celebrations. Here I first experienced Unity through the energy that charged everything linking us all, trees, winds, bugs, flutterings of wings, hearts, smiles and tears in the palpable silence of overflowing love, joy and gratitude.
Here I met psychics and clairvoyants as well as many Crystal Children from different countries, amazingly they agree to the unusual nature of our present Phenomenon. The latter, mostly around 20-26 in age, have no sense of boundary, none of the stereotypical gender traits; often streaming with tears stirring from the heart, seeing beauty in everything. They are soft and inclusive with loving acceptance of their situation whatever it be, an innate receptivity that is alien to most other human adults I have known. Some speak of their distant homes where flowers are the size of humans and who ceaselessly exude love and compassion, in what I imagine to be the veritable Maitri Spirit. No wonder these children have been drawn to Guru, like mushrooms after a cleansing rain. One angelic child from Lithuania gazed at me with large, green transparent eyes, seeing into the depths of my soul; she took my face in both her hands, touching my forehead to hers and closing her eyes, spontaneously sang a very soft but lilting prayer to the universe, I believe to soothe my enlarged and fibrous heart.
The shift in universal consciousness has begun, and is accelerating. Our Planet is evolving at an increasing pace. Now all sentient beings have a chance to become upgraded as it were, not only in themselves but, reaching out in loving compassion, to help lift up Earth herself into her next evolutionary form. Mahasambodhi Dharmasangha is not here to lead a religious Sect – but to awaken the whole Planet enfolding all religions, denominations and spiritual seekers in Maitriya Meditation of loving compassion, together to live the GuruMarga Path to liberation. In total trust, we release the deepest respect from our heart and loving compassion for all sentience seen and unseen, so that humanity along with all sentient beings, animals and plants, daemons and spirits in limbo and in all realms may be released from confusion, pain and suffering.
There is not the least doubt among this strange assortment of devotees about what is happening right now before us, amongst us, to us and amazingly within each of us. There is overflowing joy of recognition in each other of ourselves, to the point that taking leave of one another we jointly left our collective roots in the sacred Jungle of Halkhoria.
We hugged and held each other, each forgetting our self, and in the gentle breeze we swayed a sweet eternity as the morning shadows retreated. Beneath our feet long roots were becoming knitted into one deep and far-reaching web, to blossom and to uplift our energy sphere onto the long awaited Golden Age.
Sarva Maitri Mangalam
Joan Stanley-Baker (Gyemyinde)
