To me, coming to Munger and coming to a seminar like this is being in the splendour of geru, something which I don’t always wear because I live and work in the city. I have been working for decades, but I never give a yoga lesson or a talk without wearing geru. To me it means being in the lineage of the yoga that is so wonderfully concentrated here through Swami Niranjan, Swami Satyananda, Swami Sivananda. And behind them is this huge world of great sages.
I am sure that when children see a sage, they remember the fairy tales of magicians and fairies, but they also perceive the glory of the wisdom of all ages coming back to them. That is something I saw here in the beautiful presentations which the children of Munger exemplified before our eyes. They had a message: to protect the planet. It was not just dancing and singing, they had something to say to us. That is why I believe in the hidden doors of Intelligence, with a capital ‘I’, and the children have the secret of it.
Like children, we also should open our imagination and think of what we have received here. It is the original, traditional yoga set up by those elegant figures dressed in geru who simply greet us and make everything so easy that you wonder how it was possible. They exemplify high thinking which is in them, maintained and increased every day through their sadhana. At the same time, they represent the principles of precision and organization. In them we realize the relation of extremes when they are adjusted, as yoga advises us. Even the blue and red of the logo tells us that ida and pingala are in us, but they have to be adjusted so that the third force rises which is not the addition of ida and pingala, but something else. To realize this you have to come to Munger, you have to come to Rikhia, you have to imbibe the atmosphere and see the real master coming in front of you. He can be playing and joking, yet during the practices when he adjusts the postures of the crowd, there are no mistakes except when, for a joke, he passes from three to twenty-five.
I am amazed every time at the possibility that we have to make opposites come together. That is the force exemplified in this pandal. The way it grew out from the lawn, I don’t know how, because the last time I was here, I didn’t see it! Then, after the force of creation, there comes the beauty, decorating the place with the flowers and trees, so that even though the air might be polluted outside, here we breathe fresh air, we receive prana. Prana for physical health, but also prana for the mind, the emotions, the deeper dimensions of our beings. We are recharged by this force and the beauty that we find here. Since we have been here for this unveiling of the second chapter, we will be able to say in the future to our friends and children, “I was there!”