We encounter truth everyday, we just don’t recognize it. That’s what I think. The reality of our lives is truth.
When Prem quoted Tulsidas at the event ‘whatever your eye can see, it’s all illusion’, I thought about it and realized it was true. Whatever your eye can see will disappear one day, poof, like it was never there.
Prem at the event was brilliant. We were all in tears by the end, Prem, the audience, me. I got out one whoop and that was all I needed to do.
‘The purpose of life is to experience the Divine. If we don’t do that then we feel pain, suffering, confusion, anxiety, all kinds of cognitive dissonance.’ I can so totally relate. I’m paraphrasing but he said something like that. I remember.
I traveled all the way to Los Angeles to attend the event and the journey was rugged. Our lives have become part of a machine, we are being processed, ticketed, security checked and made shoeless. Also beltless. It’s like they would like to humiliate you one more time before they pass you along to the next station, boarding gates.
It was a rugged journey and it was hard to enjoy, even though the pilot beseeched us to ‘enjoy the flight’ as we boarded. The flight attendant informed us of the federal regulations and the pilot advised us to prepare for departure and then left the seatbelt light on for the entire flight. It’s not like there was any turbulence. I told him about it. He was waiting by the cockpit door as we exited the aircraft, I’ll give him that much.
So anyways the flight sucked, both ways. LA traffic is insane. I felt physically ill sitting in the back seat of my friend’s Toyota Matrix XR as she zoomed around the streets of LA. She’s lived in LA almost her whole life and she was on it, getting into the spots whenever there was a gap in traffic, jumping off the lights. We were late, having spent too much time at a fancy Mexican restaurant that wasn’t that good plus we had to park in an underground dungeon and then before that Buddy couldn’t get his ticket off his phone, so that took 45 minutes before we could leave for the not very good fancy Mexican restaurant.
Like I said it was crazy, not at all like San Antonio. But once in the hall it was like this beautiful place, like heaven or something. What a contrast. The event started with a slide show of Prem’s life, this being the occasion of his 50th anniversary of arriving in the United States. Los Angeles was his port of entry and where he began his work in the US. Lot’s of amazing photos of all those years and then the MC introduced Prem and he came out and sat down, pulled the microphone towards himself and began, “Welcome. Welcome to this event.”
Listening to Prem Rawat is like listening to . . . truth. You don’t know what he’s going to say next but you feel the spontaneity and you feel the heartfelt connection to your own heart. Delightful. Yeah. Truth is something you feel.
I was raised a Baptist preacher’s kid and believed in that until I was 19 or 20 years old at which time something shifted and I started looking for a truth I could feel. Believing in it just didn’t seem enough anymore. And one day I did feel it.
There was a poster someone had stapled to a telephone pole on Charles street where I lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan; this was long, long ago. I would walk down that street almost every day on my way to the little grocery store next to the basketball courts and on this particular day I noticed the poster and the face of a child looking at me and above the child a quote, “The energy that moves the atom, moves you. Come and realize.” At the bottom of the poster was a program date and location. That’s how I ended up at the event. The child turned out to be Prem, at that time about age 14.
So, yeah, I went to check it out, it was only about 60 miles away, and it was this Mahatma speaking in a church, standing at the front in his saffron robes and shaved head and heavy Indian accent and I felt truth. That’s all I remember. Not one word he said, but I remember feeling truth.
Everyone feels something. Everyone feels their version of truth. Real truth is unmistakable. Unforgettable. Oh yeah. Can I hear an Amen?
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at the event