Question: Arjuna, I have been a student of your work for many years. I have taken every kind of course you have taught in that time, and I am a fully certified Living Essence Practitioner. What has always appealed to me about you was your emphasis on needing nothing from outside. So what's with the Deeksha? Have you joined a cult?

Arjuna: It is great to see you here, my dear old friend.  We go back a long way, don't we?
(pause)
The thing is, that what brings you here today, as a participant, and what brings me here today, as the teacher, is more or less the same.  For sure, I get the mic.  And yes, I get paid too. And yes, ok, I get a nicer chair.  But deeper than all that, I think the reason that I have been doing this for more than 35 years, and the reason you show up to these kinds of events over just as many years is the same.  We both intuit, we both feel the possibility of a noble and awakened life.  By now it may be more than intuit, we may know the perfume of an awakened life quite vividly by now.  Is it true?  Yes, it is, isn't it?  We are all here for that.  And we intuit and long for this return to sanity, this return to love not only for you, and not only for me, but for us.  The BIG US.  This time is not just a time of personal awakening, it is a time of global awakening.

I have been involved, more or less full time, in the pursuit of awakening, since I was 14.  Yes I know, you would expect a more impressive result after all that time, wouldn't you?  I have sent in a complaint form to the powers that be.  But still, there it is.  For better or worse, I have spent my whole adult life as a full time professional spiritual junkie.  And as you know, back in 1991 there was a big shift for me, when I met Papaji.  Bang!  The whole seeking thing was gone, and there was the sudden realization, unavoidable and overwhelming, that what I had been seeking for is what I actually am.  You know my story.  In fact you must be bored with it by now.  In 1992 he asked me to return to the West and to "share this secret with your friends."  As you know, I obeyed, and in fact that is all I have been doing ever since.

I have no complaints, it has been an amazing ride.  I have had the honor and the blessing to share Self-realization, at least in snap shots, with thousands of people in the last 17 years.  But you and I know the down side, don't we?  The post workshop hangover... the rubber band effect...  as my buddy Lama Surya Das likes to say, "these days everyone is getting enlightened, but no one is staying enlightened very long..."  How can it be, that people can have such deep and shattering realization of emptiness, of being love itself, of being freedom itself, and then find themselves so ruthlessly catapulted back into separation and suffering?

In 2005 I was invited to the Oneness University by its founder, Sri Bhagavan.  Chameli and I went along initially for a vacation, but we got much more than we expected.  The element that they focus on there, and which has proven to be so important for us, is neurology.  We were talking about this before, weren't we, before the break.  The Oneness Blessing affects the neurology in a cumulative way, to allow the nervous system to support awakened consciousness in a more stable way.  That's it!  What could be wrong with that?  There is no particular ideology, no particular diet or lifestyle change.  It is all about changing neurology.  You will get 4 blessings while you are here, from a bunch of different people, and you will find out for yourself.

My dear old friend, I am the same old Arjuna, I have not changed in any way.  You know me.  I am committed to serving planetary awakening in any way I can.  That's all.  That has been my life for 35 years.  This thing helps big time, in my experience, and so I am in.  I am in with anything that helps people wake up, and demands no allegiance to a dogma.  In a way, I can say I am not part of any cult.  And in another way, I am a committed cult member.  The cult I am a part of is the human race.  I am passionate about that, a zealot.  We are all in this together, no-one can get left behind.  These next years, everyone has to awake up from the Iago trance. We are waves in one ocean.

Join the cult of the human race, dear friend, and be loyal and fanatic in your membership.  Any other cult will be too small to contain the breadth of your passion.

I love your raw realness!