Isaac and partner Anandika
Having crawled a major part of the way through kilometres of traffic on the autobahn we finally arrive at Ottobrunn, a small town
founded in the fifties, which lies south east of Munich. Tilmann,
Shasha (who’s visiting from Paris) and I make our way to a large
spacious building in the town square, where on the first floor a
satsang is being held in a large airy room. There are more people
attending the meeting than the hall can comfortably accommodate, with
several people squatting on the floor, some perched on a table at the
end of the hall and others up in the mezzanine which is also equipped
with a few light aluminium frame chairs. On the podium in the main hall
sits a portly looking man with a friendly face, framed by a head full
of crinkly brown hair flecked with white and chin embellished by a tidy
looking beard. Dressed in a casual green sweater pulled over a pair of
dark brown trousers, he listens intently to the older man occupying the
chair facing him. The man seems rather in distress and elaborates on
his problems. After a quiet hearing Shapiro reckons that the root of
his distress lies in his lack of patience. The man heartily agrees.
“Every day I pray to god to give me patience,” he says, “And I tell him
please! Give it to me NOW!” The audience dissolves into laughter and so
does Isaac.
Questions are put to Isaac and generally to the
group, about how to live in the moment, about how to introduce the
element of self awareness at the work place. “At work you need to be
aggressive, the climate calls for it. You can’t survive being nice to
people,” says a woman. Self awareness is not about being “nice.” It is
about paying attention to all that is going on inside yourself and also
to the other person. Patiently, Isaac expounds on his experience of
living in the moment, about what it means, about how living in the
private world in one’s head, being trapped in thought and ideas, is
what creates conflict in the world. He goes on to suggest that we focus
on the process of awareness instead of perpetually focussing on
problems which arise out of our lack of awareness. He talks about how
our conditioning forces us into a groove from which we find it
difficult to exit so as to act with intelligence.
We are caught
in all kinds of patterns without knowing it, Isaac says, and being
constantly trapped in patterns and habits which we are unaware of, is
what makes us unhappy, nervous and difficult to be around. To go beyond
these habits we need to become aware of them, to notice the way we
behave. The attention we start to pay to our own thought process
eventually helps us to dissociate ourselves from it and from all that
we believe ourselves to be. It enables us to identify with the essence
in us rather than with the patterns which take over our minds and which
normally define us.
Isaac Shapiro,
born in 1950 in Johannesburg, South Africa, claims to have had his
first glimpse of truth and of unconditional love at the age of 19. His
desire to further explore this aspect of life led him initially to a
kibbutz in Israel where he spent a year. Later he found himself in a
small organic farm on an island in Denmark after which he travelled to
New Zealand where he started a commune in order to go even deeper into
the questions he felt he needed to investigate. Through the years Isaac
dabbled in a variety of techniques to do with self awareness, including
biofeedback but it was in Hawaii that he got his first clue as to what
the whole experiment was all really about. His contact with the Kahunas
in Hawaii and with others who worked with communication based on energy
movements, helped him to realise that the key to self awareness and to
studying the mind was the realisation that true awareness develops when
we focus on attention itself.
Sent on by a friend to a teacher
in Lucknow, who went by the name of Papaji, Isaac further learned how
to stop focussing on the thought process and to bring his attention
round to the flow of awareness itself. Within a year of experimenting
in this direction he had found the way to himself. Recognised by Papaji
as a teacher in his own right, Isaac started holding satsangs all over
the world. People who attend his meetings and who come into contact
with the man claim to find a profound sense of peace within themselves
and to gain access to a deeper awareness in his presence, the way
individuals claim to have done in the presence of sages like Ramana
Maharshi who seemed able to bestow on their disciples or those who came
to meet them, peace and a sense of joy by virtue of their own deep
inner stillness.
Isaac maintains that truth is “your own heart speaking to itself. It’s
the true tantra. It is deeper than intimacy. Intimacy still assumes the
other. This is like making love. It is an inner kiss. In the heart, in
your own heart.”
Uma
Recent Comments