Awakening into Oneness: The Power of Blessing in the Evolution of Consciousness

BLESSING FROM ONENESS UNIVERSITY

Awakening into Oneness is not the story of one person or a group of people. It is the story of a phenomenon that is sweeping across the globe, awakening millions in its path. Its relevance is for all time and for all people, irrespective of their religious convictions. This book has the potential to awaken the reader to the awesome and intelligent power of the Oneness Blessing, as reading the book itself delivers an experience of Blessing. It has the power to awaken the seeker to the eternal and immanent presence of the Divine and to initiate a process of awakening that eventually culminates in the realization of the Oneness of all life.

We at Oneness University know Awakening into Oneness will be instrumental in the emergence of a new human being with a global outlook, free of all divisions—racial, national, religious, or otherwise.

Acharya Anandagiri

Oneness University

January 2007

Image C: Sri Bhagavan Founder of the Oneness University

Image D: Sri Amma Founder of the Oneness University

FOREWORD

I accepted to write a few words to introduce Arjuna Ardagh’s book because its topic is of extraordinary importance for each of us individually, as well as for all of us collectively. Moreover, it meshes perfectly with my theoretical conceptions and with my own experience. I went to Oneness University in 2006 and had three weeks of meditation, as well as personal encounters with Bhagavan. But this is not an autobiographical essay; the reader will find abundant personal accounts in the chapters that follow. I merely wish to note that what is recounted in this book corresponds to what I experienced myself, and it also corresponds to the results of the research I have conducted over the past two decades.

These considerations give me good reasons to take seriously the experiences described in this book. However, these experiences should be taken seriously by everyone. Now, quite a sizable number of people in nearly all parts of the world have lived the experience and corresponded about it. Combined with the insights we are gaining at the cutting edge of science, these lived experiences are of great theoretical and practical interest. Since the spread of this kind of experience is likely to be a factor in choosing the shape of our future, we can benefit by reading and pondering the ideas and experiences described in the chapters that follow.

Let me summarize why I believe that this book merits the reader’s full attention.

1. Reality. The experiences it recounts are far from ordinary, yet they are not illusory; they are rooted in the physical reality of the cosmos;

2. Urgency. The spread of these experiences in society is in the interest of the entire human family—in its most concrete and immediate interest.

These are big claims, and they deserve further elucidation.

The Oneness experience—popularly but somewhat misleadingly said to have enlightenment as its goal—is grounded in physical processes that are just as real as the perception of light, color, and sound, but they are conveyed by the reception of a different kind of information by the brain. The experiences are made possible by a balanced state of the brain (though they are not caused by this state in a mechanistic sense). One aspect of this state has been researched in connection with receiving the Oneness Blessing and exposure to the dasas who give Blessings and have presumably achieved the balanced state.

The detailed cerebral mechanisms that constitute a balanced brain state call for further neurophysiological investigation, but one feature is already clear.

The widespread experience of deep prayer and meditation—and of altered states of consciousness in general—provides evidence that in these altered states, the classical information processing of the left cerebral hemisphere is no longer dominant. The brain does not operate predominantly in the classical mode, whereby one item of consciousness follows others in a linear sequence, and perception is not limited to signals conducted by the bodily senses. In altered states of consciousness, the gestalt-perceiving, parallel-processing operating modality of the right hemisphere comes to the fore. This entails opening the receptivity of the brain to a range of information well beyond the sensory signals received through eye, ear, nose, palate, and skin.

In the cerebral states that underlie altered states of consciousness, the brain operates in a nonclassical mode: as a macroscopic quantum system. It shifts from being an EM-wave and photon-wave receiver to operating as a quantum-field transceiver. It receives, as well as sends, information in the form of holographic patterns in the quantum wave-field that, as an element in the quantum vacuum, underlies all things in the universe. (I have called this universal information field the Akashic Field, for its effect recalls the ancient concept of Akasha, the cosmic medium that interconnects and records all things in space and time.)

In commonsense terms, altered states of consciousness liberate us from the ego-limited condition whereby we view the world through five slits in the tower—they open for us the roof to the sky.

Opening the roof is facilitated, even if it is not uniquely caused, by the experience of receiving the Oneness Blessing. In turn, the sensitivity of individuals to this Blessing is facilitated by undergoing the consciousness-evolution regime Bhagavan calls Oneness process. The Oneness process enhances the effect of the Oneness Blessing, and thus helps individuals to achieve the altered states of consciousness in which their brain operates as a macroscopic quantum system.

Is the opening of the brain, and hence of the consciousness associated with it, to quantum fields of major consequence? I believe it is, since these fields link the brain and consciousness of individuals with the world around them. They permit the discovery, or more exactly the rediscovery, of these linkages, for they were known to traditional peoples and are still known to non-Western cultures and to spiritual people wherever they live. The experience of connection with others and with nature has been described by religious leaders, mystics, and spiritually versed or inclined people, whether they had entered altered states through prayer or through meditation. They are the essence of the awakening into Oneness, the consciousness evolution alluded to in the title of this book.

Rediscovering our links with the world around us is important for us as individuals: it makes us more whole, more sensitive, and at the same time more balanced persons. It is extraordinarily important for us collectively. This is because at the root of the problems now faced by humanity is the outmoded, egoically constrained consciousness. It prompts narrowly self-centered values, beliefs, and behaviors. Bhagavan is correct when he states that there is only one cause for human problems, and that is the sense of separateness—the sense that the world can be divided into me and not me. Of course, this separation is not limited to the dichotomy of me and the rest of the world, but is moderated by various forms of identification that are not purely egoic: with family, community, nation, culture, and even enterprise. But the current forms of identification clearly fall short of the global identification we need to survive as a species. This identification can only be based on the lived experience of oneness—of our connection with each other, and with nature.

In recent books, I have discussed why I believe that nothing short of a global level of identification with all members of the human family, and with the biosphere that is the human family’s life-support system, can give a reasonable chance of weathering the coming decades without major catastrophe. I shall not repeat the argument here—the evidence, in any case, is clear and available to everyone. It is enough to state the conclusion I reached after years of studying the steadily growing problems and challenges facing the human community. I can sum it up in a single sentence: Unless there are fundamental changes in the way we conduct our affairs on this planet, the chances that all six-and-a-half billion of us would survive the next decade are extremely slim.

Every BAU (business-as-usual) scenario leads to a population collapse, due to one of several root causes: climate change producing drought that makes it impossible for up to a third of the human population to grow adequate food to cover its basic needs; the lowering of water tables and the concurrent pollution of the water resources of over half the world’s population; the rise of the sea level threatening the coastal populations that make up over a fourth of the population; the famine that results from extreme poverty as well as from the degradation of the environment, and has as a consequence the spread of debilitating diseases—and the woefully inadequate development of the body and brain of the children who make up the bulk of the next generation; and the maverick or organized violence—the terrorism and the warfare—that results from increasing stress, poverty, lack of information and education, religious and ethnic intolerance, and short-sighted response to conflicts of economic interests.

BAU scenarios are deadly. Can they be avoided? The answer is, they can: we have the money (even a part of what we spend on the military would cover the requirements); we have the energy (we are using but a tiny fraction of the solar radiation that reaches the surface of the planet); and we have the technology (a variety of alternative energy technologies and technologies of sustainable resource use are already on line).

What is keeping us, then, from shifting from a BAU to a sustainable scenario? Only a failure of will. Why do we lack the economic, the political, and the civic will? Because, for the most part, we fail to perceive the critical nature of our situation. Why do we fail to perceive it? Evidently because we are still under the spell of an obsolete consciousness, with narrow perceptions, short time-horizons, and the assumption that everyone is separate from everyone else and is interested only in pursuing his or her immediate material goals and interests.

How can we change this dangerous condition? The answer is clear: by changing ourselves as a way to change the world. But how can we change ourselves? Here is where the critical importance of the Oneness Blessing and the Oneness process comes in. The most reliable, lasting, and effective way to change ourselves is to evolve our consciousness.

One last question: How much time do we have to reach a more evolved consciousness? The answer may be shocking to many people: for the human family as a whole, the time is less than a decade. The date I have arrived at is the same that Bhagavan had envisaged: the end of 2012. This is not mere coincidence. A major shift in the tenor of human life on this planet by the end of the year 2012 has been predicted by a surprising number of cultures, from the Mayan and the Cherokee to the Indian. This date appears to be deeply etched in the collective unconscious of contemporary humanity, and both Bhagavan and I have sensed it. In my case, I came to it as an intuitive insight before I did the empirical research and the calculations. The latter merely confirmed the insight, with a margin of error that is not likely to exceed a few years in one direction or the other.

Change yourself to change the world, and thus make 2012 not the opening phase of a collective catastrophe but the prelude to a new, peaceful, and sustainable civilization. This, in a nutshell, is my message, and the message of this book that shows us how all of us can awaken into Oneness.

Ervin Laszlo, Ph.D.

19 December 2006

PREFACE

I researched and wrote this book about the Oneness University in the early months of 2006. I was invited there as a guest with my wife, Chameli, to experience what they had to offer. We liked what we found there, and I agreed to write this book to document their work to the world in a broader way.

Awakening into Oneness remains a great introduction to the way that the phenomenon of deeksha, or Oneness Blessing, was born, what it is, and the potential benefits it offers. By the time the paperback went into production in 2008, however, a great deal had changed about the Oneness University. I have included a brief summary at the end of the book to bring you up to date on some of the more substantive changes that have taken place, and I have updated the Resources section so that you can access the most current news about the Oneness Blessing.

Arjuna Ardagh

Nevada City, CA

August 2008

CHAPTER ONE

THE DIAMOND EARRINGS

When my old friend Micki Karlholm sent me an e-mail to announce that he had just returned from India, where he had found the key to permanent enlightenment, I was at a loss. How could I possibly explain to him just how completely not interested I was?

Micki is the original founder of the No-Mind Festival in Sweden, and I have known him for many years. He is one of the kindest and most deeply honest people I know. So I was both surprised and disappointed to see him swallowed up by another Indian cult. I thought we were both over that one.

A few days later, we spoke on the phone. He told me this simple story.

For twelve years, Micki had been married to a woman from Denmark. They had children together. Throughout the marriage, he was always promising to buy her a pair of diamond earrings. Just wait a little while longer. I will make us so much money that you will get your earrings. You wait and see. She waited and waited, and finally, they got divorced. No earrings.

Micki told me that while he was visiting this place in India, they did some kind of processes on him that affected his brain. I imagined scalpels and tubes and wires and machines and dubious hygiene. In one of these processes, for example, they helped him to feel all the pain he had unconsciously caused to other people. Micki was able to feel that simple broken heart—all the disappointment—he had left with his ex-wife in Denmark. When he returned from India to his native Sweden, he went straight to a jeweler and bought her the earrings. He drove without stopping to Denmark and knocked on her door. He offered her first an apology, and then the earrings.

Micki, I said to him, now I am interested. This was not a story of peak enlightenment experiences displaced from ordinary life; this was not another obsession with higher states. This was a story about my friend Micki becoming a more decent human being. It was right in line with everything I was passionate about.

At that time, I was just coming to the end of three years of research for my book The Translucent Revolution, a thoroughly overambitious survey of twenty-first-century spirituality. I conducted hundreds of interviews and finally managed to distill millions of words down to a mere 520-page pamphlet. The book came out in the early summer of 2005 to the usual circus of press interviews, talks in bookstores, and TV and radio shows. "It’s six a.m. here, folks, in rural Wisconsin, and our guest today is ... Arhooh Aghaaaaar. (Did I say that right? Hell, never mind.) So, Mr. Ahaaaar, what is this trans ... luminous thing? Does it have anything to do with that thing Tom Cruise does in L.A.? I mean, what did you make of his outburst on Oprah? ... Let’s talk about that."

I needed a break. And just as often happens when something is coming your way whether you like it or not, I kept on bumping into that same brain-changing thing Micki had told me about. At that time it was called deeksha. Today it is more commonly called the Oneness Blessing. No surgery or beeping machines were involved. A Oneness Blessing giver would put his or her hands on your head for a few minutes, initiating a powerful rebalancing of energy in the brain. One of the first Westerners to be trained to do this gave someone a ride to our house and then ended up staying over. And so it was that my wife and I got our first-ever Oneness Blessing. If we had experienced flashing lights or firework displays or visions of ascended masters, we might have been less attracted. What we did find was a delicious immersion in the same silence, peace, spaciousness, and causeless love that we both knew to be the essence of spiritual longing and practice. Here was a dropping back into that presence in just a minute, with just a touch on the head. The simple fragrance of home. After that, wherever we went, there seemed to be a blessing giver there, too. Were these guys following us?

The final straw came when I heard directly from the Oneness University in India, where all these people had been trained. It seems the university’s founder had read The Translucent Revolution and liked it. Would I like to come for a visit?

My wife and I both certainly needed a holiday. Was it expensive? Come as our guests. Would we get our own room, no dormitory? No problem. Could we rest as much as we liked? Twenty-four hours a day. Is it a quiet place? Middle of nowhere. Can we do our own thing, be undisturbed? You can be totally silent.

They were good to their word. The campus was situated in a mango grove near low-lying mountains. For most of the time, all we could hear were the chirping of birds and the croaking of frogs. We slept and we slept; we ate some really quite tasty Indian food, took a short walk, and then we slept again. The whole place was run by young Indian men and women called dasas. They all wore white and were extraordinarily energetic and in permanently unflappable good moods, despite the fact that they seemed to never sleep. Our dasa (literally, guide), Pragyanand, would show up soon after eight in the morning to see if we would like a deeksha, as it is called in India. Sure, why not? It’s not like we had a packed schedule or anything. Each day the deeksha would have a specific intention, such as balancing the body, clearing old relationships, or, as was the case for Micki, helping one to feel pain one had caused to others. One day early on, for example, our young dasa announced that we would receive a deeksha to clear impressions left over from the relationship with the mother. I was skeptical. Back in the 1970s, I had beaten cushions and screamed primal screams. Later, I did est, hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, even colon therapy. I thought I had cleaned out pretty good, and I really had not thought about childhood for more than a decade.

Pragyanand did his deeksha; it took only a minute or two. Then he stood up to leave with the words Now you rest. Rest? Are you crazy? We had just been sleeping for fourteen hours straight, plus we took three naps yesterday. I tell you the ... very ... last ... thing ... I ... need ... is ... to...

We were gone, as though the bed suddenly had powerful magnets installed in it. And then a powerful stream of images started to emerge, things I had not thought of for decades. The way my mother brushed her hair before we were leaving to go out ... the smell of the laundry detergent ... the time she locked herself in her room, and the neighbor had to come and.... It went on and on, for several hours. As the images continued, I could actually feel things happening in my brain, as though it were being massaged from inside. And then it stopped, just as it had started, for both my wife and me at the same time. We got up and walked around. Things were quite normal, except that later in the day, someone would casually say the word mother, and it provoked a deep resonance of love and gratitude. It was as though there had been furniture there before, and now it was gone, and gratitude had filled its place. I love my mother—that was all that remained. The rest was a story that served no purpose.

It went on and on like that. A short deeksha, a powerful inward release something like a shamanic journey, and then more and more space, simplicity, love—the return to the natural state where things are just as they are, and there is no commentary saying it should be any different than it is.

Toward the end of our stay at the Oneness University, I sat down with our guide. This is really quite powerful stuff, you know? I told him. He smiled that unflappable smile again. I know, he grinned. Just twenty-five years old, he had the innocence of a child and the deep wisdom of a sage. During this three-week vacation, I had watched him be fully present with world-famous musicians, politicians, writers, and seminar leaders from all over the world. I had watched him greet their moments of ecstasy and agony with equal calm. He was around from six in the morning till way after midnight. I was seriously impressed. I don’t think people in the rest of the world fully appreciate the power of what is happening here. You guys really need someone to write a good book, I told him. Maybe, he said, and smiled.

A couple of days later, he got back to me. "Thank you for your idea. We would love for you to write the book."

***

There were several things that really impressed me on that first visit to the Oneness University. The first were those 170 dasas. I have spent a good deal of my life around organized spirituality. The situation has always been more or less the same. A great teacher, great teachings, wonderful practices, meditations or prayers, and then among the followers, there was always a certain degree of politics. Who could get higher in the organization? Who had the power? During my three-week stay at