“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 howler for you. Keep reading.)
Paramhansa Yogananda’s chief disciple, Rajarshi Jankananda, said, “I have come to understand that one-hundred percent of the spiritual path is receptivity.”
Humble receptivity is a quality that cannot be faked. 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 strutting, 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.
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 traditional 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 “off” spiritually – uninspired and unsure why. Looking back, I can see that I’d lost touch with the attitudes that bring us contented feelings of inner attunement: being laser-focused on serving God’s work, and putting Him first in our hearts while thinking only of giving.
There was a wonderful man who served as the main minister at the charming little Self-Realization Fellowship church in Redondo Beach, California (since closed). His name was Gene Benvau. As a toddler, Gene lived with his mother at Paramhansa Yogananda’s Mt. Washington headquarters.
Whenever Yogananda made the rounds of the offices, Gene would follow him. At each door he would wait patiently until the Master emerged and toddle along behind 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.
When I met Gene, he was a burly man in his fifties who ran a trucking company in Los Angeles. He passed away in 1971.
I remember Gene saying, “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 decided I needed a dose of Her loving 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 I’d prepared with a ramen seasoning. What I forgot was that it was loaded with garlic. In the ancient 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 flame to a maelstrom.
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 one of the basses 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 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 right button and pressed it firmly. In truth, I wasn’t concerned for myself. I’m one of the loudmouth tenors who can rock back on his heels and belt out all the fortissimo amperage a song might call for. I was upset for the quiet tenors, because I felt they should have a chance to learn to reach 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 all plunged deep in their spines.
I won’t sugar-coat it – I blew 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, at 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 rehearsal, I sat quietly in my chair. 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 came over, an expression of kind concern on his face. He said, “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 had lost all of it, and I knew there might be folks who would lick their chops and try to prevent me from forgetting it. But then I recalled Paramhansa Yogananda’s comment on those who revel in the faults of others, “The character-detective is a pig, eating the garbage in other people’s back yards.”
Swamiji spoke of 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.” He said of the SRF leaders who were intent on destroying Ananda that they were great souls, and that he knew their spiritual stature better than we could. He explained their dogmatic, institutionalized hatred as a minor flaw relative to their greatness — just a blind spot that would have to be resolved before they could be spiritually free. In saying these things, I am not arguing that I am a species of great soul; clearly I am not. I am saying: be careful before you judge others; or alternatively, go ahead and conduct the experiment: judge them freely, and see how bravely you can stand up to 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 develop unshakable inner calmness.
I decided that I would not think of the incident during the forty minutes 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 expression, 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 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, merging myself as thoroughly as I was able 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’m 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, then, 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 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 merged with the Lord. 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!” First, they needed to be inspired at the level of their own reality, to discover the joy of 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 childlike devotee, serving the Master with humble receptivity.
Paramhansa Yogananda told Swami Kriyananda that he would find complete 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 fully 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.
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 intoxicating call of bliss within.
Toward the end of his life, Swamiji remarked casually 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 Paramhansa Yogananda’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 temple courtyard, which is beautiful and shaded by a large tree. I often take pictures there, mainly of the old-timers talking together, to add to our stock of photos.
I was feeling thoroughly happy, relaxed, and at peace, when a friend asked 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 unrelenting call, well, I’m happier when I can be a shiny devotee and resist the ego’s slithering invitation to don the suffocating robes of a golden toad.