From Gurus to Holistic Health to Nondualism
Sep 01, 2024 06:00AM ● By Paul Chen
It is with immense pleasure and satisfaction that we present our interview with Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in this issue. Gurudev provided so much for us to share that we'll publish Part 2 in an upcoming issue!
Gurudev is an Indian spiritual master and founder of the Art of Living Foundation, whose mission is “to create a happier, stress-free world by providing tools for personal transformation,” and its vision is “to foster a global community that seeks positive change and well-being for all individuals.”
It was a privilege and an honor to be able to interview an internationally recognized spiritual leader, and I want to thank Sriram Iyer, former president of Atlanta’s Art of Living, for that opportunity. He proactively requested the interview on our behalf without a prompt from us! How incredible is that?
Whenever we conduct interviews, we like to ask questions on behalf of our readers. For this interview, our questions assumed that a significant portion of our readers are in the early stages of their spiritual paths—having been on it for just a handful of years—or they’re considering exploring a path for themselves. We didn’t ask “deep” philosophical questions. We sincerely hope that our questions prove themselves to be relevant to many of you.
As fate would have it, this issue is packed with articles of a spiritual bent. As it happens, two of Atlanta’s spiritual organizations are celebrating decennial anniversaries: Unity Atlanta is celebrating its 100th year, and Mary and Martha’s Place is celebrating its 30th.
While they are quite distinct organizations, Art of Living, Unity, and the Celtic spirituality that lies at the heart of Mary and Martha’s Place’s offerings share a common ground: nondualism. Wikipedia states that nondualism “emphasizes the absence of fundamental duality or separation in existence. This viewpoint questions the boundaries conventionally imposed between self and other, mind and body, observer and observed, and other dichotomies that shape our perception of reality.”
Rick Busby, a Unity teacher in Austin, Texas, wrote: “Charles Fillmore taught that the ‘Christ in you’ is the ‘true light which guides,’ and that this ‘true light’ is and has forever been within you, within me. The ‘true light’ of the Christ is the creative principle through which everything was ‘formed and came into existence.’” And Celtic mystic and poet John O’Donohue wrote: “The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel; rather, they are fused. The eternal world suffuses what, to the human eye, is our mortal world. This fusion makes all experience, thoughts, feelings, events and happenings, live and dead, holy.”
Some readers might pick up on the clear connection between natural health—the primary focus of this magazine—and nondual spiritual paths. That is holism, often defined as “the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole.” For example, consider that Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, two of humanity’s oldest health enhancement and maintenance systems—both still in practice today—recognize a deep connection between spiritual practice and optimal health. Both define health in emotional and spiritual terms as well as physical terms, the logical conclusion of which is that unresolved emotional and spiritual issues can result in physical disease. This also explains why meditation, pranayama, tai chi and qigong are all practices that offer physical, emotional and spiritual benefits.
And that brings us back to Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.
While our interview with Gurudev—and last year’s interview with Sadghuru, another world-renowned Indian spiritual master [see bit.ly/sadghuru-0523]—addressed spiritual topics, if you check out either of their YouTube channels, you’ll find dozens of videos on health issues.
Again, holism recognizes that everything is connected.
And Natural Awakenings magazine isn’t just about holistic health; it’s about nondual perspectives, too, as interconnectedness and recognition of the whole is a key theme to both. In his book Notes for the Journey Within, Gurudev writes: “It was thought that to say, ‘I am God,’ is blasphemy. I tell you, to say, ‘I am not God’ is blasphemy. When you say, ‘I am not God,’ you deny God’s omnipresence. He also expressed it this way: “Meditation is seeing God in yourself. Love is seeing God in the person next to you. Wisdom is seeing God everywhere.” ❧
