Amy was a year 7 student at a small country high school. I had taught her in year 4 and her mother baby-sat for me. One day as I arrived to collect my daughter from Amy’s mother’s place, Amy asked me a surprising question. She had an English assignment that required her to do an oral presentation on a religion. She asked if I would mind if she did hers on Sahaja Yoga, as she had learnt a little bit about it back in Year 4 when she asked me about Shri Mataji’s photograph on my desk at school. I agreed to her request on two conditions. The first was that she did not present it as a religion but as the truth of all the great religions, and the second was that she allowed me to read it before she presented it. She agreed to both these requests and I loaned her some books on Sahaja Yoga.
She gave me her work and I was impressed, but I was even more so when she said that she wished she had her self-realisation so that she could speak from experience. I told her that this was possible right then and there if her mother, Cheryl, allowed it. She did, and Amy and I moved into her room with a photograph of Shri Mataji and a candle. Amy got her realisation and strongly felt the cool breeze above the top of her head. We meditated together and the candle flame popped and grew in size as it cleared the negativity. Amy had kept her eyes open staring at Shri Mataji’s photograph through the flame. When we had finished meditating she asked my why the flame had behaved the way it did. I explained that we use the elements to clear our chakras, and that the flame was burning off negativity to clear the chakras.
As we went back into the living room, Amy asked another startling question.
“CanI give the class their realisation when I do my presentation?”
Naturally, I agreed. The next day, I brought a poster-sized photograph of Shri Mataji for Amy to use with her class.
When I arrived to collect my daughter on the day of the presentation, Cheryl suggested that I stay until Amy returned to see how it had all gone. Amy came home beaming and said that it was “amazing.” Everything had gone well. She was glad that I had explained the candle flame’s unusual behaviour as her English teacher had kept her eyes open during the realisation process to watch the class and had seen the candle flame grow and heard it pop. At the end of Amy’s presentation, she asked Amy why this had happened and Amy was able to give an explanation.
I could hardly believe what I was hearing, but more was to come. Amy told me that a girl who was always very nervous had to give her presentation after Amy. This girl had been dreading the presentation, but later told Amy how glad she was that Amy had gone first because getting her realisation had made her the calmest that she had ever felt in her life, and she stayed that way while she gave the presentation that she had dreaded!
At lunchtime people came to ask how Amy knew about Sahaja Yoga. She told them that Tanaya’s mother had taught her. Tanaya is my eldest daughter, who was also in year 7 at the same school. Other pupils came to ask for their realisation as word had spread as to how “cool” it was.
That night Tanaya told me that her friends had heard of Amy’s presentation and had been a little upset, saying, “You knew of this all along and you didn’t tell us about it!”
That weekend one of Tanaya’s friends came to visit and the two of them headed for the bedroom. This was nothing unusual but the silence that came from the room was; so, too, were the strong vibrations that I felt as I passed the door. I opened the door a little, being very careful not to disturb them. The most beautiful sight greeted my eyes. Tanaya and her friend were sitting in front of Shri Mataji’s photograph with a lit candle. Tanaya was giving her friend her self-realisation. This occurred a couple of more times with other friends over the following days. All of these young people have had that precious connection to the Divine established, and it will stay with them for life.
LB
Some time ago, we held a competition in which readers were invited to suggest a new name for the newsletter. The winning suggestion was “Light of Love”, and the person who made the suggestion was Chelene Groube from Queensland, Australia. Congratulations, Chelene, on your winning entry. You will soon be the happy recipient of a CD of beautiful Sahaja music.
We chose “Light of Love” because it aptly and beautifully sums up the concept that Love has the power to enlighten our beings and bring about beneficial change in our environments.
If you have any comments about our new name, please share them with us. The newsletter has now been in operation for more than six months, and we always welcome feedback from our readers out there in Cyberland. Keep your comments flowing in! We also welcome suggestions regarding the types of items that you would like to see included in the newsletter.
Please take the time to drop us a line. We would love to hear from you.
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim,
not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi or Zen.
Not any religion, or cultural system.
I am not from the East or the West,
nor out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal,
not composed of elements at all.
I do not exist, am not an entity in this world
or the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve
or any origin story.
My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless.
Neither body nor soul.
I belong to the beloved
have seen the two worlds as one
and that one call to and know,
First, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Umberto D, produced in Italy in 1952, is often cited as the last film produced in the post-war Italian neo-realist style. Shot on a very small scale, with a tiny rostrum of mostly unnamed characters (man in hospital, landlady, sister, voice of light), it’s the sad but ever-hopeful story of a destitute retiree whose only claim in this world is his dog, Flick.
Director Vittoria de Sica (who directed The Bicycle Thief) has crafted something akin to a “found film” in that the actors are almost exclusively amateurs, the sets whatever was available on the streets of Roma, with large portions of the story dedicated to simply observing the daily routines of the characters who inhabit this film.
This powerful narrative has universal application, regardless of period or cultural setting. The loneliness of the aged and their marginalisation in society is still a problem in affluent industrial countries, regardless of social welfare and political paternalism. Perhaps this is a mechanism of Nature, although the film certainly seems to place the blame for Umberto’s plight on the Italian government.
Umberto is a man who is determined to lead the last few years of his life with dignity, but who is assailed by a society that, if not hostile, is at best, uncaring. While Umberto scrambles to find a way to avoid being evicted from his one-room suite, we observe how difficult it is for a man in such a trying situation to retain dignity and hope.
For long stretches of the film we simply observe people walking down streets, playing in parks, working in the kitchen, and witness how they sometimes can be ground down by life. Umberto is no exception, as everything in his life has been, as we might say in modern parlance, “downsized”. He appears to have neither friends nor family, neither work nor money, and soon he will no longer have a home. Consequently, it makes perverse sense that even his name is downsized; he is no longer Umberto Domenico Ferrari, but simply Umberto D.
There are a number of notable scenes, including the scene at the Animal Pound when Umberto recovers Flick and saves the hapless mongrel from certain death, and the stunning attempted suicide at the climax. In a final attempt at solving his dilemma, Umberto tries to give Flick away to a little girl who is playing in the park but her young, vital parents intervene, refusing the offer. Umberto tries to walk away, crosses a bridge; but Flick follows, finds him by the tracks, jumps into his arms. The train whistle howls, the express blows past as man and dog are bisected in shadow and light, as if framed in transition between this world and the next. It’s a brilliantly conceived and executed piece of film, one of the greatest sequences ever, anywhere.
The dog escapes and Umberto totters back over the footbridge into the park where he finds Flick hiding behind a tree, suspicious of his master’s intentions. But Umberto lures the dog out with a familiar routine and the film ends with the man and his dog gambolling into the distance as if happily reconciled to each other and their very uncertain fate.
Umberto D courageously and magnificently champions the life of an apparently insignificant man in a difficult time.
Source: www.culturecourt.com