Our Story
Over the last nineteen years, Satya Center has received millions of visitors. This is the fourth major upgrade of our website.
Curtis and Jane, Blue Ridge Parkway, Philip's Gap, North Carolina, July 2022
Satya Center launched in 2003 as a labor of love conceived by Jane Sherry and Curtis Lang. We had been planning to build a virtual community on the Web for ten years.
The idea occurred to us during our time living in Woodstock, New York.
In 1993, we had just moved to the Catskills from Manhattan. After decades of work as a multi-media artist in New York, Jane was discovering the power of the Macintosh to create digital artworks. After working as a contributing editor at The Village Voice and WORTH magazine for several years, Curtis was working remotely as a freelancer.
We missed the sense of community we experienced in Manhattan although for city people Woodstock is a magical, challenging place to live.
Immersed in the natural world, experiencing the kind of darkness at night that allows you to see the Milky Way, eating local food, heating our home with hardwood we stacked behind the house, exploring mountain meadows and picking blueberries in summer, navigating narrow, winding, treacherous icy roads in winter and hiking in the several thousand acre state forest behind the property we rented in all four sharply delineated seasons of the year gave us an appreciation for the ever changing transformations of the ecosystem, the life cycles of plants and animals around us.
Jane's Garden, Roxbury Road, Claverack, NY, 2008
We will never forget our first encounter with local wildlife in our yard not long after we moved in to the old farmhouse sheltered by towering hardwood trees showering golden pollen. We had been warned by local residents about the bears roaming our new neighborhood. The consensus opinion was to stand stock still, show no fear, and never ever run.
Relaxing on lawn chairs one evening, a deep throated roar startled us into instant reflexive action. Our minds did not engage. We did not follow “best practices”. We jumped up and raced back to the house as fast as possible.
Autumn Day with Gold Couch by Jane Sherry, Woodstock 1996
The next day we talked to our landlords, who also lived in the same huge rambling hundred year old farmhouse, about our little adventure.
Vastly amused, they explained we had heard the mating call of the rutting bull moose. Later we did meet bear cubs in the yard at the local bakery, on the other side of the mountain, where large adult browns would crash through the rear screen door and grab entire trays of freshly baked bread for lunch. By then we knew enough to be shocked by city folk who let their children play with the cubs, oblivious of the danger.
At the same time that we engaged with the wonders of nature in a way that was simply impossible in cities and suburbs, we explored the new possibilities emerging as Apple built better and better computers with advanced graphics capabilities every year, and even in Woodstock we enjoyed a true technological marvel – connection to the World Wide Web.
There was no graphical browser when we first moved to Woodstock – that arrived in 1994. Lynx, a customizable text based browser, had appeared in 1992, but most of the online world existed on America OnLine, Prodigy and CompuServe.
Jane and I spent the long cold Woodstock winters by the fireplace blowing up our computers repeatedly, trying out new software and hardware, which in those days was a very risky business.
Jane won an award from Fractal Painter, for a digital artwork called Mixed Madonna, and began to grow adept with her Mac. Curtis had been evaluating Silicon Valley companies as investment vehicles for WORTH magazine since the time when people still used the term cyberspace.
And during those long winters, we developed a plan to create a virtual community where artists, spiritual seekers, political activists, nature lovers, farmers and gardeners could gather together. A kind of America OnLine for a fin-de-siècle Woodstock Nation.
We wanted to share our new found connection with the ecosystem around us with others, and to provide a place where people all over the world could come to join us in an exploration of the seasonal cycles of the natural world. We also wanted to offer the world a peek at Jane's spiritualized artworks, and publish Curtis' writing, ranging from global news events to metaphysical explorations.
Fast forward nearly a decade to 2001.
Jane and Curtis were living in Pleasantville, a suburb 45 minutes north of the 79thStreet Yacht Basin in Manhattan. Jane established a large biodynamic garden in the sprawling back yard, and had great success growing vegetables, herbs and flowers.
Willow Street Collage, Pleasantville, NY, by Jane Sherry, 2000
Curtis had gotten a job as an Executive Editor at the online broker Ameritrade, working on the development of an online portal for investors called OnMoney.com, where people could manage all their financial accounts online, research all sorts of investments with bleeding edge software tools, read financial news and access investment analysis from the most respected sources in America.
But Curtis did not become a dot.com millionaire. The dot.com crash sent Ameritrade stock from over $100 a share to about $10. Instead of going public, after spending $100,000,000 in marketing the product and getting millions of visitors a day for over a year, in 2001 OnMoney.com was discontinued and all the software tools and content were ported over to the Ameritrade website.
At that point, around fifty years old, with the severance package money in hand, we decided to focus on our two long deferred dreams – developing a serious spiritual practice, and creating a website that would serve as a portal for spiritual seekers, food lovers, gardeners, and political activists.
Over the next couple of years as we refined the concept for our website, we pursued a more intense spiritual practice.
We were initiated as Reiki Masters, and volunteered in the Maitri Clinic in Yonkers, New York, offering Reiki sessions to people living with HIV/AIDS.
We were certified as Past Life Regression Therapists after a long year of giving and receiving several regressions a week. Our teacher, Cindy Blum, was startled because when regressed separately or together, we regularly remembered lives we had shared together, but each of us recalled different incidents from the shared lives, and none of the details conflicted in the twin storylines.
We were honored with psychedelic experiences during workshops with an American Shaman named Jade Wah’oo Grigori.
We experienced Buddhist empowerments and a special blessing from His Eminence Namkha Drimed Rabjam Rinpoche, the supreme head of the Ripa lineage of Nyingma Vajrayana Buddhism, who did a rare arrow divination on the future of our embryonic website, and assured us that it would manifest and constitute a blessing for everyone involved in the project and all those who would come to visit it and interact with us in the future.
Shri Anandi Ma, Nikora, India
A series of synchronicities and meaningful coincidences led us to our revered much loved spiritual teacher, Shri Anandi Ma, head of a well known lineage of Kundalini Maha Yoga.
We continue to practice Reiki and yogic practices daily and expect to do so for the rest of our lives.
We chose the name Satya Center for our website because satya is a Sanskrit word meaning the true nature of reality that lies behind the appearance of duality. That is Unity. Satya Center is a virtual center where people can gather who seek to rediscover their own inner truth, and to center their lives in that living truth.
"The true reality is divine, that is reality. What we think of as reality is an illusion, a lie,” says 20thCentury Bulgarian spiritual teacher Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov. “Thus we cannot know reality, until we idealize and divinize all creatures, and ourselves. The disciple seeks to know himself, because he wants to reach God himself, to be able to say, as Jesus said, 'My Father and I are one.' 'I am He.' "
Since then we have reached thousands of people worldwide who subscribe to our Cosmic Weather Forecast, written hundreds of articles about food, gardening, health and healing, and love in all its incarnations. Jane has written and published her poetry and created an online art gallery of her work in all media.
We have enjoyed our work with countless Reiki, past life and intuitive counseling clients.
We also have sold tens of thousands of Reiki attuned crystals, gems, pendants, bracelets and ear rings to be used in healing and meditation.
We have written hundreds of articles and blogposts, and two e-books, which we offer for FREE on our website.
Map of the Original and New Lemurian Mines, Serra do Cobral, Brazil
One is called Spirits of Stone: A Lightworker’s Guide to Crystals and Gems for Meditation and Healing. There you can read about the secret teachings of indigenous shamanic healers, Vedic sages, Egyptian pharaohs, Buddhist teachers, Jewish mystics and High Priests, Christian Qabbalists and alchemists who used crystals and gemstones as part of their spiritual practices.
You’ll see how modern New Age practitioners have utilized crystals, sacred minerals and gemstones in Ascension practices, meditation, and healing, take a tour of the famed Brazilian Lemurian mines, and learn about the origins of the Lemurian Seed crystals.
Healing the Wounded Heart of the World, by Jane Sherry
Back to the Garden: Cultivating Love in Our Lives is Curtis and Jane's 21stCentury guide to the mysteries of soulmates – and how to measure compatibility between two people according to the development of their chakras, their karma, and their attainment of Higher Mind. It's a record of a lifetime's research into the mysteries of loving relationships.
We experienced a series of powerful consciousness expanding flashes of shared past lives when we met in1980, after a series of meaningful coincidences.
After a few months of adventures, we broke up, then reconnected four years later after marrying other people and learning many lessons about the many flavors of love that exist in the world.
Then, twenty years later, as past life regression therapists, we uncovered new layers of shared past life experiences, and this deepened our understanding of the soulmate connection.
Will My Real Soulmate Please Stand Up?, Digital Painting by Jane Sherry
Speaking from our experiences, if you want to find your soul mate, the most important first step is to cultivate a spiritual form of Self-Love. So we offer simple five minute meditations designed to help you take the first steps in that direction.
We map out the pitfalls and minefields encountered on the path of romantic love.
You’ll discover some excellent ways to foster loving partnerships that transcend transitory physical attraction and infatuations.
Finally we reveal the secrets of the New Age of the Divine Lovers, now dawning, which will extend for the next 2,000 years, and reveal how you can align your loving relationships with the highest expression of this transformative, alchemical form of loving relationship.
At the request of the heirs of America’s most famous crystal healer of the 20thCentury, Marcel Vogel, creator of the legendary Phi Crystal Vogel healing wands, we have created the Marcel Vogel Archives. Our Editor, Curtis Lang, has prepared an edited version of the Marcel Vogel book manuscript that was prepared for publication in the late Nineteen Eighties, not long before Vogel’s death, but never before published.
Oil Painting of Marcel Vogel from his Estate, collection of Satya Center
We provide this FREE online version of Marcel Vogel’s book to the public as a love offering.
The Satya Center Crystal Store offers a highly curated array of Vogel wands, sacred geometry crystal and gemstone pendants, and many types of crystals and gemstones.
Over the years, Jane and I have used hundreds of these types of crystals and gemstones in our own meditation and healing practices, and we have written up lengthy descriptions of the metaphsycial and mineralogical properties of each and every item, all available free of charge on our website.
You won’t need to buy a book or pay for a workshop to select the right crystal, gem or pendant for your purposes at Satya Center.
But if you have questions or comments about any of these treasures, or how to use them in healing or meditation practices, please contact us. We are always happy to help!
Building and maintaining Satya Center is not just a business proposition. It has always been part of our spiritual practice. Our teacher, Shri Anandi Ma, has always called Jane by the name Satya, and that's where the name originated.
There's a story behind that name, too, a story about a quest, an adventure, and a consciousness expanding self-recognition that has changed our lives, and the lives of many others. The story is about the journey to find our own inner truth, our Satya Center.
Finding Our Satya Center
In a state of bliss, comparable to that experienced by lovers and mystics, we discover our own inner truth.
The word satya in Sanskrit means truth and honesty. The word satya also implies a unity underlying the apparent conflict and duality of the material world.
The Unity between the Self and Source of creation. The Unity between Form, The Logos, or Shiva, and Energy, The Holy Spirit, Shakti, or Parvati, Shiva's wife.
Electromagnetic fields provide the boundaries within which the waves that are also particles known as electrons, protons, and neutrons manifest in an ordered structure, producing what we call matter.
Space is not empty, nor is it silent. The region around Earth is filled with magnetic field lines and trapped energetic particles, zooming about in a high-speed dance around the planet (shown here in an illustration). Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Brian Monroe
This is the Unity of the Divine Lovers.
Thus Satya implies both inner truth and Cosmic Consciousness.
Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and other great spiritual teachers of the East and the West revealed their own inner truth, and we find their Cosmic Consciousness illustrated in their life stories.
The great saints and mystics of all religions around the world have experienced the power of inner truth.
Love released their inner truth and the truth worked miracles in their lives. Their lives changed the world.
Now we live in a world of war, competition, fear, anger, anxiety and alienation.
We've lost contact with our Satya Center.
We've hidden this inner truth from ourselves.
We've closed ourselves to love.
We've exiled ourselves from the Garden of Eden.
Yet deep within our hearts, we also carry this inner truth like a favorite wound, a memory of a Golden Age, a primal garden, a starry mountaintop night. We all know that love is the key to its attainment.
And now, together, we're going to explore different ways we can travel the paths of love and relationship back to the garden.
We're going to discover how we can open ourselves more and more to a divinely inspired and inspiring love.
Pink Rose Offering by Jane Sherry
We're going to come home to our inner truth and find our Satya Center. We're going to bloom like gorgeous roses in the garden of life! We will be the offering to the Divine that we have always sought to give.
We will know we are awakening to our inner truth when we begin to commit spontaneous acts of compassion, joy, wisdom, fearlessness and creativity on a regular basis.
We will know we are centered in our Satya Center when we cheerfully perform acts of selfless service, when we engage with our neighbors in activities designed to educate and prompt thoughtful debate about social issues of importance.
Satya Center is a community of healers, a community for all those who have a sincere desire to find healing -- healing for themselves, their families and loved ones, and their neighbors around the world.
At Satya Center, our goal is to serve as catalyst and agent for a socially engaged spirituality that respects the inner truth of all religions and spiritual disciplines.
Helix Nebula (NGC 7293):
Composite of infrared data from Spitzer and visible-light data
from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/J. Hora (CfA) and C.R. O'Dell (Vanderbilt)
We see all life as arising from that unity of being which is the source of inner Truth.
At Satya Center we encourage people to discover their own inner truth, and help them cultivate their connection with inner spiritual guidance.
Spiritual masters of East and West agree that there is one truth underlying all spiritual teachings.
Establishing a conscious, ongoing connection with our own inner spiritual guidance, also known as the intuition or Higher Self, is the only path to this fundamental truth.
One aspect of this eternal truth, or unity, underlying creation, is that every individuated viewpoint represents only part of the truth. In order to see more of the truth we must share our truths cooperatively.
Nowhere is this law of nature more important than in the realm of human affairs.
By developing an acute awareness of our own limited viewpoint, conditioned as it is by our race, sex, class, educational, religious and family background, we can learn to develop virtues like openness, generosity, tolerance, respect for others, compassion for people who are not part of our family, class, religion or nation, forgiveness for our enemies, and aversion to violence.
By learning to identify with our own inner truth, our own Higher Self, we loosen the grip of the ego on our thoughts, our hearts, and our wills. We open our hearts to the world, and all its peoples, and we realize that our own existence, our own understanding of the world, our own reality, is impoverished when we refuse to see through the eyes of another.
On the other hand, our consciousness expands every time we can learn to see the universe through another's eyes.
At Satya Center we help people uncover more of the truth about the world around them.
When we open ourselves to viewpoints of those from different cultures, nations and religions we come to understand that in the realm of politics, religion and culture there are many "truths" in the world.
Our own truth becomes more closely aligned with the complexity found in the web of life, the multiplicity of viewpoints evident in human affairs and with the unity at the heart of life itself.
So at Satya Center, we offer global news from sources around the world, a wealth of alternative news resources, and original articles by visionary thinkers about war and peace, agriculture, the environment, social justice, money and other big issues of our time.
We point you to resources that will help you get involved in issues of importance to you -- and to the world.
At Satya Center, we seek to encourage spiritually aware individuals to transform their compassion into action, to live in balance with their neighbors and to live lightly upon the Earth.
Together we can change our world!
Love and Light from Curtis and Jane!