Recently I attended a weekend workshop on Death and Dying Consciously. It was held in the Beacon Yoga Ashram in Beaconsfield, a southern suburb of Perth and run by a beloved mentor of mine. That place was full of ghosts for me. My own ghosts, the ghosts of the place and the ghosts of the workshop participants.
The ashram was established by a yoga teacher and friend of my parents named Nancy. My parents ran the Yoga School of Perth and both taught yoga. I helped clean up the building when a twenty three year old and attended satsungs and other such things. Nancy converted to Hinduism and took the name Swami Lakshmi. She was a devotee of Swami Venkatesananda from Rishikesh, India. Swami Venkatesananda had first visited Perth in 1956 under the auspices of the Divine Life Society. My mother had gone to a talk and yoga demonstration of his. He helped my parents and another person set up the Yoga School of Perth when I was four years old, and visited us practically every year, so I grew up with him in my life. He was kindly towards me and as a little child I sat on his lap.
My brother and I definitely had an unusual childhood. We were surrounded by those who saw themselves as enlightened, or if not quite that, on the road to enlightenment. We had to learn to sift through all that stuff. And, I suppose, this is why I now work in psychotherapy: a job that requires a lot of sifting, sorting and identifying the real from fantasy. And yet, I, as we all do, still have to do the work of consciousness, of becoming aware.
Remarkably, given the propensity for things to come and go rapidly in this country of ours, the Yoga Ashram is still there 50 years later and looks grand these days. The building previously, I think, was a nursing home or possibly a children’s home of some kind but in the early 1970a was very run down and unoccupied. Now the gardens are beautiful with roses and flowering plums and the rooms are well kept, with air conditioning. All very comfortable, at least on the outside. It is, though, full of ghosts – all concentrated there. There are numerous pictures of Swami Venkatesananda (who died in 1982), his teacher Swami Sivananda Saraswati, Lakshmi, Krishnamurti, and others – even Jesus (the enlightened and the ordinary Joe Blows of us all). There are corners with religious objects, incense, a statues, altars and hangings everywhere. The place is full of stuff. Just like all of us.
Before our workshop began, someone asked me if I felt a rush of energy from Swami Venkatesananda. I replied, no I didn’t. He was a good man, but he was not holy. Kindly, intellectual (a Sanskrit scholar and author) and a good speaker, but that’s it. He was, though, a prime mover in getting a lot of people to consider consciousness. A very useful first step.
What are these ghosts of which I speak? These are not the disembodied post-death entities floating around still attached to the earth that we consider in the West, but ghosts as Tibetan Buddhists see them. They are projections of the people, attachments we all have to what we identify as ourselves, our ego, our beliefs about ourselves, of past suffering and trauma, memories, of feelings of longing and desire.
It's very interesting to know that in Traditional Chinese Medicine acupuncture, they speak of ghost points. These are thirteen specific acupuncture points designed to treat disturbances of the mind, trauma, psychological blocks, addictions, sleep disturbances, and the like – recognizing that the matters of the mind are found in our bodies. Ghosts materialize literally in ourselves.
The work, then, is not to identify with the ghosts but to recognize that they are there, and there and there. But we are more than ghosts. We are becoming awareness.
