Michael Perera was born on August 27, 1963 to a Sri Lankan father and a Norwegian mother in the village of Haguranketha in the Nuwara Eliya district of the Central Province. Kingsley Alanson Pereira was Michael's grandfather, a wealthy businessman. Many businessmen and street vendors in Kandy in the nineties and fifties did business with his financial company. Holiya Bandara Jayasenavi Herath Vasala of Haguranketha Mahagedara Valavu was the grandmother of Swarnalatha Mahagedara Kumarihami Raju of Herath Vasala Mudyansela, and she was the first teacher and spiritual guide of little Michael in his childhood.
Since childhood, little Michael longed to go to the Buddhist shrine with his grandmother and participate in the ceremonies and rituals held there.
During these journeys, the worship of the monks' feet, the color of the robes, flowers, incense and lamps, were experiences that took his mind to a different world. Little Michael loved to run barefoot on the cool sandy ground with his toes and to run on it with his heavy feet. He was very fond of music and painting. Michael and Neganiya used to listen to heroic stories, Jataka stories and village stories while sitting in Mittaniya's bed. When Michael was ten years old, he left for Norway, his mother's homeland, with his grandmother. It was at his mother's house near Oslo.
In the early 1970s, Norway had a modern society full of consumer goods that Sri Lanka did not have. As such, little Michael had the opportunity to experience a life of luxury that he had never experienced in Sri Lanka. To develop his innate talents, Michael attended the Einar Granum School of Art in Oslo. His favorite painter there was the Spanish Salvador Dali. Hay loved him so much that he once dressed up as Dali. For some time he also lived in Dalim. This is because the surrealist quality depicted in Dali's painting is very close to his spiritual life. Even though he lived a very luxurious life in Norway, he was in the arms of his grandmother Hunguranketa. He lived in this country in every dream. Therefore, it can be thought that Dali's paintings, which expressed surrealism, were very helpful in expressing his mood.
He went to art school and went to a yoga ashram in Oslo in the evening. Michael was seventeen or eighteen years old at that time. He felt that there should be spiritual things added to art. He saw that most people painted but were equally enjoying life and not being creative. He saw that many people were sitting in stress and used to release that stress through creativity. It may be due to political or personal actions, but it results in a narrowing of the art. But he wanted to unite spiritual understanding and creativity. Therefore, he oscillated between the physical and the spiritual. Michael said goodbye to Norwegian life after ten years and returned to Sri Lanka in 1982.
Inherited a life between the two worlds of the advanced industrial capitalist society and the new feudal society, Michael was moving more and more away from the outside world to his inner world. In December 1983, Michael Perera presented his first painting exhibition at Lionvented in Colombo. The then minister Gamini Dissanayake and his wife were the chief guests. Hay saw a new Dali in the whimsical paintings of this Sri Lankan-Norwegian hybrid. Michael's favorite writer was Hermann Hesse. Haye greatly desired Damien's novel, such as Hesse's Siddhartha and his life story. Also, he was very fond of western rock music.
Raju's second painting exhibition was held in 1984 at Alliance Francaise, Kandy. Tilak Abeysinghe, a well-known sculptor and painter in Sri Lanka, also came to see it. Raju's third painting exhibition was held in January 1986 at Lionel Wendt, Colombo. It was also an exhibition of paintings that showed the surrealist quality as before.
Michael, who lived a bohemian life if not an outsider, met Swami Sachidanandan who came to the city. With this meeting, Michael's life took a different direction. Not only his fashionable clothes but also his speech started changing. He, who was second to growing wisdom, was inclined to see inwardly through simplicity. This self-recognition did not come to him all at once. After giving up painting for three years, he experimented with various ways of seeking wisdom. He lived with friends who lived bohemian lives, taking various yoga practices, psychoanalytic 'drugs'. But in the end, realizing that it was useless, he distanced himself from them. Wee He spent his time in quiet solitude and beautiful natural places. He lived in solitude in a small house in the surroundings of Thaprobane Island, Haputale Hills off the south coast and in an uninhabited hole near Kandy.
Realizing that "truth" could not be found in any of these things, Michael turned to the teachings of Bhagavan Sri Rajneesh (Osho). Went to Osho Ashram in Poona. There he reached the path of understanding the mysterious nature of the mind by referring to musical and dance meditation programs and Osho's lectures. From then on he was a new being. There was a new birth. Michael Perera was Raju Devdas. Salvador Dali, who had impressed him so far at the Oslo Art School, was no longer strange to him. The Krishna Murti thing
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