My next hero, Neville the writer and meditator.

Neville Hodgkinson

The kitchen for 20,000 people

Here is a handsome hero, his name is Neville Hodgkinson and he is a meditator with special heroic qualities.  He is my friend and he is one of my heroes. He is a hero because he follows a system of meditation which means he gets up early and meditates probably at 4.00 am each day!  We grandparent household meditators manage twice a day most days but it isn't that early. Examples like Neville and Father Laurence and others who rise early and meditate daily do it not just for themselves but for the welfare of the world.  Neville's spiritual family are the Brahma Kumaris, a group formed in the 1930s in Hyderabad.  They formed round a man named Dada Lekhraj, a man who had a vision of the world entering dark and troubled times.  He brought together and inspired a group of young people, teaching them, passing on his received knowledge.  He sent them out into the world rather as Jesus sent his disciples out to hear a message of salvation, a message that the truth of each person was that they really were a pure soul and not a body and that truth could be realised through meditation and discipline.  At that time there were only a few 100 and many were young women.  Now there are many Brahma Kumaris centres round the world and  at their main centre in Abu Road at the foot of Mount Abu, they can feed 20,000 people 3 times a day!  I have seen it with my own eyes.  When the group arrived in England they were very few and met in different people's houses.  Neville, who had a successful career as a journalist with science as his particular subject felt a calling as he walked away from a talk at Westminster Abbey.  

He says: "The catalyst was a vision: a golden-red light that opened out like a flower from the centre of my forehead. It happened during a few minutes of silence, following a chant by devotees of an Indian swami. He and a leading Anglican churchman had been taking part in a press conference in London, speaking about the soul. I was working at the time as medical and science correspondent of a leading UK newspaper, and a doctor friend had invited me. The conversation seemed to trigger some deep memory inside me....(click here to read more). 

He knew from then that he really was a soul, not just a man and a journalist with a good job and a family.  He followed that calling and joined the emerging group of Brahma Kumaris, becoming vegetarian and taking on the disciplines of a surrendered life.  You are lucky if you meet him and you can! Come along to St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 23rd, that's just 10 days away.  His story, which seems so other worldly in some ways, is what has made him such a good example for meditation.  We need these heroic and spiritual qualities to shine out in a person to help us determine that the transcendent reality which they aim to make real for themselves and others really is worth the effort. 

The hall at Abu Road which fits 40,000 followers and meditators all grown from one man's vision