The Biography of Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov

[Milarepa]

Introduction

      All human beings seek happiness. All aspire to great things. In fact, we all have a desire for perfection, this ideal to which we often give different names. ‘Those who are seeking tenderness, wealth, beauty, or power,’ said Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov, ‘are they not really seeking God?’
   The teaching that this great Bulgarian-born spiritual Master, Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov, dispensed so generously between 1938 and 1985 has already helped thousands of human beings to transform their lives. His methods are simple and within the reach of all, but they are also extraordinarily powerful and effective. The major themes of this teaching have always existed, for their source is in the highest spheres of the invisible worlds, and they have been taught by all of mankind’s most enlightened spiritual guides. In our times it has been given to Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov to bring them before us in his own unique way. Every element in his teaching has its practical application.
   Central to Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov’s teaching is light, which he defines as the most perfect expression‎ of divine reality. He explains how we can use it to transform ourselves and become radiant as the sun. Another theme to which he refers constantly is the ‘yoga of nutrition’, a way to physical and psychic health through assimilation of the subtlest and most potent elements concealed in food. In addition, he astonishes and vivifies us with his unique perspectives on the meaning of love and sexuality; on the great laws of ‘cosmic morality’; on true purity which is toexplains how to purify oneself, how to bring good out of evil, and how to bring oneself into harmony with the four elements and learn to use their power creatively.
   He himself is an example. In the course of his eighty-six years he endured a great many of the trials known to humanity and used them consciously as tools of transformation. He was still very young when he began the work of self-perfection to which every human being is called. At the age of six, a booklet on the life of a great saint triggered a first spiritual experience which marked him profoundly. In adolescence, his inner life was borne along on a powerful current that led him to illumination and ecstasy at the age of fifteen. The twenty years he spent under the guidance of the Bulgarian Master Peter Deunov were years of intense spiritual work during which he strove to develop the qualities and virtues of a true son of God.
   Finally, his life in France, initially as the representative of Peter Deunov and later as a spiritual Master in his own right, bears witness to the immensity of the love that animated him and his exceptional wisdom and greatness of soul.
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Childhood

    Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov was born in the little village of Serbtzi in Macedonia at the dawn of the 20th century. In the early morning hours of January 31st, 1900, as the villagers slept under the watchful eye of the Grandmother Mountain, the first cockcrow announced the beginning of a new day. It was bitterly cold out of doors, but in the house in which a baby boy had just opened his eyes a great fire blazed in the hearth.
   Mikhaël was born early at eight months, and before the day was out, his mother asked the village priest to come and baptize him, for in those mountain villages at that time, the chances of survival were slim for a premature baby. But if the adults were afraid to lose him, the new baby seemed happy to find himself in this world and determined to hold on to life.(p 3)

   The things to which Mikhaël was attracted as a child were significant: he loved threads and every kind of string; the water gushing from a spring; fire, and tall trees. These four ‘childhood passions’, as he called them, played an important part in his development, pointing him very early in life toward the reality that each one represented. (...) As he would say later: ‘Everything in our lives is foreshadowed in the events of childhood, but we pay no attention.’
   As a small child he was capable of concentrating for hours at a time, observing some phenomenon of nature. He often went off alone to reflect on some words of his mother or grandmother that he had taken to heart or to puzzle over something that intrigued him. The conclusions he drew from these observations and reflections were to remain with him for life, and the experiences of these early years became a constant source of lessons both for himself and others. But as he was to say later, he was a high-spirited child, and the effects of this first ‘conversion’ at the age of six were soon eroded by the reality of life at school and by the difficulties caused by his fiery temperament: ‘I was a bit of a rascal,’ he confessed with a smile.
   Indeed, the little boy’s turbulence was often a problem for his neighbours and a source of concern to his mother. There is no doubt that the energy and exceptional inner strength with which he was endowed would prove indispensable for his future work, but his curiosity about everything often led him into trouble. (...)  Mikhael used to say that his motherhad been his first model. The education she gave him left an indelible mark. With unerring intuition she found the words and images that helped him to control his turbulent energies. (p 12)
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Adolescence

   By the time he was fourteen, Mikhaël had begun to be aware of the immense powers of his own subconscious, and with this came a glimpse of the breathtaking possibilities before him. (p 35)

   If the power of thought was one of Mikhaël’s most important discoveries during his adolescence, the yoga of nutrition was another. At the age of fourteen he had an experience which caused him to reflect on the hidden properties of food. One morning, his mother found that she had nothing to give him for breakfast before he left home for the day. She did, however, have some flour, and with this she made a small bread roll for him. For Dolia, bread was the one great staple that could always be relied on when one had no money to buy anything else. While kneading the dough and thinking of her eldest son, who so often had to make do with an inadequate diet, sheinfused it with all her energy, every ounce of her strength. When Mikhaël came home that evening, he asked: ‘Mother, what did you put into that bread?’ He was both intrigued and impressed, for having eaten it he had not felt hungry for the rest of the day. Dolia told him: ‘While I was making it, I prayed that it would sustain you and give you strength for the day.’
   But as usual, he needed to understand for himself the question of the energy contained in food. One day, when he had nothing to eat but a small piece of bread and a morsel of cheese, it occurred to him that he should chew each mouthful for a long time so as to draw from it all its hidden qualities. The result of the experiment was astonishing: a powerful sensation of well-being, joy, and peace flooded him, and he became aware of a host of subtle energies flowing from the food into his whole being.His intuition thus confirmed, he reflected that the food we eat possesses a secret life of its own, far beyond its physical properties, and that it is important to eat slowly.
   For him, nutrition was already a form of yoga, a beneficial exercise, a discipline for life. He ate only when he was hungry, partly because he felt much better when he did so, but above all because he wanted to ‘subordinate the ordinary way of life to the spiritual life.’ From this time on, in taking what he needed to sustain the life of mind and body, he always tried to choose elements that were pure: water from unpolluted springs, natural food, books that inspired and elevated the mind. (p 36-37)
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Illumination

   Mikhaël had reached a key period of his life. He had worked long and with single-mindedness to open his mind to wisdom, to purify his heart, and to strengthen his will. He had tirelessly implored God to come and dwell within him, and now he was ready to receive the Spirit. […]One summer morning, as usual, he went to the sea shore to watch the sunrise, and climbing a slight rise, sat down in an orchard. He had been meditating for a little while when he sensed the presence of heavenly beings around him. Suddenly bathed in a nimbus of brilliant light, he was plunged into a state of ecstasy. The sparse references he made to this illumination in later life evoked an image of dazzling beauty, but he clearly found it impossible to express the essential core of the experience. It could never be described or shared with others. We know only that he saw ‘a mysterious being’, one of those heavenly entities that manifest as pure light, the sight of which leaves such a profound impression that a mystic feels as though he had seen God. Later, he commented:
    I had never abandoned my desire to become like Buddha, like Jesus. This was still primordial in my   mind… and it was so beautiful that I was beside myself. To see such a being, with all those colours, all that light! He was almost invisible in the extraordinary luminosity that surrounded him. I found myself flooded with light. I was in a state of bliss, of ecstasy so immense, so powerful, that I no longer knew where I was. It was a delirious joy; it was heaven; it was the universe! Ever since then I have felt that if God were not all beauty I could not believe in him. It is beauty that remains in my mind as the one essential: neither power, nor knowledge, nor wealth, nor glory. Only beauty! (p 54)
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The Brotherhood of Peter Deunov:
 

For Mikhaël, it was the beginning of a new life; his quest for perfection was now channelled in a more definite direction. He felt extraordinarily rich to have found one of the most precious treasures a human being can have: a spiritual Master. He realized that this new teaching confirmed and brought into perspective all that he had discovered and practised in the last few years, and this gave him great joy, for by now he was aware of the dangers inherent in his excessive exercises. Convinced that he needed a guide in order to progress in the spiritual world, he looked to Peter Deunov for advice and instruction in the methods he should use. (p 74)


    In the thirties, Peter Deunov had begun to reveal certain things in order to prepare Mikhaël more directly for his future task. One of these revelations was in the language of allegory: ‘I have in my possession a precious stone. It is as big as an egg and valuable beyond words. I intend to give it to someone to take to another country, but as he will have to travel through a dense forest teeming with bandits and savage beasts, I will coat it with mud. Later, when it is washed, it will shine in all its splendour.’ It was a prediction that was to be fulfilled ten years later, but at the time Mikhaël was not able to decipher the hermetic language in which his future was described. He was to be the bearer of the teaching, symbolized by the precious stone, and he was to be soiled in the same way as the gem. Since Peter Deunov had prophesied in 1917 that the forces of darkness would oppose him, Mikhaël had known that he was destined to endure great ordeals, but the meaning of this allegory of the gem that had to be soiled in order to be protected became clear to him only when those ordeals were imminent. Even if Peter Deunov knew the nature of the tribulations that awaited Mikhaël, to have revealed them would only have made things more difficult for him. Thus this veiled allusion to the mission he would entrust to him a few years hence and to the need for concealment. (p 141)
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Mission in France:

    On July 18th, 1937, after bidding farewell to his family, Mikhaël boarded the train that was to take him to Paris. A small crowd of friends and many of his pupils and their parents were at the station to see him off. Many wept when he left, sensing perhaps that they would never see him again. Mikhaël could only look at them, his heart torn. For years, he thought often of those children he had loved and of the brothers and sisters who had come to wish him Godspeed.
He was thirty-seven and was giving up everything, family, friends, and the country in which he had been born, for the sake of this new mission. Symbolically, he was selling all he possessed in order to carry the precious stone to a distant land.(p 144)

   
Brother Mikhaël found constant inspiration in the everyday events of life. For him, they were a reflection of invisible realities, and he used them as examples to illustrate a point of his teaching. One day, some friends took him to Luna Park, in which one of the attractions was the Rotor, or ‘butter dish’. This was a large circular platform, and as it spun faster and faster, those standing near the outside edge lost their balance and were thrown to the ground, while those who stood close to the central axis remained unaffected. This carnival ride fascinated Brother Mikhaël, and he often referred to the ‘butter dish’ when speaking of the need to maintain a close bond with God, the centre of all things: ‘If we do not want to be defeated and thrown off balance by life’s difficulties, we must stay close to God, whatever comes.’(p 157)
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Spritual galvanoplasty:

    The brotherhood began to attract more members throughout France following a talk Brother Mikhaël gave in Lyon in June, 1938. The subject of that talk was ‘spiritual galvanoplasty’, an original concept to which he attached great importance. Using the example of the technique of electroplating, by which an object is coated with gold or other precious metal, he explained how a pregnant woman had the power to influence the child in her womb:
    If a woman knows the laws of gold-plating and decides to apply them in bringing her child into the world, then, when a seed is implanted in her womb (cathode), she will put a sheet of gold into her mind (anode), the gold of pure, lofty thoughts. The current is switched on and the blood flowing through her body conveys the precious metal to the seed. The child grows, clothed in gold and turns out to be robust, healthy and beautiful, both in physique and in character, and capable of overcoming all difficulties and diseases, all evil influences. […] Mothers have the potential ability to work miracles for the world: it is they who possess the key to the forces of creation. Women could transform the whole of humanity within fifty years, if only they applied the methods of spiritual galvanoplasty. (p 163)
    Mikhael had been told by Peter Deunov that he was especially destined to give spiritual assistance to women, and this was one of his principal concerns, but he did not restrict the notion of galvanoplasty to the realm of physical gestation alone. Transposing it on to the spiritual plane, he explained how all human beings can put golden thoughts in their minds and a divine image in their hearts, and be constantly connected to the great central powerhouse from which flows the current of life. He often affirmed that each one of us possessed great innate powers of self-perfection, and that meditation was one of the most effective means of achieving self-mastery and inner harmony. Within a year after the talk in Lyon, the name of Brother Mikhaël was becoming well known in Paris. His ideas were discussed wherever there was an interest in spirituality, and people were eager to meet him and hear him, for his words spoke to the highest aspirations of the human soul. Listening to him, many discovered a new life. (p 164)
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  Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov:

    While in India, Brother Mikhaël had received the new name that seems always to have been destined for him. He never revealed the exact circumstances of the event, but in private he sometimes alluded to three Masters whom he met during a two-week retreat in a Himalayan temple. One of these three, by virtue of the supernatural power invested in him, gave him the name of Omraam. (p 233)

   Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov was sixty years old. In reality he had been teaching, enlightening, and guiding his disciples with the wisdom of a true spiritual Master for many years, but (on his return from India) he seemed both the same and yet transformed. His whole being expressed the stability that had always characterized him, while at the same time radiating a new aura of authority. (p 241)

    After returning to Paris he spoke about his new name:
   The name Omraam combines the two processes of solve and coagula. ‘Om’ is the sound that disintegrates all that is negative. It corresponds to the solve of initiatic science, which returns things to their source by transforming them into light. The vibrations of ‘Raam’ have the power to condense and coagulate divine realities and make them tangible. This is coagula. (p 242)

    Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov’s dominating passion was to set fire to hearts and minds. His personal path was the path of light, and all his teaching was imbued with this element so essential to life. His aspiration, he sometimes said, was to be a Prometheus: to steal fire from heaven and give it to human beings.
    He loved to talk about the Spirit of the sun. In this respect his philosophy coincided with the age-old philosophies of the Vedas and Puranas, which teach that the true sun is not the star that is visible in the sky, but the supreme Intelligence that reigns at the summit of the firmament, above the realms of physical creation. He revealed that behind the physical sun existed a subtler, immaterial sun, a sun that is hidden to all but the most highly developed consciousness. Through love, it is possible for human souls to communicate on the level of the super-conscious with all creatures in the light of that sun. ‘In our planetary system,’ he added, ‘the sun is the representative of God, the supreme sun of the universe.’ (p 259)
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An ideal of brotherhood:

    His brotherhood had never been the preserve of an élite; it was a family of ordinary men and women in which each one was free to learn, to grow, to advance on the path of perfection, to work for the kingdom of God on earth. As he often said:
    The brotherhood is a trial run, an attempt at the social actualization of  a spiritual family whose members all support and help each other with  love. Each one contributes something beautiful from his or her own soul. A perfume emanates from a brotherhood, as from a flower as it opens, which nourishes the souls and spirits of all its members.

    The kingdom of God that he so ardently desired to see established on earth corresponded to a veritable Golden Age which he called ‘the new season of love.’ To him, this was not so much a physical realization as an inner state that reflected all created beauty; it was the reign of love, joy, and peace that could be materialized on earth thanks to a truly fraternal spirit. His one preoccupation was to prepare the way for this reality, and to gain the collaboration of his disciples in his work. And, as he explained, before the reign of wisdom, justice, and love could be established on earth, those who looked forward to it must establish a synarchy within themselves, a way of life founded on the harmonious alliance of heart, mind, and will. (p 282)
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Christmas 1986:

    On December 25th, 1986, fully conscious of his passage into the beyond, Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov left this earth. In accordance with his express wishes, the news was delayed for three days, for he had let it be understood that he had important work to do during this period, and that his body should be left in peace. On December 31st, a number of his disciples gathered at the Bonfin for a last farewell. The silence was extraordinary, a silence inwhich each one tried to understand what his departure meant and to accept his physical absence. The room in which he lay was suffused with such a sense of life that it was impossible not to think of his own words about the death of great spiritual Masters: when they leave their physical body, their body of glory continues to be present and radiant, continues to vivify all who come in contact with it. (p 291)