How I Got the Compassion
Initiation from a true guru is a heavy thing. The initiate tends to become whatever and however the guru was.
Yogi Bhajan was a true guru. He was a Sikh who had received his initiation from a discarnate guru, Ram Das, a disciplic successor of Nanuk, who founded the Sikh religion.
Yogiji came to America in 1969, stating that he had come to teach teachers. His yoga was extraordinary, and he attracted quite a following. One of his initiates made this explanation for how they became and continue to be: “After a while, we looked around and at each other and said, “Who are we kidding? We’re Sikhs.” And they began to practice the Sikh religion and wear the Sikh regalia -- ceremonial dagger at the waist, men grow their beards, and the turban, some of them say, comes off at the neck. They are Sikhs.
Swami Prabhupada’s initiates teach just the same way he did. They are Hindu.
I also received initiation from a discarnate guru, who was a Tibetan, in the mid-1960’s. Milarepa was very yogic and very Buddhist, and I subsequently became both of those, since he was a true guru.
In later life I took up sutra-chanting in the form of Gongyo, a practice of Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism, at the time the largest religion of Japan. I branched off into my own private practice, not keeping the Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism but retaining the lotus-sutra chanting practice, which I later adapted to my own form.
Once during the early years of this, when I was doing Gongyo morning and evening, some Tibetans came to me on the psychic plane and showed me the compassion of the great vehicle.
I said, “Ghyaaaaaah!” and pointed at it physically. “I want that,” I declared, and began praying to it daily, in one of my Gongyo prayers.
That went on a few years, I think. Later I developed a practice that I called “Spirit Reading”, in which I read scriptural or at any rate heavy spiritual matter at the rate of exactly 5 minutes a day.
When you read scripture for just 5 minutes, you read at a high level of intensity. When we read, our intensity falls off, so subtly that we cannot perceive it. But if you hold to the “just 5 minutes and no more” discipline, you find over time that you have covered the material more intently, such that more insights have resulted.
I read the entire Judeo-Christian Bible in this way -- it took over a year. I read the Koran, the Book of Mormon, and the great Hindu epics, Mahabarata and Ramayana. I read also in this manner The Serpent Power, by Sir John Woodroffe, and that particular work produced insights by the bushel-basketful, due to the five-minute discipline.
Anyway, while I was covering Mahabarata and Ramayana with a faithful 5-minute-a-day practice, it seemed that certain Indian spirits of light, particularly Hanuman, became aware of me and apparently felt badly that so much of those epics is specifically ethnically Indian. They provided some guidance, and when I had finished the two epics, I surprised a lot of people with my next choice. Bible, Koran, Mahabarata, Ramayana -- what next? “We’re going to read the myths of Norway next,” I said. Hanuman knew, I think, that this would be the ethnic boost for me that Mahabarata and Ramayana are for Indians.
So I waded into the legends of the Aesir, and I discovered that the myths were a hugh, interwoven tapestry full of lessons that were specifically intended for my ethnicity -- in short, I had discovered my ethnic heritage.
Baldur’s death had been fortold in a dream. Frigg, his mother, sought to avert the tragedy and went all over the universe getting all the forms of life to promise to do no harm to Baldur. They all did, and the gods took to amusing themselves by shooting arrows at him, because the arrows would always turn aside.
Fatigued from this effort, Frigg reclined against a tree trunk, dozing. Loki, who was a shape-shifter, transformed himself into an old crone selling apples from a push-cart. When she came to where Frigg was reclining she stopped, to rest from the heat. “I have heard,” she said, “that you got everything in the universe to agree to do no harm to Baldur.”
“Yes, yes.... it’s wonderful. Now Baldur will be completely safe; the danger is past.”
“Really!” said the hag. Every creature?”
“Yes, every one of them. ....Well -- except for the mistletoe, of course. It’s so innocent and vulnerable, it couldn’t harm anything.”
“That’s wonderful,” said the crone, and picked up her cart handles and headed down the road.
Loki gathered some mistletoe and magically hardened it, fashioning it tnto an arrowhead, and some days later, when the gods were shooting arrows at Baldur to watch them divert, he approached Baldur’s blind brother, Hodr, and asked why he was not honoring Baldur by joining in.
“Do you not know that I am quite blind,” asked Hodr.
“That’s all right -- I’ll guide your hands. Here.” And he placed a bow into Hodr’s hands, with an arrow already nocked.
“Baldur!” cried Hodr, and let the bolt fly, striking Baldur and wounding him mortally.
Baldur died and was taken to the underworld. The gods were terribly wroth with Loki about this, and he disappeared for some time.
It was the custom for the Aesir to have a feast once a year, which the gods took turns hosting. Late that year it was held at the home of Tyr, the sea god, in his undersea kingdom. They were all seated around the long table, being convivial, when to everyone’s shock, in walked Loki.
Angrily, they demanded that he leave, but Loki reminded Odin that the two of them had sworn blood-brotherhood in the dawn of time, and Odin reluctantly ordered a place made for him beside his own seat.
One by one, the gods at the table began accusing and berating Loki, bitterly bringing up his numerous offenses of the past, and one by one he gave it back to them in their faces, just as bitterly, reminding each of them of his own offenses of the past. This was fully underway when Thor, who was late to the gathering, came in and beheld all of this. “You had better go,” he said to Loki, “ere I smite thee with Miolner.”
“I will go,” said Loki. “For I know you, Thor, that you strike when the spirit moves you. But for these others I have little regard.”
In that moment, I understood Loki, and in understanding him I understood them all, and the compassion of the great vehicle came to me at last.
It is essentially the spirit of treating each soul that we encounter as we believe best for the well-being of that soul.
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