Christopher Greaves in conversation with Nigel Powel

As an answer is one things I think people will be really interested to hear about from your experiences is not just when and where you got your self-realization but the circumstances quite briefly, where your head was if you like, what were the circumstance at the time when you found Shri Mataji and Sahaja yoga. Perhaps if I start with Chris and just work around. When you started, how was the inception, where we were you? Were you just wandering around and suddenly you saw a poster or were you desperate?

It’s quite an interesting story would take me a couple of minutes to tell you but I was a seeker and I’ve been seeking for a long time in a sort of intellectual way. I hadn’t identified with any particular cult or anything like that and one day I saw in the New Musical Express, an advertisement, a little advertisement saying that on such and such a day, June 5th 1978 Shri Mataji would grant en mass self-realization at Castor Hall. It didn’t mention Sahaja yoga at all just said this and I was fascinated by this because this idea of collective en mass but self-realization, the individuation, was exactly what I’ve been looking for. All my mental conclusions have come that this is what we need to change the world, something that is collective yet also individual at the same time. It so happened because I had no money in those days I lived a very lazy sort of life that some friends were moving out to London that day to Park so I got a lift with them and I went alone to Castor Hall. These friends, the guy who was moving was a guitarist and he had a band and they needed a name for this band. It was kind of acoustic jazz band, very nice music actually and an old school friend of mine came up with this name she had found in a book about medieval Indian religion. And the name was Sahaja. When I got to Castor Hall I was very self-conscious, shy kind of person. I had a dread that I would be invited in and it would all be so happy, clappy, hugging each other. I came to Castor Hall and outside there was this big poster and it said Sahaja Yoga. I thought this is a sign if ever there was one. I went in and it was, I’ll just go on a little bit longer about the meeting, shall I? There were, actually that meeting which must be one of early meetings in Castor Hall, some leaflets on the chairs before the meeting actually began and they said something about who Shri Mataji was that she had been Mary, for example. I was of a very skeptical mind but I just did not doubt this somehow. Gregoire gave the introduction which was a very strong one, calling on the deities to support what he was saying and then Shri Mataji spoke and I couldn’t actually, a lot of people actually have these Vishuddhi problems and I couldn’t actually make out everything she was saying though she spoke perfectly distinctly. Then there were some question and she turned to me, I was sitting in the middle, I thought if I sit at the back of the room then they might say, everyone in the back moved to the front, if I sit at the front I’ll already be at the front in the firing line and so, this is my intellectual. I sat in the middle and she looked at me and she said, an intellectual. I didn’t look particularly intellectual, I had very, very long thick hair and some John Lennon specs and she said, you won’t find the answer in the books. I head myself saying, because as I said, I was very shy, in front of all these people I said, yes, I know that. She said something else. She actually told me I should get my hair cut because entities can get in hair like this. I think she knew that I wasn’t… The people worked on me and they said some things about what they felt she was astonishing to me. How could they know this? I just felt that this is a matter of destiny, I’d always felt I was in this world for some purpose, something to do with your changing the world for the better and so I never looked back, although I didn’t feel very much myself for a long time.


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