The Gurus of Self-Realization, Yoga Studio, Ananda Sangha, Palo Alto, California. L-R: Lahiri Mahasaya, Lord Babaji, Jesus Christ, Sri Yukteswar, and Paramhansa Yogananda. Photo by the author.
I planned to sing with the choir at Sunday service, but then I had a “health event” as we octogenarians call them.
We had gone shopping, and when we left Whole Foods I was perspiring profusely and feeling alarmingly disoriented and dizzy. When we got home I sat for a long while getting my bearings, then I thought of taking an electrolyte pill, and the dizziness soon passed.
I was exhausted and lay down for a half-hour’s nap. I awoke six hours later with Ishani shaking me gently and saying, “It’s time for bed.”
I had meant to practice the music for service, but then I had another episode in the night, and I wasn’t sure I could safely go up on stage. I decided not to sing but shoot video of the songs instead, and if there was another health event I could pop an electrolyte and sit and see how events unfolded.
The choir sang beautifully. When I got home, I began editing the video, but my efforts, then and for the next three days, proved fruitless. Nothing worked.
Divine Mother often tests us this way. Even if a project is very beautiful and spiritually worthwhile, She will use it to help us give up self-will and offer ourselves to do only as She guides us. As Swami Kriyananda said, Divine Mother will make it seem almost impossible, but if it is actually impossible we must accept it as Her will.
I was stressed and disturbed by the situation. Finally, I took my frustration to God, but my prayers received no answer. I was emotionally upset and hadn’t arrived at the point where I could offer myself calmly, humbly, receptively.
Finally I said, “Okay, I’ve done what I can. This is your video. You can help these people. I cannot. If you want the video done, you’ll have to show me the way.”
The next morning I opened the original raw footage and realized after applying a simple format transform that it was lovely. My goodness, I thought, I should always look at the video before I try to improve it. I had watched so many YouTube videos that told how to improve video that I hadn’t considered that they might sometimes not actually need help. I made a few tweaks to prevent YouTube from butchering the audio, then I posted it.
Meanwhile, the episode had opened a spiritual quagmire. I continued to feel anguished, confused, and spiritually disoriented.
All of my time at Ananda has been about deepening my relationship with Swami Kriyananda. All of the moments of my life have been arranged toward that end.
Swamiji never urged me to meditate longer. In my twenties I was paralyzed for three years from the chest down, and the two surgeries left me with a spinal x-ray that resembles a dog’s hind leg. Still, I’ve meditated three times a day for fifty years. I figure that God never misses a meditation, and that He doesn’t care in the slightest if I meditate badly so long as I try. It’s not about meditating as in the movies, wearing immaculate white robes, a thousand flickering candles on the altar, mind filled with pristine thoughts. It’s about forming a relationship with my Father, Mother, God even if it’s a rough and tumble kind. God likes that.
Of course, God planned my troubles – the paralysis and the brain damage from drugs. A psychic told me that in other lives the spiritual path had been easier for me, but that this time I would have to work hard at it. The assignment for this life was to serve.
Early in my life at Ananda, Swamiji gave me experiences of his spiritual greatness. He showed me that he could effortlessly shatter the frail frame of ego-identifications I had constructed and by which I defined myself.
There is a girl in New York City
Who calls herself the human trampoline
And sometimes when I’m falling, flying
Or tumbling in turmoil I say
Whoa, so this is what she means”
(Paul Simon, “Graceland.”)
I believe he did this, at least in part, so that I would know what kind of spiritual teacher I was dealing with. I was used to going my own way, but then, all the events of our lives are designed to teach us that we don’t know more than God. And when we get to the point where we’ve begun to suspect that there is no other reality than Him, He will hasten our progress by pulling away the foundations of our nuttycakes identifications.
I was awestruck by the feeling, in Swamiji’s presence, that his consciousness was unbounded. I could never say “These are the edges that define him. This is what he is.” In time, I realized that he was not Kriyananda at all, that there was no Kriyananda. Kriyananda was, as he said, “An event for which I am responsible.” He was something endless of which Kriyananda was only a temporary extrusion. He told us that if we could know ourselves as we truly are, we would see that we are tiny sparks of God’s light. Toward the end of his life he remarked quietly to a friend in India: “Master is everywhere, and my consciousness is almost as vast.”
One of the first questions I asked Swami was how I could develop more love for God. I believed that God was the magnetism I felt when I put my energy at the spiritual eye and prayed with intensity. But my prayers lacked something. There was lots of will power, and chiseled words that reflected my longing but that were not directly felt; instead, any devotional feeling was locked in a stranglehold of reason. I couldn’t figure out how praying intensely with will power fit together with being relaxed and receptive and devotional.
I was praying this way in meditation after the video editing event, praying earnestly at the spiritual eye, when I became aware of what had been lacking for sixty years.
I had always felt a sense of inner communion while focusing energy and attention at the spiritual eye, but it had seemed incomplete. This time, I realized that the true method of prayer at the spiritual eye was being revealed.
As I prayed with affection for God and Swamiji, I became aware of a warm current of energy rising from my heart toward the spiritual eye. My will and my love were drawing devotional feelings from the well of the heart. I realized that this was the missing ingredient.
In the early 1950s a psychologist named Rollo May wrote a book called Love and Will. In the 1970s, Psychology Today published an article that clarified May’s arguments, which in the book were obscured by being intellectually entangled.
The article said, essentially, that love and will are inextricable partners, and that it poses a great danger to a culture when they become separated.
May used the example of America, which in the early Fifties was losing touch with the moral and ethical framework in the culture that had allowed love to flow. He predicted that if the loss of values continued unchecked, people who had yielded to the temptation to try to feel their lives more vividly through sense pleasures would find themselves emotionally drained, their nervous systems scorched.
He predicted that they they would try to regain the stimulation through violence. A prediction which, of course, is being confirmed today. As Swami Kriyananda said, people seem to be seeking an outbreak of violence the inevitable consequence of which will be war.
In the late 1960s I asked a question of Brother Bhaktananda, the men’s correspondent at SRF, and the monk who had been with Paramhansa Yogananda the longest.
I asked him how I could develop more love for people. Bhaktananda replied that love is under the control of the will.
I didn’t understand this at the time, but my recent experience in meditation seemed to confirm it. And, of course, aided by Swami Kriyananda’s guidance I had learned that self-restraint is the first requirement for love. “Before there can be an expansion,” Swamiji said, “there must be a certain grounding first.”
When I had prayed with will at the spiritual eye, the brain center where will power is localized in the brain, and when I had blended my will with devotional longing, it had stimulated a current of love in the heart and drawn it upward.
This was something that Swamiji had talked about, but that I hadn’t been able to understand from experience. It was one of those teachings that we aren’t ready to assimilate, so we have to put it on the shelf for a time.
The morning after the meditation, I wrote an email to Nayaswami Asha:
“I thought you might appreciate this. By grace, I found a fresh way to have devotion.
“I decided to take it for a test spin, so I imagined walking into Babaji’s house, feeling only devotion, no regrets or expectations, fear, shame, etc., just a warm devotional love for Babaji. Then I walked into Lahiri’s house, then Jesus’ and Sri Yukteswar’s and Master’s.
“It was a nice feeling, and I was enjoying it, when I had a thought, which had Swami’s vibration and mischievous humor stamped on it: “Yeah, they’re all great guys!”
I knew that Asha loved Swamiji’s creative, often humorous way of helping those in his spiritual care.
She replied, “I think that’s absolutely delightful. These are family. Our biological family never is. Might as well go visiting.”
Indeed. The sequel is that I stayed up until 12:30 a.m. recording these thoughts..
The next morning, I went to Sunday service and had a glorious time, chanting from a full heart and serving the Master’s work by taking photographs and shooting video.
I didn’t care that I couldn’t chant with the fervor of a Yogananda and other great saints of devotion: Swami Kriyananda, Sri Chaitanya, Sri Ramprashad. I just knew that my heart wanted to chant and chant and chant, because in some part of me there was a devotee, fully formed and longing to emerge and transform my being. As Bhaktananda said, “Fathomless depths of love for God lie hidden in the human heart, waiting to be awakened by the Guru’s liberating discipline.”
– Rambhakta