A religious leader came to ATLAPA the other day, on a mission both spiritual and worldly. Had those who came to hear him known nothing about him and heard but not seen the choir perform its first number before the man took the stage --- “El espiritu de Diós está en este lugar” --- they might have thought it was a Roman Catholic gathering.
Ah, but a whiff of the incense and the next number, “Ganesha Om,” gave clear indication that this was the visit of a Hindu religious figure.
And indeed, Panama’s Hindu community turned out in force to hear Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. The lower part of ATLAPA’s Teatro Anayansi was nearly filled and there were hundreds of people in the balcony as well. Many of the women in the female-majority crowd --- including some who are not of South Asian ancestry --- came dressed in saris. It was one of this year’s premiere spiritual events in Panama.
Educated in the classical Hindu Vedic tradition, Sri Sri has, like leaders in many other religious denominations, devoted a lot of effort to public service as well as strictly spiritual pursuits. His Art of Living Foundation works in more than 11,000 small rural communities in several dozen countries --- including in one of the corregimientos of Anton --- to improve living standards by better nutrition, more systematic health care, strict cleanliness and fewer unhealthy vices. The Prison SMART Foundation he created does much the same work that Christian and Muslim prison ministries do around the world, plus teaches inmates to control their emotions using yoga.
And yes, he preaches a religious message, a rather ecumenical, universalist one.
And yes, he runs a business, a worldwide chain of centers that offer yoga classes, including one on Calle 67 in Panama City’s San Francisco neighborhood. (If this interests you, contact them by email at artedevivir@cwpanama.net.)
(Sri Sri’s does not seem to be a Jim and Tammy operation. Although he raised a fair amount of money from the tickets that were sold to his lecture and at the end of his talk he mentioned his foundation’s yoga classes, this was neither the hard sell for divine indulgences nor the recruitment of zombified cultist slaves to work for a personal financial empire.)
Walking onto the stage as the music played, the guru, who earned the title of Yoga Shiromani in 1986, sat down on a sofa, closed his eyes and enjoyed the music. Then he began to speak.
“Life is so dry without music, isn’t it? Music is harmony in sound.
“We need harmony in life, too.”
He asked people in the audience to greet those around them, and launched into a talk about sincerity.
“There are so many times in life when we say ‘sorry’ or ‘thank you,’ but we don’t mean it.” It is sincerity, he said, that gives power to the words. “When we miss this sincerity, this caring, this love, that’s when life gets so dry. That’s when we go into depression.”
To ward off such depression, Sri Sri asserted, “we need to know life. We need to appreciate life. This is the art of living.”
To this yogi, existence has seven layers: body, breath, mind, intellect, memory, ego and self.
Despite all of humanity's great advances in science and medicine --- which Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, unlike some Eastern philosophers, does not reject as irrelevant to the spiritual life --- he opined that we really don't know very much about the human body and the way that it works.
His style of yoga places great emphasis on breathing exercises. “It’s the breath that keeps us alive, but we don’t pay much attention to it.”
On the intellectual plane, Sri Sri said that “it’s OK to disagree, but being aware that we disagree is important.”
In the memory, “our mind tends to hold onto the negative. Giving a twist from the negative to the positive is called yoga.”
Ego, he said, is identification with something. “Those who are not that something, you don’t feel that belonging with them. We must go beyond that boundary. These identifications limit us. It is OK to have them, but we must expand beyond them.”
(Considering that this was spoken by a Hindu preacher from India, which is frequently rent by the most violent inter-communal strife, and where a Hindu nationalist government that had exploited Hindu-Muslim divisions to hold onto office had been voted out of power in national elections a few days earlier, this gentle admonition was no mere platitude. It was the political and spiritual stance that got Mohandas K. Gandhi assassinated.)
People have an interesting perspective of self, Sri Sri noted. They will play with babies and watch them grow up into adults, but they won’t think that they themselves have changed in that time. “Everything around us is changing,” he said, but “being with that something that is not changing is called meditation. The purpose of meditation is to feel unconditional love.”
The lecture proceeded through thoughts on Attention Deficit Disorder, various mind games, learning how to control our emotions and ridding ourselves of anger through breathing exercises. “We have to learn to keep our mind clean,” the guru advised.
There followed a question and answer period that touched diverse subjects, and in which he garnered the night’s greatest applause when he spoke about terrorism.
“The problem in today’s world is that we haven’t globalized wisdom,” Sri Sri opined.
He held up Afghanistan under the Taliban as a case in point, arguing that if the kids there had been taught a little bit about the best of Christianity, the most enduring points of Buddhism and a few words of wisdom from the Upanishads, Afghan society would have never been so narrow minded as to allow the destruction of its famous 2000-year-old giant Buddha statues.
Moreover, the guru had an ominous warning about the fundamentalist roots of terrorism’s many forms: “If only a little part of the world thinks ‘I am going to heaven, everyone else is going to hell,’ the whole world is unsafe.”
The night ended with advice for those who actually want to be depressed --- “Just sit around and think ‘what about me, what about me, what about me?’” --- a 20-minute meditation exercise and a greeting line for people to exchange their personal respects with the wise yogi.
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