Marisa J. - Milano, Italy

After I received Knowledge, I began to be in touch with something that has really enriched my life because it was meeting my real self. It was like finding a friend within me that was full of love, always “on my side,” and able to love me without ever judging me, but simply able to help me to appreciate life.

This is the feeling that I had the first time I was able to direct my attention to the place that Maharaji indicated within me. And this is the feeling that I continue to experience after twenty years of practicing Knowledge.

This experience has had repercussions in all aspects of my life because feeling fulfilled within gives me clarity and a lightness of being.

All this for free and without having to change my way of life.

— Marisa J.
Milano, Italy

January 8, 2004 in Italy | Permalink

Giulio Cossu - Rome, Italy

An M.D., Giulio Cossu has spent a career in medical research, beginning with bis postdoctoral work in anatomy and embryology at the University of Pennsylvania and culminating in a professorship at the University of Rome, with a sabbatical at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in the interim. His work on muscular dystrophy led bim to work on stem cells to develop treatments for such diseases as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. He is president of the Italian Society of Cell and Developmental Biologv in addition to being director of the Stem Cell Research Institute in Milan. Cossu experienced self-knowledge only recently and has come to value it as a source of personal strength.

The experience of self-knowledge is recent for me. Several friends who had received self-knowledge gave me videotapes of Maharaji’s lectures. I thought this man was saying something very simple and straight to the heart. Later, I watched satellite broadcasts and found myself listening to him nonjudgmentally and with simple curiosity. My rational mind kept saying, and at times still does: “Come on, this is a story for people living in another world. Listen if you want, but then you will have to go back to real life.” Now, I ask, which is the real life?

Despite the pressure of hundreds of commitments and deadlines, I am becoming aware of how much more there is to enjoy in life. As a scientist, I always prized the rational part of me, always planned my life to the minute. I had closed off the other part of me, perhaps out of fear. I left no time to be curious about the substance of my life, or to appreciate what an incredible gift it was.

People close to me started to notice something different. I should add that I am, on the surface, an easygoing, lighthearted person, which makes seeing personal changes more difficult. The experience of self-knowledge is difficult to describe. It is like a subtle but continuous presence of enormous benefit. I feel stronger and more confident simply because now I know something more about myself and am able to enjoy the little things in life that I had once crowded out.

November 2, 2003 in A - Featured Posts, Italy | Permalink