Landmark,Avatar,Satsang (Part. 2)

Satsang, the third transformational paradigm that I've experienced, is a form of spiritual discourse delivered by a Satsang teacher. It usually begins a session with a talk by the teacher and then may involve dialogue with students who volunteer questions or offer reports of their experience in "satsang." Satang literally means something like 'being in communion with truth.' The "truth" of this experience presumably shifts one's attention from a consciousness of the world to a consciousness of the prior condition of Awareness that makes consciousness of the world possible. So one becomes conscious of one's Consciousness or Awareness and, thus, "Self-conscious." It is the kind of 'awakening' in which one can glimpse the Source of the consciousness that "creates" one's relatedness to the world and the things of the world.

I experienced Satsang first with Yukio Hasegawa who was given the name of "Ramana" by his teacher in India, H.W.L. Poonja, who was a direct disciple of Ramana Maharshi. Yukio, now known as Ramana-ji, began his teaching a few years before I met him and experienced his Satsang in May of 1999. In the first 10 minutes of his Satsang I experienced a dramatic 'awakening' experience which was like an epiphany of feeling and insight into pure Self-Awareness. The concomitant experience was one of the feeling of self-love, self-forgiveness and joyful love of others absolutely unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life. I was 52 at that time.

Satsang is rooted in the traditional Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. It affirms the existence of Self as absolute divine source of all being and as the essence of being itself. Self is the whole of the real, the divine and the appearance of such in the individual, i.e., Atman. Ramana Maharshi's version of this is also called jnana yoga, or, the yoga of knowledge. The spiritual "practice" is called "vichara" or 'self-inquiry.' It is identical to Satsang although vichara is also something one practices by oneself. Vichara is simply an orientation and comportment of oneself toward oneself and one's experience in the world as the question: "Who am I?" This question is not repeated like a mantra but is always present as a mode of being in the external world. It is the vehicle that moves one toward the immanent reality of self as pure Self-Awareness.

Satsang is not concerned to translate one's having achieved or rested in Source consciousness into any projects or possibilities in the world. It is not explicitly interested in "planetary enlightenment" as in Avatar nor in the material instantiation of Self in worldly projects as in Landmark Education. Satsang seems more purely spiritual though more 'idealistic' in a sense. But it's not that there is any radical separation betweeen the Awareness of Satsang and one's consciousness in the world. It is just more "indifferent" to how one lives one's life, although it claims that if there is ever going to be anything like world peace and prosperity or planetary enlightenment it does presuppose enlightened consciousness.