Shambhavi lays out some ways that spiritual practitioners can elicit a bigger response from Wisdom. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi.
FIRST WORDS from THE PODCAST
I want to talk about the qualities that get you what one teacher of mine called a spiritual address. Theses are qualities that cause you to be taken seriously by Wisdom, and given certain opportunities. Now, having said that, everybody is being treated the same on one level. Everyone is equally being guided by wisdom all the time, whether or not that’s recognized. But when we start to do practice, we can be given certain opportunities based on certain qualities that we are demonstrating. This is my own personal experience. I think the word that sums up at least some of those qualities, if not all of them, is fortitude. Fortitude means something like a combination of strength, and patience, and persistence.
I want to read something that was written about my Guru. This is actually from a really beautiful little book by the photographer Richard Lannoy. He published a book of his photographs of Anandamayi Ma. And he was a kind of an interesting disciple or devotee. He just sort of trailed around after Ma and took photographs of her over a period of a couple of years. These have become some of the most famous photographs of her. When I say Ma, I mean Anandamayi Ma. He reports in this book, which has some very beautiful accounts of his own experiences with Ma, that in all the years he was taking photographs of her, she never looked directly at him other than one single time. So he was constantly photographing her and taking these very close-up portraits, too. But he said she always avoided looking him straight in the eye. Then the one time that she looked him in the eye, he said, “I never wanted to experience that ever again.” I don’t know what he saw, but it was maybe too much for him.
