Isaac Shapiro
I was born in November1950, in Johannesburg, South Africa. At 19, I experienced the first glimpse of Truth, unconditional love, and recognized that it was possible to live like This, and that all that was covering This was my thinking. I was studying medicine at the time and it felt to me that if I continued I would get lost in all the conditioning that was playing through this body mind. I had no idea of enlightenment or any context for my experience, just that I knew This is the Truth of everything. My feeling was to find others who had a similar interest, live together and explore our thinking patterns so we could be free of them. I had the idea to start a commune to explore all of this, which led to living on a Kibbutz in Israel for a year, on an organic farm that was a small community on an island of Denmark and finally moving to New Zealand to start a commune. Many things were becoming clear to me as life moved me through different experiences but there were still many ideas and beliefs that troubled me.
After living in various communities in New Zealand, I moved to Maui Hawaii to start a community there. I came across a biofeedback technology for examining the constructs of the mind and immersed myself in it. Together with a couple of friends we developed a set of questions through which a person could understand the functioning of the mind in about 15 hrs. Even though my understanding was complete, I knew there was something overlooked.
I met some people who were working with the energetic communication between people and this intrigued me. At the same time I met some Hawaiian kahunas and spent some time with them. I saw that attention is the key. Where our attention is, is what we experience. Working with people all around the world started to happen. I wanted to create a better world. A friend told me about Papaji and I went to see him in Oct 91
. He told me to bring my attention to Awareness Itself. This for me was the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle.I experimented with This until I returned to Papaji March of 92, planning to stay with Papaji and let this deepen. When I arrived, he told me "You have found the Diamond and I want you to be available for Satsang." Since then I have been traveling the world holding formal Satsang.
So for me, my initial experience was the wake up. After meeting Papaji and after intense investigation of the feeling of me or "I", there came the recognition that there had never been an individual and that all there is is awareness. Also revealing of the various thoughts and beliefs that appear to veil this awareness. This deepening or to describe it another way, as long as there are unexamined beliefs, our attention is involved in activities that produce sensations of misery. These usually become the fixation of our attention and we don't then have the inclination toward simply being. As these beliefs are seen through, there is more propensity for simply being which is living in the mystery of life or reality, whatever you like to call it. This love affair with Truth increases as there is love for It.
