Sample from the Fall 2006 issue of Integral Yoga Magazine
A Being of Love
A Tribute by Dr. Wayne Dyer
… I was fortunate to meet Swami Satchidananda five or six times over the years and to spend some very beautiful, comfortable, joyful, peaceful loving moments with this man of great wisdom and great humor. He was very, very funny. I loved his stories. The thing I recall the most about him is that he had a story for everything. He could always illustrate his points with some kind of anecdote or story that always made great sense. I’ve read his books and I’ve have been a great admirer of his for as long as I can remember.
Even in his 80s he was limber enough to sit in the lotus position for hours. He had vitality. He was a great model for that. Yoga is something we should be teaching in schools for an hour a day. I took my 16-year-old daughter with me to Yoga a couple of times, and now she is hooked on it. She had a skin condition and it is all gone now since she began practicing Yoga. She is happier, sleeps better, and eats better, and this all came about with her just practicing Yoga. Practicing Yoga totally transformed her life. This is something Swamiji was teaching us. It’s a great contribution.
He helped me to raise my consciousness to a place of being more peaceful, more loving, more God-realized. He was a living example that this is something that we can do. He was a being of love, in all of his life’s work and all that he represented and all that he stood for. My life and all of our lives and the entire planet are affected and impacted by people who live at that level. He was a Christ Conscious person who walked among us. He was like having Jesus on the planet with us. I always felt better whenever I was around him or whenever I read any of his stories.
I respect all that he has done and I strive to practice and live it. His breaking down the boundaries of religion and creating an interfaith alliance among all peoples is what this world needs, I think, more than anything else right now. Most of the conflicts we see raging around the planet now are being fought in the name of God — a situation to which he was radically opposed. There is a sense of identification with someone so loving and sweet and good and knowing that — if we had people like this in positions of political persuasion and “leadership,” if we had people who were heads of state who live at these levels– we wouldn’t see the headlines that we see today. Ultimately, I believe we will see these kinds of people and will begin to take these positions…
