Society - April 2007 | The Global Intelligencer

The Oneness Movement

by Barbara Bottner and C. Montana

“Joy is our natural state,” says Rohanna Salom, doctor of Oriental Medicine in Valley Village, California. “But we seem to have forgotten our true nature.”

Of all the 21 st century organizations working to heal this condition, one of the newest and largest is undoubtedly the Oneness Movement, started in Chennai, India in 1991 by twin avatars Sri Bhagavan and Sri Amma. The declared intent of the Oneness Movement is to uplift humanity’s consciousness from a state of chronic separation and suffering into a state of enlightenment - the awareness of wholeness and oneness – mainly through an energy transmission process called the Oneness Blessing or Oneness Deeksha. Currently acknowledged as teachers and bringers of enlightenment and god-realization by more than 20 million adherents around the world, Sri Bhagavan and Sri Amma’s goal is to bring enlightenment to a minimum of 64,000 people worldwide by the year 2012.

Discovery of self – inner city kids reframe their identity

by Cathy Ellis

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – Life changed for 12 year-old Careino Gurley the day Jane Barrash, now director of The Continuum Center, walked into his classroom in 1991. Placed in Harrison Secondary in north Minneapolis, a school for seriously emotionally and behaviorally disordered kids at the bottom 3% of state scholastic performance, Gurley, like every other kid in the room, had slid down the academic rungs to the last place the system would manage him.

Primarily kids of color, all the students at Harrison had been kicked out of treatment centers, other schools or hospitals. They represented the full range of problems coming from the inner city: poverty, domestic dysfunction, illiteracy, drug addiction, alcoholism and crime.

To say Barrash was met with disbelief when she started talking about how science shows humans are connected at the subatomic levels, and how thoughts and emotions and attitudes are connected to results in life, is an understatement. “They called me ‘Crazy Lady’ at first,” says Barrash. “But after about three weeks they were intrigued.”