Not-Quite-A-Passage for January

For the past six months, we've highlighted a passage each month, but we thought we'd shake it up this month and highlight another resource: Eknath Easwaran's Thought for the Day. In his book Words to Live By, Easwaran presents a quote from a great philosopher, poet, saint, or sage, and follows it with commentary to highlight how the wisdom of the ages can help us here and now.

The Thought for the Day is a favorite here among the YA Blog Team, and we often hear from YAs that their practice began by daily reading of Thought for the Day.

We recommend exploring the Thought for the Day content on the Easwaran website where you can sign up to receive Thought for the Day via email - or even check out the Thought for the Day App. Here are a few facts: 

• The Thought for the Day has 8,411 email subscribers. Most subscribers are in the US, followed by Canada, Germany, UK, India, Switzerland, Japan, and Australia
• The Thought for the Day App was released in October 2012 and has had 2,302 downloads. A high percent users are in the US, and you'll find the rest in UK, Canada, India, Australia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Ireland, Germany, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia

We wanted to share today's thought with you, and we've copied it below. We'd love to hear from you! In the comments below, we invite you to share any reflections on the quote or Easwaran's commentary.

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January 7

Genius . . . means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way.
   – WILLIAM JAMES

Attention is very much like a searchlight, and it should be mounted in such a way that it can be trained on any subject freely. When we are caught up in some compulsion, this searchlight has become stuck. After many years of being stuck like this, it is hard to believe that the light can turn. We think that the compulsion has become a permanent part of our personality. But gradually, we can learn to work our attention free.

As an experiment, try to work cheerfully at some job you dislike: you are training your attention to go where you want it to go. Whatever you do, give it your best concentration. Another good exercise is learning to drop what you are doing and shift your attention to something else when the situation demands. For example, when you leave your office, leave your work there. Don’t let it follow you home and come into the dining room like an untrained dog, barking at your heels.

All this is the spiritual equivalent of kicking exercises in a dance lesson or knee bends in an aerobics class. By practicing these exercises, anybody can learn to direct attention freely.

A Happy YA New Year

In the YA eSatsang, our online fellowship group, we have a tradition of asking people to write in and share a holiday message. In the email calling for holiday messages, the YA eSatsang team asked YAs to share an overview of their year, successes, challenges, and benefits they've seen from a year of passage meditation practice.

We at YA Blog HQ wanted to share some of the amazing things we've learned this year, so we decided to kick off 2014 with our own holiday message!

Bay Area YAs at a recent gathering in San Francisco

An Overview of 2013

At the close of 2012, the BMCM put forward a new strategic plan for the whole of the organization. The top priority of this new initiative? Finding new ways to share passage meditation and Eknath Easwaran's teachings with young people. Many YA schemes were hatched, lots of YA plans were made, and in February 2013, the YA Blog Team was born!

At the end of April, with the help of our wider YA community, we began sharing stories and tips from YAs around the world practicing passage meditation. We've been just amazed at these posts. Lofty, practical, sincere, and often funny, we've learned a lot from all our contributors and been inspired to work on our own daily practice.

By now, eight months later, YA Blog HQ has settled into a nice routine of writing, editing, emailing, and posting - none of which would be possible without the support of the broader YA and BMCM community. We're so grateful for all the help!

Successes and Challenges

We've been so pleased with the reach the blog has had in its first months. Here are some stats from the blog's first eight months of activity:

• We've had visitors from over 35 countries. Most visits come from the US, India, Germany, the UK, and Canada.
• We've had a total of just overe 2,000 unique visitors, with an average rate of 500 unique visitors per month.
• The month of November brought us the most visitors so far: 635 unique visitors, and 1,167 total visits (we think it might be that Passage Portfolio thing. . .)
• One-third of our audience comes via the Timeless Wisdom Blog or the Eknath Easwaran Facebook page.

We've been so pleased to hear from many of our non-YA friends from the passage meditation community. Keep it up!

As with any endeavor, the main challenge on our end is curating content. There is such a wealth of material out there, from YA stories to inspiration from Easwaran to passages. . . it's a wonderful challenge to have. 

What do YOU think?

Now we'd love to hear from you! In the comments below, we'd love to hear from you on any, or all, of the these topics. Or just drop a comment saying "hi". We'd love to hear from you!

• What post from 2013 really inspired you?
• Was there a tip you picked up from a post that helped your practice?
• Is there anything specific you'd like to see on the blog in 2014?

Best wishes,

Your YA Blog Team

Easwaran on the Katha Upanishad: The Razor's Edge

[In 2013, we launched an experimental project sharing mp3 talks, which we described below. The talk referenced here is no longer available, but we'll continue sharing other mp3 talks via the blog in 2014.]

Over the past months we’ve shared two audio talks from Eknath Easwaran on the Katha Upanishad. These talks were given in the 1970s to his close students, mostly YAs at the time. We’re pleased to be able to share a third talk from this series with you!

Easwaran dives right into the Katha Upanishad at the opening of this talk sharing a long excerpt from the third canto, known to many passage meditators as the passage titled “The Razor’s Edge”.

In the secret cave of the heart, two are seated by life’s fountain. The separate ego drinks of the sweet and bitter stuff, liking the sweet, disliking the bitter, while the supreme Self drinks sweet and bitter neither liking this nor disliking that. The ego gropes in darkness, while the Self lives in light. So declare the illumined sages, and the householders who worship the sacred fire in the name of the Lord.

May we light the fire of Nachiketa that burns out the ego, and enables us to pass from fearful fragmentation to fearless fullness in the changeless Whole.

In his commentary on this passage, Easwaran uses a great deal of Sanskrit, reciting short excerpts of the original text and using special Sanskrit terms to explain his points. Don’t let this discourage you! Easwaran will either provide translations, or you’ll find that the context of a word is usually enough to convey its meaning.

This talk also captures much of the spirit of the interaction between Easwaran and his students – he calls them by name, or asks  them to remind him of shared anecdotes to help illustrate a point. Although these in-jokes may not be totally clear to a modern audience, this talk really gives you the feeling of being “in the room”.

As with the other talks, we are very interested to get your feedback on the audio talk.

We’d love to hear from you in the comments below, or by email (young.adults@easwaran.org) on any, or all, of the following questions:

1. Do you have any observations on the content of the talk that you'd like to share?
2. Do you have any observations on the audio experience of the talk that you'd like to share?
3. How might we help you interact with this content better?
4. Anything else?

We leave you with the last three stanzas of the third canto to inspire you to hit play!

Get up! Wake up! Seek the guidance of an illumined teacher and realize the Self. Sharp like a razor’s edge is the path, the sages say, difficult to traverse.

The supreme Self is beyond name and form, beyond the senses, inexhaustible, without beginning, without end, beyond time, space, and causality, eternal, immutable. Those who realize the Self are forever free from the jaws of death.

The wise, who gain experiential knowledge of this timeless tale of Nachiketa narrated by Death, attain the glory of living in spiritual awareness. Those who, full of devotion, recite this supreme mystery at a spiritual gathering are fit for eternal life. They are indeed fit for eternal life.