For entering into a level of illusion deeper than the one we are usually in, fast moving action can be effective, but mostly the more coherent foreign films, you know, those with a story. And layers of meaning. Movies where you sort of have to partake and give a little of yourself to get the full effect. Other times, just pure escape from myself and when the world takes on a quality so real that it is almost impossible to get from there to Here... and when I start scaring myself sometimes a good movie helps.

Soft, slow stuff of any kind mostly. Music that touches me "in here". Stories, layers, like Leonard Cohen and others sometimes, or just great lyrics, and emotional stuff, even if loud. Oh, and some gentle Chopin is really cool.

Any religious writing really, specially the East - Vedas, Upanishads, the Gita, and that entire field. Sivananda writes well, as does Sri Yukteswar and Yogananda. Then, any alternative yet sophisticated life-argumentative stuff. Zen, the Western philosophy and psychology branches - the older guys like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and even older like Confucius and King Wen and the Duke of Chow, Lau Tsu, then also Camus, Hegel, Kant, Hume, Husserl, Moore, Spinoza, Buber, Freud, Rogers, Maslow, Adler, and yes, Skinner too, then, some of the Classics, and oh yes, good contemporary poetry.

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In Yoga tradition, when it becomes clear to you that the quest for the knowledge of the Self, and the merging of the individual self with the Divine is truly, to you, more important than worldly life - that the space between the warp and woof of the fabric of life is more important than the cloth itself - then, as a sign of your commitment to this goal, provided that the path you are going to follow is a path of yoga, you obtain a yogic name. Your yogic name can be assigned by your Preceptor, or your Spiritual (Enlightened) Friend, or a Yoga Saint, or your Guru, or in some cases, you can "choose" your name via a Divine Intuitive sense.

Because of a number of deeply spiritual reasons, prompts and insights, I came to the name of Humananda, or it came to me. Humananda is Sanskrit and means "He who finds Bliss in (the sound of the) "Hum" (of the Universe)." For me it is one of the easiest ways to "tune in" to the Oneness. If you listen, right now, you yourself can hear the "hum" all around you. And if you listen more closely, you can hear it even inside of you. For me it then becomes Me, and then I am That That I am. Hence, Humananda.

My primary Yoga Teacher is the Kavi Yogiraj Mani Finger, founder of the Integrated Science of Hatha, Tantra and Ayurveda, (ISHTA) - a Sanskrit word meaning personalized, or individualized, Life president of the Yoga Teachers Fellowship of Africa and Patron of the International Yoga Teachers Association, and the founder of the Southern African Yoga Teachers Fellowship, and also father and Teacher to his son, Yogiraj Alan Finger

Nowadays I teach Yoga publicly and free of charge from a studio in Maine to many who are curious and have never heard of yoga in any serious way, and I teach privately to the few who adore it and want to live it, whether it be Tantra (from the root Sanskrit words tanoti, meaning expansion, and trayati, meaning liberation), or Yoga in general.

Tantra-based satsangs every 2nd Saturday.