I was born in Zagreb Croatia. My grandfather a WW1 and WW2 war hero and then political prisoner of conscience, has been a great influence in my life.

I grew up in Ethiopia where I developed and experienced a clear awareness of nature as a dominant presence in which humanity is inexorably imbedded. I then came to Australia with my parents where I finished high school and studied architecture.

In the late 1960’s in the final years of my university studies, I joined the Vietnam Moratorium movement that campaigned for the ending the Vietnam War. By then I was also a film maker. I was asked to make a documentary of a national one week festival of arts – performances and exhibitions by Australia’s prominent artists, led by Guy Morrison, first editor of the Australian newspaper and nephew of the famed journalist “Morrison of Peking’. The film was featured in the 1971 Melbourne Film Festival, with a copy bought by the New York Museum of Contemporary Art. I completed my University studies that same year when I took on the job of film director with Fontana Films.

I was greatly troubled at the time by the growing violence between the nationally spreading anti-war protest movement and the authorities who often brutally sought to supress it.

Then I met some people who were passionately into Yoga. Here for the first time I saw a way that can change the world – not by protest and conflict. I took to practicing Hatha Yoga as a way to meditation and changing oneself – removing violence and disrespect of others from one’s own nature and then by example, lighting the will in others, to do the same. With gusto I took on the study of eastern and western philosophies and spiritual paths.  I discovered that for me above all, Buddhism made perfect sense.

…….

I often wondered what prompted one of my University professors Peter Kollar, who two years earlier, when I was 19 years old, to give me Aldous Huxley’s book “The Perennial Philosophy”.  Aldous Huxley, renown for “Brave New World” and the “Doors of Perception” argued in the Perennial Philosophy that no matter what culture, or place in human history, going back 50,000 years, all civilizations and cultures shared the same wisdom – about ‘MAN’ and about our relationships to ‘nature’ and the cosmos. It influenced me greatly.

 I understood that religions are first a manifestation of an inner search of one self and a greater Self, before they became as it for some, a habitual cultural form, a tradition or a means of exercising authority, control and power. They are varied in the interpretation of a single truth – inherent and accessible in the human form. Their expression is conditioned by language, culture, time and place in which they originate. Therefore, one should search for and seek the common root from which have sprung all the religions that shows the pathway – from theory to practice, experience and realization.

My friends introduced me to smoking marihuana then taking LSD. I learned to practice Hatha Yoga as a first step to calming the body, emotions and mind. I hoped that would lead me to seeing what lay behind my thoughts. In my circle of friends, marihuana and LSD were seen as genuine means to self-discovery – to be approached with reverence, commitment and respect… as a sacred ritual. About a year later I came to see that whilst these drugs did indeed open the ‘doors of perception’ – as Aldous Huxley himself discovered in the first half of the 20^th century, they did not change you –  the person that carried in their heart anger, fears and anxieties, that hurt others, that created wars and that was destroying the planet. Marihuana and LSD would not neutralise nor eradicate but perhaps only subdue, these inner tendencies, inherited from our ancestors, our parents, our past karmas, deep seated habits of the mind that sabotage our way to liberation.

In 1972 I left my friends. I moved to Sydney in a shared house where I kept strictly to myself whilst respecting house culture.  I let my ‘intuition’ guide me to what more I needed, to learn. Over a year practicing yoga silence and self-isolation, I immersed myself in a twenty four hour cycle of hatha yoga, meditation and reading,  daily walk, visit to grocer and second hand book shop whilst practicing, as best I knew how, being present…in the moment.

One late evening, sitting in the Vajrasana posture, in the middle of a passage of Pyotr D. Ouspensky’s[1]  “The Fourth Way”, I felt an exquisite mercurial energy come down from the top of my head flowing to every part of my body. I instantly knew I had become permanently wired, to some …Source.

I knew it would be so, connected… as long as I retained memory, an uninterrupted awareness, of that connection and Presence; as long as I did not lose myself, completely – in a thought, a feeling or sensation.

I began to understand the nature of sacrifice and the meaning of spiritual discipline – both yet to be tested in a life’s journey; to remain true to one Self. To remain tuned in, to the song of the universe…

“There was the Door to which I found no Key;                                                                                                                                          There was the Veil through which I might not see:                                                                                                                                  Some little talk awhile…of Me and Thee                                                                                                                                                      There was – and then, no more, Thee and Me.”

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Persia XIth Century

EXTRACT FROM Sasha Ralya’s oncoming Book “PLANETARY MAN”                                                         Sydney December 2020

Sasha Ralya History

Born in Zagreb, (capital) Croatia to Valentina[2] Smoljan[3] – journalist and (Dr) Mihaelo Ivanovic[4].

Age 10-14 1957-61 grew up in Ethiopia

1961 migrated to Australia (refugees)

Age 19                     1964-1966               cameraman – Ethiopian Television cameraman  coverage HRH Queen Elizabeth                                                                                   & HRH Prince Philip official visit to Ethiopia                                                                             Age 21                     1968-70                   “Arts Vietnam – A Protest against the War” Film Director/ Producer                                                                                                        Melbourne Film Festival 1971 experimental fil                                                                                Age 24                     1971-72                   Film Director, Fontana Films                                                                                                          Age 24- 31              1971-1978               Founder ‘Eye of the Sun’ Meditation Centre Mt White NSW                                                   Age 31-35               1978 -1979              Coordinator Findhorn Foundation Western Australia                                                            Age 31- 47              1978-1994               Founder – ‘Anduril’ Healing and Teaching Centre Western Australia                                                                       1978 – 2018            Founder – SIA Architects Pty Ltd Winner Design Excellence & Heritage Awards                                                                                     CLIMATE CHANGE FORUM INITIATIVES

                                 2010 January         Dubai Forum          https://www.indesignlive.com/sustainability/dubai-forum                                                                                                                           architecture-for-sustainable-societies                                                                                             2011                          Australian Federal Government ENDEAVOUR EXECUTIVE AWARD – Masdar City Study                                   2013                          6th International Urban Conference                                                                                                                                   2014                          7th International Urban Conference                                                                                                                                   2015                          Reshaping The Australian City Conference                                                                                                                       2016                          Australian Regional Conference ACT Canberra                                                                                                               2016                          9th International Urban Conference

                                 Co-founder FHSI Architects Dubai Perth Tiblisi

[1] Born Tumen Russia, grew up in Croatia Journalist/ Lawyer. Daughter to Vjekoslav Smoljan & Evgenija Gluskina – both Russian Revolution and WW2 awarded & decorated for bravery.

[2] Smoljan lineage to King Smoljan Jure  1720 of Medjugorje – site of the 1981 manifestation of the Virgin Mary to two village girls

[3] Born Serbia, Doctor of Medicine Assoc Prof. WW2 Prisoner of War – for harbouring Partisans

[1] a disciple of George Gurjieff