“Insanity Loop” by Flaming Claw
When Swami Kriyananda counseled the Ananda ministers on how to give talks and classes, he suggested that they avoid dwelling on their glowing successes, and speak instead about their mistakes and failures, and how they were able to overcome them with the help of the teachings.
Boy howdy, have I got a humdinger of a story for you. Keep reading.
Rajarshi Jankananda, Paramhansa Yogananda’s chief disciple, said, “I have come to understand that one-hundred percent of the spiritual path is receptivity.”
Swami Kriyananda said that humility is simply seeing things as they are. It isn’t a quality that comes easily. And that’s surprising, because it opens doors to all kinds of happiness. Still, the glue that binds us to the prancing, cakewalking ego is of an exceptionally durable, super-sticky kind.
God Himself conspires to teach us humility, painfully. With boundless ingenuity He sets tripwires in our path and exposes our pretensions so completely that it’s impossible to hide, deny, or rationalize them.
Okay, here’s my story. It’s a real howler, and I guess I could keep it to myself –Yogananda did advise us not to talk about our faults. But, for my part, I don’t much care, because it really isn’t about our faults; but how little God actually cares about them. Seva, a wise friend, once remarked to me, “I don’t think Divine Mother even notices our faults!” I believe my story illustrates this beautifully.
I find it hard to decide what to eat on Sunday morning before I’ll sing with the choir.
I’ll sometimes have homemade chocolate milk. It’s delicious and gives me energy, and the dates and chocolate open my heart for singing.
But dairy forms mucus. I’ll be singing “Give life your heart, bless everything that’s grown,” and it will come out sounding like beer cans being fed through a trash compactor: “Fear hhhgrptot the luff-hrrr-ing, all this world’s your hrrrown, hrrrffzghah!”
Another option is almonds blended in orange juice, a drink that Paramhansa Yogananda recommended before doing hard physical labor. It’s energizing. The trouble is, as Yogananda said, orange juice stimulates the brain; and mine isn’t a brain that needs stimulating. Amped on OJ, my thoughts will be bouncing all over the inside of my skull. Not helpful.
I could make a healthy breakfast – maybe an egg with a veggie patty. But I don’t like to wake the neighbors by cooking on Sunday morning.
“Hey Rambhakta. How about a pickle?!”
I hear ya. I get it. Hey Rambhakta, make breakfast the night before and get on with your life.
For weeks I’d been feeling spiritually “off” – uninspired, and unsure why. Looking back, I can see that I’d lost touch with the attitudes that bring us happy feelings of inner attunement – being laser-focused on serving God and putting Him first in our hearts.
Gene Benvau was a wonderful man who served as the main minister of a charming little Self-Realization Fellowship church in Redondo Beach, California (since closed). As a toddler, Gene lived with his mother at Paramhansa Yogananda’s Mt. Washington headquarters.
When Yogananda made the rounds of the offices, Gene would tag along. At each door, he would wait patiently until the Master emerged, and follow him to the next office.
Yogananda told Gene that his life would not be that of a monk. He chose a wife for him, and she was a refined and noble soul. Gene passed away in 1971.
When I met Gene, he was a burly man in his fifties. He ran a trucking company in Los Angeles. In his talk one Sunday, he told us, “I was at work the other day and someone asked me, ‘Hey Gene, how come you’re so happy? You’re the happiest person I’ve ever met.’ I told him, ‘It’s because I have such a deep love for God in my heart!’”
Gene used to say, with a hearty chuckle, “You can pray to Divine Mother to give you humility, but then – watch out!!!”
I reckon Divine Mother felt that I needed a dose of Her discipline, and the instrument She chose to paddle my fanny was breakfast.
On Sunday morning I was staring in the fridge, wondering what I could eat, when I noticed a bowl of leftover beans and greens that I had prepared with a ramen seasoning. What I forgot was that it was loaded with garlic. In the Indian healing system of Ayurveda, my body type is “Pitta,” and of all foods garlic is the most dangerous for us, because it can dial-up Pitta’s fiery flames to a blast furnace.
During our rehearsal we practiced “Dark Eyes,” a lovely song about the Divine Mother. There’s a verse where the tenors sing a unison solo:
Dark eyes in the morning,
Dark eyes in the evening,
Dark eyes in the starlight at end of day.
Dark eyes that speak silence,
They whisper ‘Come find me.
You’ll never know true love if you stay.’
We sang it through, then someone asked the director if a couple of the basses should join the tenors, because we sounded anemic, and the solo is meant to be sung mezzo forte, with feeling.
That’s when I lost it. I said, my voice taut and trembling with anger, “Why?! … Why?! The tenors don’t need help from the basses! This is a learning choir, after all!”
Divine Mother had found the proper button and pressed it firmly. In truth, I wasn’t concerned for myself. I’m one of those loudmouth tenors who can rock back on his heels and belt out all the fortissimo a song might call for. I was upset for the quiet tenors, because I felt they should have a chance to learn to reach deep inside and retrieve their sleeping Pavarotti. Ramesha Nani, a wonderful voice teacher, told me that anyone can learn to sing with a full, resonant sound.
Of course, my anger utterly nullified any possibility that my plea would find a hearing. Indeed, the response to my outburst was a resounding pianissimo from the other choir members, as they plunged deep in their spines.
I won’t sugar-coat it – I’d blown it extravagantly.
Divine Mother had programmed my downfall to perfection. “Do you want humility, dear boy? Do you want freedom from the ego? Happy to help! Here you go.”
And there I was, age 83, a disciple for 59 years, and a fully vested member of the Nayaswami Order, and I had lost it like a petulant five-year-old melting down in a tantrum.
After the rehearsal, I sat quietly. My first thought was that I would not indulge in the slightest whisper of shame or embarrassment, nor would I waste a single millisecond punishing myself or trying to justify my behavior.
One of the basses approached, an expression of kind concern on his face. “I asked Keshava” – our best, professionally trained tenor – “to join you on that line.”
I laughed heartily, “I really popped my cork on that one, and my voice showed it!”
I had lost plenty of face – to be frank, I’d lost it all, and I knew there might be folks who would lick their chops and try to prevent me from forgetting it. But I didn’t care. I remembered Yogananda’s humorous comment about those who revel in the faults of others, “The character-detective is a pig, eating the garbage in other people’s back yards.”
Swamiji told us about saints he’d met In India who were subject to fits of anger. “I didn’t doubt their sainthood for a moment, but I was also in no doubt that they were blowing their tops.” Patanjali said in his Yoga Sutras: “Yogas chitta vritti nirodh.” As Swamiji translated it, “Yoga is the neutralization of the vortices of feeling.” Meaning, of course, the vortices of restless emotional feeling. Not easy, and the promise is that when we can do it, we will be free.
He said of the SRF leaders who were intent on his destruction, that they were great souls, and that he knew their spiritual greatness better than we could. He explained their dogmatic institutionalized hatred as just a minor flaw relative to their greatness – a blind spot that would have to be healed before they could be free. In saying these things, I’m not remotely hinting I am a great soul who can still throw a tantrum; clearly, I am not the former, but evidently still the latter. I am saying, though: be careful before you judge others. Or alternatively, go ahead and make the bold experiment: judge people freely, and see how boldly you can stand before Divine Mother’s terrible irony.
I knew that it was a serious spiritual weakness to be capable of flying off the handle as I had. Swami Kriyananda had tested me on this, doing or saying things that were designed to see if I would lose my grip. Not to shame or embarrass me, but to let me know that I would be happier if I would work to be free of reactive emotions, and able to rest in an unshakable inner calmness.
I decided that I wouldn’t think of the incident at all during the forty-minute meditation before service. Instead, I would sit quietly and give all my attention to the primary meditation technique of our path, which, Swami Kriyananda said, is listening to Aum.
Lahiri Mahasaya, one of the avatars in our line of masters, said, “The only duty that has been given to man is to listen to the inner sounds.”
Paramhansa Yogananda said that when we hear Aum in meditation, even in its first quiet manifestation, perhaps as a soft, unbroken sound like wind in the trees, we can know for certain that we are in actual communion with God.
Yogananda had compassion for people’s struggles in meditation. He said words to the effect: “You will be distracted, but keep on. If you persevere, you will enjoy it very much.”
I did my best, and when the chanting began, I was healed. During our performance I was able to join fully in sharing the inspiration of the song.
The lesson was clear. Actually, there were two lessons.
First, I realized that meditation is the cure for the spiritual disease of emotional reactivity. Divine Mother had let me know that I needed to meditate with all the calm focus I could muster, absorbing my attention as calmly and thoroughly as I could in Aum.
Second, Divine Mother had spanked me well and truly, and I had lost face – yet I was loving it. That’s because I had long since realized that I am never so happy as when I can enjoy two states that Swami Kriyananda urged on us: “childlike devotion” and “humble service.”
Paramhansa Yogananda told Swami Kriyananda that his life would be one of “work, plus meditation.” Meditation would have second priority.
How can we develop inner calmness, while working actively in the world?
A woman lamented sadly to Swamiji, “I try so hard to go deep in meditation, but I just can’t!”
Swamiji was ready with consolation. He told her that ours is a path of active service, and that our role in this lifetime is to help spread Yogananda’s message, and to be active for his cause.
He said that if we were able to go into blissful union with God, samadhi, we wouldn’t be much interested in doing an outward work. He told the woman that our highest spiritual aspiration at Ananda is to develop purity of heart, through service and meditation.
Sri Ramakrishna, a great saint of the late 19th century, asked his chief disciple, Swami Vivekananda, to go to America and spread India’s scientific spiritual methods there.
Before Vivekananda set out on his mission to the West, Ramakrishna gave him an experience of nirbikalpa samadhi. Vivekananda was a liberated soul, a jivanmukta – one who is able to be active in this world while knowing himself as one with God. He was permanently free.
The experience of samadhi lasted three days, at the end of which Ramakrishna came to Vivekananda and said, “I hold the key. Now I am putting it in a pocket until it will be time to take it out again.”
If Vivekananda had been a saint of pure bliss in America, he would have presented a wrong image of the path of yoga for this country at this time. People would have looked at him and felt, “He is wonderful! I, too, want what he has!” Of course, few are ready for that level of freedom; but many are ready for a life of spiritual growth. Americans needed to be inspired at their level to discover the joy of seeking God through regular meditation and service.
I had been humiliated, exposed, and had lost face, and I was loving it. I felt that I was rolling in the humiliation, rubbing it all over my body, eager for the simplicity and freedom of my true state as a child of God, serving the Master with humble receptivity.
Paramhansa Yogananda told Swami Kriyananda that he would find liberation at the end of his life. “Death itself is the final price you will have to pay.”
Through service to his Guru’s work, Swamiji was freed from the last threads of karma that had kept him from merging in God. The Bhrigu Samhita, an ancient Indian book of prophecy, foretold that Swamiji would achieve moksha, final freedom, at the end of this life, a promise that was repeated in a reading from another great Indian prophetic work, the Agastya readings.
When a friend asked Swamiji if he was liberated, he replied, “Master told me that I am, but it is not being revealed to me.” Like Vivekananda, it was his spiritual duty to give his life to building his Guru’s work, undistracted by the call of bliss within.
Toward the end of his life, Swamiji remarked quietly to a friend in India, “Master is everywhere, and my consciousness is almost as vast.”
Swamiji told us many times that he found so much bliss in serving his Guru’s cause that “I sometimes find it almost impossible to bear.” Service and meditation, meditation and service – these are the portals to liberation for this age.
After Sunday service, we gather in the courtyard of the temple, which is lovely and shaded by a large tree. I often take pictures there, mainly of the old-timers talking together, to add to our collection of photos.
I was feeling thoroughly happy, relaxed, and at peace. When a friend asked me how I was doing, I couldn’t resist. The words burst from my lips, “SUPER-DUPER!” Perfect to describe my inner condition.
As for following the ego’s relentless call, well, I know that I’m happiest when I can be a simple devotee, and turn away from the ego’s slithering invitation to be a golden toad.