What is a spiritual Master?
‘A Master is someone who has gained control, or mastery, over all of his thoughts, feelings and actions….
To achieve complete control of all one’s thoughts, feelings and actions requires the use of special methods, a special discipline and a profound knowledge of the structure of the human being, of the forces at work within him and the correspondences between his whole being (his organs and his several bodies) and the different realms of nature. To be master of oneself also presupposes a knowledge of the entities of the invisible world and the structure of the entire universe. A Master is one who has resolved all the essential problems of life, who is free, who possesses an extremely strong will and, above all else, is full of love, kindness, gentleness and light. What tremendous work, what concentrated study and perseverance it takes to become a Master!
The power of genuine Masters lies in the perfect accord between their actions and their philosophy. They are the first to practice in their own lives what they preach to others; they are living examples. And to be a living example is to be a fountainhead, a spring to which plants, animals and human beings are drawn. This is why there are always disciples around a Master.’
Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov,The Second Birth, Complete Works, Vol. 1, p. 182-183.
‘If you want to learn to play the violin, you buy an instrument and a book of exercises and begin practicing. For the first few days, you work for an hour or two, but very quickly this first enthusiasm wanes and you abandon your instrument. A week later you take up your violin again, and then once again you give up… And so the time passes, alternating between activity and laziness, according to your whims. But when you have a teacher, you want to win his or her approval and respect, so you work steadily to prepare for your lessons. The teacher corrects your mistakes and encourages you, and under this guidance, one day you become a virtuoso. No great musician has reached the height of his art without a teacher.
It is the same in the spiritual domain. If you don’t have a Master, it is very difficult for you to persevere. You know it would be good for you to meditate and make efforts to improve yourself, but very quickly you give way to your old habits. A few months later you remember all your good intentions and make a few more efforts… until one day you are permanently overtaken by inertia. But with a Master you are continually stimulated, continually carried along by both by his words and his example. He also touches your feelings, and because you love and admire him, you are pushed to work on transforming yourself.’
Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov, What is a Spiritual Master?, Izvor Collection 207, p 25-26. Translation of the audio
Testimony of Svezda
For more than forty years, Svezda fully dedicated her life to the Master Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov in her 
official function as his secretary. Prepared from birth for her meeting with him, she had been given all necessary criteria with which to measure his greatness and recognize his teaching. She was a privileged witness of the work he accomplished daily.
In her book, The Life and Teaching in France of the Master Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov, written in 1970, Svezda offers this testimony:
‘On many occasions during this time I was surprised at Frere Mikhaël’s comportment. One sensed that he lived according to norms that were absolutely unusual… and I felt compelled to understand the deep spiritual reasons that dictated his actions. This is why I paid attention to his slightest gestures, in an attempt to penetrate his motives.… In both his movements and his words, one felt a gentle yet tenacious will that manifested the unmistakable presence of the spirit and a celestial harmony.
Everything was connected and consistent in the life Frere Mikhaël lived. I never found any contradiction between his life in the community, his words and his comportment at home. Living close to him for so many years allowed me to confirm this. He never advised others to do anything he had not put into practice in his own life. He never accepted the slightest personal service, even those services that are so easily and normally offered in a community setting. He alone took care of his bedroom, cleaned it and made his bed. He took charge of his own laundry as well, and did so with the greatest care.
What most struck one upon first meeting him was the intense light that radiated from him, a light imbued with gentleness and a pure, impersonal love that seemed to pour over everything and everyone in a kind of divine flux. In the way he looked at people one sensed a consummate generosity that belongs only to the saints and great Masters. In observing him, one had the impression that his sole task was to offer this divine gift of love unreservedly to all, whether young or old, beautiful or ugly, rich or poor.
On the material plane, he manifests as a will that never acts to the detriment of others, as a soul pure and full of sacred and disinterested love. Those who listen to him recognize an intellect that is exceptionally clear, penetrating and endowed with extraordinary powers of analysis and synthesis. What is more, he thinks divine thoughts, feels them and acts on them.’
‘The teaching of Master Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov is exceptionally vast and elevated, answering the question we so often pose for ourselves: how to live.
What most writers and thinkers have neglected until now is explained here: how to eat, breathe, sleep and wash ourselves; how to look at things, how to listen to music, meditate and develop our imagination and willpower; how to bring children into the world and how to educate them; how to love; how to use all our energies and increase them; how to reinforce and regenerate ourselves by capturing the rays of the sun in the morning; how to develop our sensitivity through our contact with nature; how to respect everything that is alive and enter into relationship with the higher realms of our being…
The Master has neglected nothing in his efforts to put the keys to our future in our own hands. Together with his profound philosophical explanations, always expressed with great simplicity, he proposes various exercises, methods and practices which, instead of burdening our daily life, penetrate our concrete existence and allow us to master it and render it more beautiful. All of these methods teach us to work with the forces of nature in order to improve ourselves, to transcend the cares and uncertainties of life, to free ourselves without harming any creature, and finally to become useful to all humankind…’
Agnes Lejbowicz
Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov, “Master of the Great Universal White Brotherhood”
Editions Prosveta, 1982
‘Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov was a simple and direct man. Sometimes simplicity and directness are merely the products of a lack of sophistication. In Aïvanhov’s case, they are the fruit of a wonderful mental lucidity and great personal integrity. He presented even the most complex ideas in a clear and lively manner, and with an unpretentiousness that is deceptive.
Our age loves complicated matter. We pride ourselves in being sophisticated, and we generally assume that profound thoughts call for complex expressions. We always wonder whether an opaque thinker might not be incredibly deep.
Aïvanhov cuts through all this pretense and confusion. His countless talks – he has not written any books – are uniformly simple, lucid, and deep. Many who have listened to Aïvanhov during his nearly fifty years of teaching found him to be too simple and moved on to other, more complicated- sounding teachings and philosophies. We discover the depth of his ideas only when we approach his teaching without intellectual snobbery and préconceptions.’
As the American physician and writer Larry Dossey, M.D. remarked:
‘A mark of a great spiritual teacher is to convey wisdom of such luminous clarity that it seems genuinely simple – as if we might have known it all along, as if it is innate in everyone. Such a teacher is Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov, whose words have the ring of familiarity and truth. In an age that confuses profundity with impenetrable esotericism, Aïvanhov is a refreshing discovery.
There is a traditional story about a somewhat presumptuous aspirant who came to a renowned spiritual teacher for instruction. When the teacher asked him to sweep the floor, the young man hesitated. When the teacher reassured him that this was in fact his teaching, the newcomer sneered and left. He had missed the whole point of the instruction and hence never caught even a glimpse of the teaching that would most certainly have transformed him.
In some respects, reading Aïvanhov’s published talks is like sweeping. Many of his ideas sound so familiar that we easily come to the hasty conclusion that we have already moved beyond them. But there is a vast difference between knowing something and living it. Aïvanhov’s talks and his exemplary life constantly remind us of this crucial distinction.
As we delve into Aïvanhov’s recorded talks, we are humbled by his tremendous depth of understanding. When we follow his thoughts attentively and gradually discover their profundity and beauty, we are touched and transformed by them.’
Georg Feuerstein “The Mystery of Light” Editions Prosveta, 2012
‘Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov’s dominating passion was to set fire to hearts and minds. His aspiration, he sometimes said, was to be a Prometheus: to steal fire from heaven and give it to human beings. His personal path was the path of light, and all of his teaching was centered on this element so essential to life. Light, he said, was the most perfect image human beings can have of God, and he explained how to use it in order to transform oneself and become as radiant as the sun.
One of the most important aspects of Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov’s mission on earth was to lay the foundations of a truly universal human family. His constant themes were brotherly understanding, peace and sharing. He was always trying to make people understand the essential: that peace can be achieved on earth only when genuine brotherhood reigns among human beings. Peace has to reign in our hearts before it can reign in our families, in our individual countries and in the world as a whole.
The methods he taught were realistic, practical and effective. He explained how to purify oneself in order to receive energies from a higher plane, how to bring good out of evil, and how to bring oneself into harmony with the four elements and to use their power creatively.
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 to have a heart as transparent as a crystal; on the yoga of the sun and the yoga of nutrition; and on the way in which mothers can work to perfect the child in their womb. And all this with a view to preparing the advent of a true Golden Age for humankind.’
Louise-Marie Frenette “The Life of a Master in the West” Prosveta US Dist, 2009.
Larry Dossey, M.D.
Excerpt from the foreword to Georg Feuerstein’s book, The Mystery of Light: The Life and Teaching of Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov, Passage Press. 1994.
‘There are rare moments in our life when the discovery of a particular book, teaching, or peace of wisdom simply stuns us and leaves us breathlessly filled with awe, gratitude, and joy. We recognize immediately that we have come upon a great treasure. As we stand in its presence and yield to its brilliance, we can sense immediately that it has begun to change us. That has been my response to encountering the work of the remarkable Bulgarian spiritual teacher Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov.
The pages of history are littered with wise spiritual teachers. Regardless of the truths they have spoken, many of them have not made a great difference in people’s lives or the world in general. What accounts for the transforming power of some of them? Whether or not a great spiritual teaching actually engages us depends on our openness to it of course, but on other factors as well. It is not enough for the teaching to be true. In addition, it must be coherent, not only with former wisdom but with the best current knowledge as well. It must convey relevance, immediacy, and urgency. Above all, the teaching must somehow be right for the times, and it must feel right. At some point, if these conditions are met, magic may happen: we, and the world around us, can be transformed.
Not only is Aïvanhov’s teaching consistent with the greatest wisdom traditions of humankind, it is at the leading edge of our evolving knowledge about the world. This means that those who prefer their spiritual teachings to be dusty and crusty, archaic and arcane, will need to look elsewhere. Aïvanhov does not advocate taking refuge in a sentimental past. Using reason to the fullest, and supplementing it with his remarkable visionary powers, he enunciates a breathtaking picture of human transformation that is modern and up-to-date.
One of the most striking qualities of Aïvanhov’s teaching is the simplicity and clarity that shine through at every moment. His unadorned, uncluttered words are a refreshing contrast to the hopelessly obscure obfuscations that pass today for ‘spiritual’ teachings. What a joy to rediscover that authentic wisdom need not be opaque and impenetrable!
Although Aïvanhov’s teaching is consistent with the best of the ancient wisdom that has gone before it, it is in many respects fresh and new. Aîvanhov was obviously aware of the penetrating insights of modern science. He honored this window onto the world and, by applying his considerable intellect and understanding, opened this window even further. Unlike many spiritual teachers, Aïvanhov never went around the modern picture of the universe; he marched straight through it and expanded it. This is one reason his teachings seems so relevant to our age.
There are probably more so-called spiritual teachers today than ever before. The West is flooded with them, and it has been difficult in many instances to sort out the sage from the scoundrel. Amid the current supermarket of offerings, the spiritual seeker’s task of finding a genuine teacher can be daunting. That is one reason why it is a great honor and privilege to recommend the teaching presented in this book. It is in a class with few others….
I am frequently asked in lectures and seminars, ‘Who today is a believable, genuine, spiritual teacher?’ Now I can answer without hesitation: ‘Encounter Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov and see what happens.’
Larry Dossey, MD, is author of Recovering the Soul; Space, Time and Medicine; Meaning and Medicine; and Reinventing Médicine.