Edward Salim Michael

Edward Salim Michael (1921 – November 2006)[1] was a composer of symphonic music and an author of books on spirituality and meditation.

It was to Buddhism that he felt closest, but as his teaching was based on his direct experience, he did not hesitate to quote Christian, Hindu, or Sufi mystics.

He gave numerous concerts in which he performed the thirty-five or so concertos that he had in his repertory as well as some fifty sonatas and more than two hundred other pieces for violin before leaving for Paris in 1950 to study with Nadia Boulanger.

After four years of a most intense spiritual practice, he had, at the age of thirty-three, an experience of awakening to what one may call his Buddha Nature as well as the Infinite in oneself.

He composed many orchestral pieces, among them a mass for mixed choir, two string orchestras, celesta, harp, glockenspiel and percussion.

The next year, his Nocturne for flute and orchestra won the Lili Boulanger prize in the United States, given by a jury which included Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland.

He finally decided to give up composing and travelled to India, the country of his maternal grandmother, to dedicate himself fully to his inner life.

At their request, he began writing his first book, written in English, The Way of Inner Vigilance, published in London in 1983, which he signed with his middle name Salim.

Michael addressed his teaching to the seeker or the aspirant who is, as he said, "someone who has embarked on a spiritual path to try to find his True Identity, a state of Vast Consciousness, already present in him, but obscured by his ordinary mind and the clouds of his incessant thoughts.