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Mike Shreve was a teacher of yoga at four universities. (The portrait above was drawn by one of his students in 1970.) Then a spiritual rebirth brought him into a real relationship with God and drastically changed his heart, his life and his belief system. Read his story here.
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Michael Graham's StoryA Personal Student of Swami Muktananda (Siddha Yoga)
Michael, who had embarked on an intense and
far-reaching spiritual journey from the time of his graduation from elite
Geelong Grammar School in the mid 1960’s, came to find himself at the heart of
the great migration to the West of Indian religious teaching and practices. Michael was one of the first Western
disciples of Swami Muktananda Paramahansa, who was to become a leading figure in
America and elsewhere with his teachings of Siddha (perfect being) Yoga. Michael
helped manage his ashram (spiritual center) in India. He also became deeply
involved in Muktananda’s American activities and energetically promoted his
teachings in Australia and elsewhere. Michael’s story is a remarkable one. He
was born and raised in Melbourne. His father was a doctor and psychoanalyst. He
spent three years studying and practicing yoga while still in his late teens,
then took his motorcycle by ship to Colombo, and rode around Ceylon (now Sri
Lanka) and India. After a trip to England he returned to India in early 1969 and
spent six months in Muktananda’s ashram. It was during this period of intense
spiritual discipline that he experienced a dramatic spiritual “awakening.”
“The theory is that everyone has a divine spark, unkindled, within them,”
says Michael. “It can be awakened by the touch of a guru such as Muktananda or
by entering into a personal relationship with him.” In an interview with Rowan Forster on
Melbourne’s Triple 7 radio in April 1999 he recounted the experience: “I was
just sitting there, meditating, and all of a sudden my body started to sway. And
then each day it began to sway more and more vigorously, even violently. And
I’d stop it saying, ‘What’s this? What an extraordinary phenomenon.
Hitherto, I’d always moved my body, but never before had it happened
spontaneously. And then all of a sudden I’d be overcome with fits of laughter
that were not attendant to anything funny; they just came forth. Then there’d
be sounds, utterances of birds and animals that came from my mouth…and visions
– journeys of the body. Great floods of blue light throughout my system,
followed by torrents of peace.” It was a tantalizing experience for the
young Australian. “I was totally seduced by this awakening. It was so engaging
and seductive. It was real. And it had a huge promise attached to it. It
promised an encounter with the Divine.” LACKING FULFILLMENT
Michael returned to India several times,
and studied and practiced under other gurus also, some of whom were to become
famous (and in some cases, infamous) in the West, such as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
In 1977 he rejoined Muktananda in America and spent some years working and
touring with him and his successors. Muktananda was attracting huge numbers of
followers, including famous names like John Denver – whom Michael remembers
coming daily to the Santa Monica ashram and often singing for all the students
– along with Diana Ross, actor Raul Julia and Olivia Hussey and former
California Governor Jerry Brown. In the words of former Los Angeles Times
journalist Russell Chandler, in his book Understanding the New Age, “Perhaps
more than any other guru except Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of Transcendental
Meditation fame, Muktananda made yoga meditation accessible and fun to
Westerners – particularly the Hollywood set.” But despite the exhilarating phenomena of
Indian religious practice, Michael found that it was not bringing forth the life
changes he desired. “It was always the same old me. There was no change of
heart and mind. I was a young man, a modern man, with a philosophical bent. I
had no affinity for the actual teaching. It was all the amazing experiences that
kept me there. So I looked for something to supplement it, in the New Age
Movement. I became involved in various New Age mind dynamic techniques.” For a time he was active in corporate
consulting, designing and delivering personal and organizational development
programs. He then discovered the US-developed Avatar Program, an inventive way
of creating preferred reality through the management of one’s beliefs. He
became one of the most successful teachers of this program, delivering it in
Australia, the U.S., New Zealand and Switzerland. “Avatar teaches that your beliefs
determine your life experiences. The point was that you could re-engineer your
life by changing your beliefs. So you choose your desired outcome, then
re-engineer your beliefs to create that reality. I explored it all assiduously,
and drew as much from it as possible. But people’s deep-rooted beliefs are not
amenable to change through strategic means. I found ultimately that the
program’s impact was minimal.” From around 1993 he started developing his
own training courses. But increasingly, he felt frustration. His work was not
developing to expectations. More significantly, he felt his spiritual life
somehow in stagnation. He resolved to intensify his spiritual practices,
starting each day with two-and-a-half hours of spiritual disciplines. Then he
decided to embark on a series of 10-day meditations, in isolation, and it was
during one of these that he had an encounter with an unexpected visitor. AN UNEXPECTED VISIT
“At the time it happened I was in
isolation,” he recalls. “But I wasn’t meditating; I was in a completely
plain state of mind. All at once an image of Christ formed up in my chest
cavity. Along with the image came a recognition of who he was. What followed was
beyond conception. But using mere words—there was an openness to me from
Christ of cosmic proportions, and an invitation and welcome, as if to say,
‘Give me your life and breath and I will take care of you.’ It was a very
personal invitation.” Despite the marvel and intensity of the
encounter, Michael was entrenched in his existing spiritual ways and simply did
not know how to respond. He carried that memory of meeting Jesus with him for
twelve months, when he happened to be in Berkeley, California. And there, in
1997, he had what for him was another profound experience. “I was overcome by
the conviction that all the past spiritual investments of my life added up to a
big fat zero. It was a powerful feeling. I was reduced to nothing.” At the time he was driving 45 minutes each
day, and as he drove he listened to evangelical Christian radio, which was
building his understanding of the first principles of the Christian faith. “I
started to get very excited by the promises of Christianity,” he remembers. A
prominent young Indian swami was visiting California at the time, and he was
looking for people to be trained as gurus. Michael was not in the least
interested, but when three friends urged him to attend, he took that as a sign
that he should be there. He went, and was not impressed by what he heard. But
one thing he noted deeply. The instructor reminded him that to achieve anything
it was necessary to have faith. At that moment Michael knew that he had faith in
the person and promise of Jesus Christ. But there was for him one more step in
becoming a Christian. “I knew about the importance of decision. I’d created
a course on it. I knew that becoming a Christian would be the biggest decision
of my life. I wanted to make a marker of it – an event. It so happened that
Billy Graham was coming to San Francisco. So I went up in front of 22,000 people
and made that decision. And since that day, I’ve never been the same. I knew
absolutely what it was to be renewed.” He now tells those who converse with him,
“Fulfillment is found in Christ. In Him are contained all the treasures of
wisdom and knowledge. The point is that the salvation He offers doesn’t come
through signs and wonders, though they may be appended to it, but from a turning
to him in the acknowledgement of his pre-eminence and lordship, and as the
medium through which total release can be known…Jesus doesn’t simply show us
the way, or the truth. He is the way, the truth. He’s not another guru, or
preceptor, or avatar, or holy man, or prophet. He’s God stepped down in human
flesh to die, consuming within Himself the consequences of our decision to turn
away from God, thus breaking the momentum of our eternal entrapment. In this way
we are reconciled to God and enjoy free and open access to Him. The Christian
revelation is the end of the game.” Visit Michael Graham's website, www.youturnworks.com. (This personal story is taken with Michael Graham’s permission from a pamphlet by Martin Roth.) |
He was once the disciple of an Indian Swami
and a teacher of New Age techniques until an unexpected encounter turned this
life around. Many of the young Western spiritual seekers who flocked to Indian
religions during the idealistic 1960’s and 1970’s became familiar with a
mild-mannered Australian named Michael Graham.|
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TheTrueLight.Net ©2002 copyright
by Mike Shreve.
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