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05/15/2002 Archived Entry: "4/22/02 Khalsa Council"

I just came back from a week of Khalsa Council meetings in Espanola, New Mexico. The Khalsa Council is a leadership body for the 3HO Sikh Community. I have been a member since its inception, when it was just composed of Regional Directors. It is the place where we meet as peers on our spiritual path.

Our growing into wisdom together has been a long and interesting path. Yogi Bhajan has long said that group consciousness leads to universal consciousness.

Our early meetings were pretty barbaric. We would savage one another frequently. Indeed, we even had a thing called "personal member complaints," in which one of us would rise to advise another of his or her faults. Now we have been rubbing elbows along side one another for 30 years (some of us), and we are well on the way to knowing how to love and appreciate one another.

In the early days, when I was fairly insecure, any person’s rising to leadership was a challenge to my ego. Now it is different, I experience each person as a flower unfolding, and am grateful for his or her strength and beauty.

The Siri Singh Sahib came to speak to us. He is back from India, after having a new kidney implant, and is still quite weak from the surgery. As he entered the room a thrill ran through my being and tears came to my eyes. One of my friends, a chiropractor, told me later of having visited him while he was in India, at a time when he was very weak. In fact, my friend said, the Siri Singh Sahib was mostly either asleep or unconscious when he saw him. As he bent over him to do some treatment, the Siri Singh Sahib opened his eyes, uttered two sentences that pierced my friend to his core, then closed his eyes and spoke no more. The Siri Singh Sahib has always been like that: the teachings and caring for us first, everything else, second.

I was inspired and moved by our time together and by the Siri Singh Sahib. Now that I am home, I am thinking about what to do to shift myself to a new level of being. What practice should I take up? What can I do throughout the day to stay awake?

There is a song I sing sometimes which came to me quite some time ago. It is, sort of, my song. A portion of it goes as follows:

In the morning
And the evening
And all throughout the day
May I ever remember
To remember Thy Name
May I ever remember
To remember Thee

In my thoughts
And my actions
And my words
And my deeds
May I serve
Thee O Lord
In all that I do

In the morning
And the evening
And all throughout the day
May I serve
Thee O Lord
In all that I do