Who are these people and what do they believe in?
Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar was born in 1921 in Bihar, India. He was surrounded by the rich and poor, the colourful and chaotic and saw enough yoga, meditation and philosophical practices to get him thinking seriously about setting up some sort of yoga, meditation and philosophical business of his very own.
But it was not until 1955 while working on the railways in Jamalpur that he realised that the tracks out of town could him lead, philosophically, to a whole new way of life. All he had to do was think up a name.
Sarkar knew that one of the first rules to adopt when trying something new is to get hold of a catchy name that people have heard of and that would command a bit of respect. The word for a blissful state of experience and meditation (in Sanskrit of course) is Ananda (and the fact that two and a half thousand years ago the name of Buddha's right hand man was Ananda, was just a coincidence) but now Sarkar had found his path: Marga to Ananda: bliss.
But things were never going to be easy for those who followed a different path from the somewhat chaotic Indian political system. Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian National Congress has always demanded full independence from British rule and after a couple of imperfect Government Of India Acts (1919 and 1935) took the non-cooperation idea to its ultimate conclusion and achieved independence in 1947.
Sarkar first started down his path of bliss in 1955 and soon he had sufficient followers to warrant a little name changing of his own. His path attracted others who saw him as someone with ‘spiritual realisation’. Some said he was ‘the embodiment of bliss’ and others went so far as to suggest that ‘upon seeing him one falls into bliss’. Agreeing the translation as Shrii Shrii Anandamurti, P B Sarkar now had a good name to go with all his good causes. And Shrii Shrii Anandamurti was going to have a lot of good causes.
In 1958 Anandamurti formed the Progressive Utilisation Theory and both in 1967 and again in 1969 his PROUT party ran in the Indian Parliamentary elections on a ticket of a unified world language, a unified world government with its very own world unified army. Quite who the world-army would fight was not made clear, and it was no great surprise to the majority of voters that PROUT party did not do very well at all.
Turning his mind back to the more comfortable path of bliss, the 1960’s saw the formation of the Anada Marga’s Education and Welfare Section, the AM Board of Education, the AM Degree College and the AM Institute of Technology. Monks and nuns were initiated and went off on their own paths of social services to open children’s homes, orphanages and schools. And in 1970 the formation of AMURT the Ananda Marga Universal Relief Team allowed the AM message to be combined with disaster relief wherever disaster struck and relief was needed.
Unfortunately in 1971, and due to what would eventually be proved a misunderstanding, Shrii Shrii Anandamurti found himself in prison on a charge of plotting to murder and had to wait four years while Indira Gandhi took her country through its period of National Emergency. Even more unfortunately Shrii's hopes for freedom were not greatly advanced when a few (eight) of his most devoted followers voluntarily killed themselves by setting themselves on fire. (Conspiracy theories concerning Communist factions committing the crime were never proven).
At his trial (still in prison) he was found guilty of conspiracy to murder and spent a further three years in uncomfortable detention before charges were dropped, ‘true’ was changed to ‘false’ and the Guilty verdict was thrown out.
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But prison had given Shrii ample time to work on the old classical yoga techniques of yama and niyama to take a good look at their ten principles of ethics that fitted in with his slowly forming whole-world-view philosophy.
Meditating on all this he came to the conclusion that true meditation is not possible without true belief in some fundamental moral values. And prison had certainly given him time to reflect on some of the more fundamental of the currently available moral values.
There was, he realised, a spiritual path. The way was getting clearer and was made clearer still by the realisation that helping others was one of the most important of the ten principles.
And this, said Shrii Shrii Anandamurti, was not just the way to the Path of Bliss; this was the way to the Path of Perfection.
Released in 1978 and now back on the right path Sarkar thought again about connections. He began to realise that everything, that was everything, was connected. The entire earth, all the animals, all the birds and all the fishes were somehow connected. All the plants, the rocks, the water, the air and of course all the humans were all connected together in some way. And if that was not enough, Sarkar started to think about languages. Starting with Bengali and Sanskrit he found words, phrases, thoughts and ideas that all seemed to link up. He called it Neo-Humanism.
Still searching he turned to the sciences of physics, chemistry and biology and found more links. By now Sarkar knew he was on to something big but it was not until 1986 when he finally put a name to the phenomena: Microvita.
Microvita, said Shrii Shrii Anandamurti, are the fundamental building blocks of all life, they are emanations of pure consciousness and are the links that make everything join everything else. And that definitely is everything.
Sadly the tantric guru Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar aka Shrii Shrii Anandamurti broke his last link with the corporal phenomena of life on the 21st of October 1990 but he left the world with 5018 Songs for The New Dawn and as the author of well over 100 books, enough of his thoughts about strange microvita to keep his followers and anyone else that is interested busy for years to come.
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