Emir Salihovic

Yogeshwar’s passing away made me ponder a lot about his contribution to my life, and made me to re-evaluate what I learned from him, and what his teachings actually meant for me and my life.

In a way I was a bit surprised, as I brought it to the light of my awareness, how important Yogeshwar actually was in my life. I knew he was important, but I didn’t suspect he was so much important!

I took my first Enlightenment Intensive when I was only 17. In fact, I learned about Intensives when I was sixteen, and immediately understood the technique and was irresistibly drawn to it, but I couldn’t manage to do the one before a year later. I had my first enlightenment experience then, and it virtually changed my life completely, or better to say, as I was so young, it determined my future life completely. I took another Intensive only a month after the first one, and had such a profound self-enlightenment experience that it is still with me, and actually I am still into project of aligning my life with what I experienced those 22 years ago.

Since then I took many Intensives, including a 14-day one, and became an EI Master myself, but the impact those first few Intensives and experiences had on me and my life is eternal.

It was because of the power and directness of the Enlightenment technique that I was also drawn to other aspects of Yogeshwar’s teaching, so I started doing Holistic yoga course, Energy Mastery techniques, learned about Abilitism, did Fundamentals of Life course, You and Thought and other Mantra Level materials… I got immersed so much into Yogeshwar’s work, although I had been studying other spiritual schools too, that in 1989 I also asked him for a spiritual name, as a symbol of a spiritual bond between us, and he named me Brahmananda. In my heart, that little symbolic gesture made me his devoted disciple. But I still studied and practiced other spiritual schools too.

There were also some of my close friends who knew Yogeshwar personally, even lived with him in South Australia, so I was always feeded with fresh news about the ommunity, satsangs with Yogeshwar, his lectures… I was literally at the source of news when Lila theory emerged…

And again, all that time I was also studying and practicing other spiritual schools and systems too…

In the end, now when Yogeshwar left his body, I am looking back and see that I always evaluated and judged those other schools and teachings in the light of what I learned from Yogeshwar, and in the light of my most valuable spiritual experiences in life, all of those experienced in the context of Yogeshwar’s techniques and teachings…

I always planned my actions, evaluated my life experiences, related to other people, lectured or wrote in the light of what I learned from Yogeshwar.

In fact, everything valuable that I learned about life I learned from Yogeshwar. Not from my parents or my teachers. I learned many valuable things from other teachers too, but the essential, most valuable things, things that make the core of how I live and experience the life, how I try to live my life, it all came from Yogeshwar. That incredible individual that I never had a chance to meet in person happened to be my prime spiritual teacher, my ‘root guru’ as Tibetan Buddhists would say.

My love is with him, and I think all of us who learned from him do share a responsibility to further his teachings and pass it on to others.

Jaya Bhagawan, Lord of Yoga!