During our meditation we repeat the words of the passage silently and slowly in the mind, but there are also times outside meditation when listening to the passages is a wonderful addition to a daily spiritual schedule.
The BMCM offers free access to recordings of Easwaran and his wife Christine reading the passages from his anthologies God Makes the Rivers to Flow and Timeless Wisdom, and you can find these collections in two different locations. Read on to learn about where you can listen to these recordings, and to hear from passage meditators about how they incorporate listening to passages into their spiritual practice.
Where to Find the Passages
All the passage recordings can now be found on the BMCM website at www.bmcm.org/passages and on the Easwaran Digital Library (EDL). The collections of passages are presented slightly differently in each location, and each presentation has its own benefits.
On the BMCM Website
The BMCM website offers all the passage recordings alongside the text of the passage, making it a wonderful resource for anyone working on memorizing or studying a passage. The website is accessible to anyone, and it’s easy to share a link to a passage with others because no account is needed to visit the passages. On the passage landing page, www.bmcm.org/passages, users can filter passages by spiritual tradition or theme.
One of the main benefits to the passages on the BMCM website is that users can download the audio files for their own use offline.
These audio files are hosted on the web-platform SoundCloud, and the BMCM Programs Team has curated several playlists:
- Passage Recordings: This five-hour playlist contains all the passages from God Makes the Rivers to Flow and Timeless Wisdom.
- Full Setu Playlist: This 90-minute playlist contains passages that address the challenges of getting older or facing a life-threatening illness. It was curated for passage meditators participating in the Setu program, but this playlist is also enjoyed by meditators of any age in any life circumstance.
- Setu Playlist A: This is a 30-minute playlist of passages specifically requested by Setu friends.
On the EDL
In addition to video and audio talks, the EDL now also has a library of the passage recordings. The EDL is a free resource that can be accessed by anyone who creates an account at www.bmcm.org/edl. The passage recordings can be found if you click on the Audio Playlists tab next to the Video Playlists tab at the top of your page.
One benefit of listening to passages on the EDL is that the passages are organized in the same sequence as in God Makes the Rivers to Flow, so users can browse under the same headings as in the anthology itself. The additional passages that were added to the Timeless Wisdom anthology can all be found at the bottom of the list of Rivers passages.
You’ll also find the same curations of passages for building positive qualities or changing negative patterns of thinking that you can see in the back of God Makes the Rivers to Flow.
When listening in the EDL, users have the option to listen to a single passage on repeat, if they are working on memorizing a passage, for instance, or to play through a continuous collection of passages. The EDL will also remember where you were in a passage or playlist, and you can pick up in the same spot when you return. Inside the audio playlists there is also a search function to help you find a specific passage.
