One of the highlights the past few weeks, for each of us, was getting time to read a good book.
Mine was Sometimes Brilliant, by Larry Brilliant, one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and winner of the TEDPrize. He really is brilliant. So are you, by the way, but more on that later.
The book is a spiritual memoir and a testament to faith, love, service and what it means to engage in the world and make it a better place for others. Brilliant’s path follows a long and winding trail. Along the way, he engages with some of the most prominent leaders, spiritual masters, heroes and cultural icons, including Martin Luther King, Ram Dass, Neem Karoli Baba, Steve Jobs, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Grateful Dead, Wavy Gravy, Ken Kesey, the Dalai Lama, Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter (the latter who asked for permission to make copies of this book for a class he was teaching).
The trail emerges from the civil rights movement and the era of sex, drugs and rock and roll in the 60s. It soon leads to spirituality and philanthropy. He cuts his internship short and, along with his wife, Elaine (who postpones law school), joins a caravan of two buses of hippies led by the peace activist, Wavy Gravy. (The year before, Wavy Gravy had been Master of Ceremonies and peace keeper at the Woodstock music festival.) The caravan journeys from London, through Europe,Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, over the Khyber Pass and into Pakistan and India. They stop at numerous spiritual shrines along the way, and they bring food and medical supplies for the poor and starving in India and Pakistan.
Brilliant and his wife eventually move into the Indian ashram of Neem Karoli Baba, who becomes their guru (Elaine is given the Sanskrit name Girija). It was Neem Karoli Baba who sent Larry to Delhi to join WHO and help end the smallpox epidemic. Neem Karoli Baba predicted that smallpox would be quickly eradicated. It took less than three years, thanks to Larry’s (sometimes) brilliance and his all-the-time perseverance, and thanks to the hundreds of other doctors, epidemologists and volunteers who join him fighting the disease.
Brilliant gives an illuminating account of one of the greatest medical triumphs of our time: eradicating a 10,000-year-old disease that in the 20th century alone killed more people than all the era’s wars combined. The amazing feats didn’t stop there, as later on he also helps start the Seva Foundation, curing blindness for millions of people (Seva is a Sanskrit word meaning selfless service).
What an incredible and story! I laughed out loud often and cried, too. My heart was touched deeply. I am still intoxicated with the experience. I have since purchased three more copies of the book to share with friends.
For Larry Brilliant, the ride was not always a delight. He saw a lot of suffering. He toiled with doubt, despair and depression. He had bouts of anger at a God who he thought was not managing the world very well, given all the suffering he saw. But his wife’s companionship, the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita and his Guru’s wisdom and love kept him afloat. One guiding post for Larry was these words from Neem Karoli Baba: “It is better to see God in everyone than to try to figure it all out.”
In the final pages of his book, he writes: “If after all the death and suffering I have seen, I can still find reason to be optimistic, if I can still love God and find love for everyone in my heart, then I would like this story to lift you and catapult you into another world, where the horror of a common enemy [smallpox] once brought together competing nations to prove that global efforts can accomplish great things… If a kid from Detroit, the first in his family to go to college, can pass through the stages of anger, self-righteousness, hedonism, and risky adventures through the minefield of drugs, prophets, and ideologies to find a harmony in an attempt to serve and honor God, so can you.”
And so, yes, you can be brilliant, too! And if you are practicing yoga enough, you will know your brilliance and let it shine for everyone.
Larry’s ability to integrate spirituality, science and service to improve the world for others dovetails with the teachings of Swami Nirmalananda. The next step for me is to read her new book, Yoga: Embodied Spirituality – Navigating the Inner Quest for Wholeness. On the cover of this book, there’s a quote from Swami that includes this message: “Knowing your own Self, you abide in the effulgent bliss of Consciousness and share it wherever you go. This is yoga.”
As for Nancy’s reading pleasure the past few weeks, it’s been Dinner with Buddha, by local author Roland Merullo. She first got into Merullo’s books last summer, when I was reading his Driving Jesus to Little Rock. When I had put that book down for a rest, she picked it up out of curiosity and started reading a few pages. After that, I had a hard time getting the book back from her.
Since then she’s already read Breakfast with Buddha and Lunch with Buddha. All these books include road trips, with the author’s main character (a skeptic, which I assume is one side of himself), riding with a spiritual character (and that, I know, is the author’s other side). Each ride is delightful and thought-provoking with beautiful landscapes and sprinkled with plenty of rest stops for laughs, spiritual wisdom, tenderness and great fun.
Nancy’s looking forward to the author’s newest book. Yes, believe it or not, Dessert with Buddha.
Merullo has the ability to make not only the personal universal,
but the everyday sacred.- Baltimore Sun