Lessons In Self-Realization A

Lessons In Self-Realization A Yoga Techniques for Daily Living Lesson Twenty-One I WANT TO FEEL THEE JUST BEHIND THE VOICE OF MY PRAYER WHISPERS FROM ETERNITY Swami Kriyananda BY PARAMHANSA YOGANANDA 2012 by Hansa Trust All rights reserved. O Father, Thou art just behind my vision with which I see Thy beauty without. Thou art just behind my listening power with which I hear Thy voice in all Creation. Thou art just behind my touch with which I feel Thy world. In the sweetness of flowers and in the zest of sustaining food lies hidden the essence of Thy being: Thine eternal sweetness. Thou art just behind the voice of my prayer. Thou art just behind the mind with which I pray. Thou art just behind my glistening feelings. Thou art just behind my thoughts. Thou art just behind my cravings for Thee. Thou art just behind my meditations. Thou art just behind the veil of Nature s splendors. Thou art just behind the screen of my love. Behind all these mystic screens, reveal Thyself as Thou art! 1

The Eight Aspects of God A diamond has many facets. God, similarly, may be experienced in any of several ways as bliss, love, wisdom, sound, light, calmness, peace (the negative aspect of calmness), and power. Let us consider the last one first: power. Most human beings, living as we do on a planet in a rajasic universe, cannot but equate power with material strength: muscles, sledgehammers, weights or, on another level, with worldly importance, or with the devastation caused by hurricanes. This last especially, however, should give us at least a suspicion that the subtler the force in this case, air the greater the power it can manifest. In modern times we all know the power that comes from splitting the atom, which created the atom bomb. Lightning, which (materially speaking) has no substance at all, has in fact great power. Today we know that matter is not solid at all, being only a manifestation of vibrations of energy. God, whose reality is the subtlest in existence, must by an extension of this logic have infinite power. Do you remember, in the last chapter, my quoting Yogananda as saying, In a little gram of flesh like this there is enough energy to keep the whole city of Chicago in enough electricity for a week? And electricity is only what he called the animal power in the energy world. We see divine power expressed through all those who have realized God. The saints are far from meek and mild when they feel a need to express the power they feel within them. The expression meek and mild is often applied to Jesus Christ, yet in the Bible itself we see many instances from his life of a power no one could resist. Think of the way he, single-handed, drove the money 2 changers out of the temple. He was crucified for the strong challenge he posed to tradition. Yet even then he said he was not submitting to that ordeal out of necessity. Rather, he showed even greater power in submitting to it, as the will of God. There are two aspects to these divine attributes: those which are God s pure emanations (as we might call them), and those which filter down to us through the ego. Even a master must filter God s grace down to mankind, for it to be even comprehensible to us. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna grants to Arjuna the divine vision. At last, however, Arjuna asks that he be allowed to see once again the familiar reality of his own guru, Krishna, lest his understanding be overwhelmed by what he has seen. The power displayed by masters, then, is only a tiny fraction of the power available to them in the divine Self. Even Krishna s raising of Gowardhan mountain on the tip of his little finger was only a tiny display of the infinite power available, in the Divine, to every great master. Thus, peace, when filtered down through the ego, is merely the cessation of conflict. In human affairs, the celebration of victory in a war may be called peace, but in fact it is purely temporary, and does not affect people in their interpersonal relationships. Still, the temporary nature of such peace provides a hint of the difference between calmness and peace. Like the difference between sabikalpa and nirbikalpa samadhi, the peace man finds with the cessation of conflict is a temporary state. So also is the peace first found in meditation. When I first came to realize that the goal of life is to find God, the most I thought might await me in fulfilling that aspiration was sublime inner peace. But when I read Autobiography of a Yogi, and learned of the divine love 3

and joy available to one in finding God, I was overwhelmed by that discovery. I went west to meet my Guru, and he accepted me the very day I met him. Even then, however, I saw him only as a divinely great man. One day he looked at me calmly and said, If you knew my state! Those words shook me. From then on, every time I looked into his eyes, so deeply calm, it seemed to me that I was gazing into infinity a calmness nothing could shake; that calmness which, as he himself put it, enables one to stand unshaken amidst the crash of breaking worlds. Light is another aspect of God. One can see light in visions, and in the spiritual light in one s own forehead the light of the spiritual eye. When the spiritual eye opens up, whole worlds of divine light are revealed. The golden aureole around the spiritual eye becomes a tunnel of golden light, revealing the light of the astral universe, which one can then actually enter. The blue field inside the spiritual eye elongates to become a tunnel of blue light, revealing, and bringing oneness with, the light of the causal universe. At this point, one can enter and become one with the causal plane of existence. This is the light of Christ consciousness. In the center of the spiritual eye, when that eye is perceived perfectly, the meditating devotee beholds a fivepointed star. The peak of the star is at the top. (Is it not interesting that atheistic Communist China has taken for its national symbol an inverted five-pointed star, with its peak at the bottom?) Yogananda said that in this way man was made, even physically (as the Bible proclaims), in the image of God. If you stand upright, with your arms outstretched and your legs apart, you ll see that your own body, with the head, resembles a five-pointed star. For centuries, there has been speculation as to the reality of the star of the east, which the three wise men saw and which led them to the manger in Bethlehem where the Christ child lay. Some people have wondered whether it was an appearance of Halley s comet. Others have speculated that it may have been only an astrological sign, significant of that divine birth. The speculation has never been conclusive. People have even conjectured that the birth of Jesus occurred four years earlier, to coincide with some known phenomenon in the skies at that time. Paramhansa Yogananda explained that the answer was quite simple. The wise men of the East were men wise with divine insight not kings in a worldly sense, but kings among men, for they were Self-realized masters. It is said they saw the star in the east, then followed it to the manger. But if they followed it eastward, where the Bible tells us it was, they must have moved away from Bethlehem, for Israel lay westward from where they were. Did the Bible mean, rather, that it was while they were still in the East that they saw it? This must be the meaning generally drawn from this passage, though if this were the case the passage ought to read, In the East, we saw. There is another, and in fact correct, explanation. The east of our bodies is in the forehead; the west is at the back of the head; the north is the top of the head; and the south is the base of the spine. In Hebrew, the word for east is kedem that which lies before. The same word applies also to the body, and refers to the forehead. The east is not only an objective direction, but also a location in our bodies. 4 5

The star the wise men saw was, in other words, the star at the center of the spiritual eye. We have seen his star in the east, and have come to worship him. Those words indicated that Jesus Christ had come from the very highest divine regions. He was, in other words, an avatar, or incarnation of God. To have understood this deep truth, they themselves had to have deep wisdom. They were, indeed, avatars themselves. When I was at Master s desert retreat in Twenty-Nine Palms, hardly a month after he d accepted me as his disciple, he began to dictate a new set of lessons intended to replace those that were, and still are, sent out by SRF. In his first new lesson he began with the astonishing statement, The three wise men who came to the Christ child in Bethlehem were Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, and Swami Sri Yukteswar. Often and often I have wondered whether Master might not have been, in fact, Jesus Christ himself! Again, when I was editing Master s commentaries on the words of Jesus, I could not help marveling, many times, at the similarities between the personalities of Jesus and of my own guru. Great masters are beyond personality, yet when they return to human form they reassume their old personalities. Master told me once, When I re-enter a new body, it feels a bit itchy, rather like a heavy overcoat on a hot day. But then I get used to it, and it s all right. Does this mean the personality changes? Not necessarily. Yogananda told us he had been William, known as the Conqueror, and that he had also been Arjuna, of the Bhagavad Gita. He said he had been in Spain as well, his role there being to drive out the Moors. The facts of history point to his having been Fernando III, the Saint. I know little of the personality of Fernando, but both William and 6 Arjuna were mighty warriors. It was said of them both that no one else could bend their bows. Arjuna, the earnest disciple in the Bhagavad Gita, appears there only in the position of one eager to learn. Curiously, that is the impression Yogananda creates also in Autobiography of a Yogi. I myself wrote a biography of his life to show people what a great master he himself actually was. I saw the body of Fernando III in Seville in 2010; it was still incorrupt. Curiously, the body of William I (I call him the Great ) was exhumed more than four centuries after his death, and it, too, was incorrupt! Of course, going back to the question of whether Master might have been Jesus, we have the fact, revealed to us by Jesus himself, that his guru had been John the Baptist. Does this negate the possibility that Jesus was Master? Not necessarily. I once asked Master, Sir, were you Jesus Christ? He answered, What difference would it make? So the question must remain moot! Yet it would be completely perfect for him to have been Jesus, for he called his mission the Second Coming of Christ. To finish the story of those three wise men, Jesus Christ, when he was twelve so Yogananda told us went to India himself to study under them. Records of that visit exist in a Tibetan monastery in or near Leh, in the region of Ladakh, Kashmir. The eighteen years he spent in India were removed from the Bible, but no one dared to add such words even as, And he grew up, and worked in his father s carpentry shop. Bharati Krishna Tirth, the Jagadguru of Gowardhan Math in Puri, told me, I have had access to one of three extant copies of the council at Constantinople when it was decided to eliminate that section from the Bible. The reasoning was that if Jesus needed to learn from others, 7

people might question whether he was truly the son of God. A layman present stood up and said, I am not a priest, but it seems to me that if the apostles didn t doubt Jesus, why should we? He was voted down. To move on, now, to the other aspects of God, I said, quoting Master, that God is also knowable as sound. If you listen with closed ears to the inner sounds of your body, especially in the right ear (the positive side), you may hear many sounds. These are the sounds of the electric body. As you go deeper into meditation, you may hear the sounds of the spinal chakras, and also the sound of AUM itself. The Supreme Spirit, in manifesting the universe, did so (I ve said this before) by vibrating a portion of Its consciousness. Creation itself is that Cosmic Vibration. In the companion lessons to these I will include the Om technique. What you will hear in practicing this technique are sounds that will lead you more and more deeply within until you hear Om itself. It will be a deep, rumbling sound, all-absorbing, into which you will finally merge, becoming one with it. More need not be said here. But I might just add this: listening to Om is very blissful! As for the aspect of wisdom, wisdom is not intellectual knowledge. Its home is in the heart. The man who prints my books in India said to me recently, You must do a lot of research in writing your books. I do no research at all! I replied. I wrote my Essence of the Bhagavad Gita in less than two months, from memory of working with Master on his original commentaries. The biography of Yogananda I wrote in three weeks. Demystifying Patanjali I wrote also in three weeks. And these lessons have come to me in a month. My understanding is derived from inner knowledge. And unless 8 what seems true is corroborated by my heart s feeling, I discount it. Wisdom is intuitive. It is the soul s power of knowing. How could God ever have created this vast universe? I have a screensaver on my computer that shows many telescopic photographs of galaxies. It seems almost incredible that God made all that! How? No intellect could ever have figured it all out. The power of cosmic creation rests on direct, intuitive wisdom. Enlightened masters have to lower their consciousness even to converse with us ordinary people! I was with Master while he dictated his commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita. He would turn his eyes up to the spiritual eye, and just start talking. True wisdom comes from within. When one achieves it, there is nothing to figure out. One just knows. Love, the seventh aspect of God, is quite unlike human love in this respect: In divine love, there is no thought of what one is receiving from others. Jesus felt that divine love for those who crucified him. His suffering was not for his physical body, which he d transcended completely. It was for people s ignorance, that could drive them to kill the very person who had been sent to bring them divine love and salvation. Divine love is completely selfless. It is not love expressed by the personality, but felt in the soul behind the personality. When you look at people in terms of their personalities, it may be difficult to imagine loving them all. As human beings some of them seem so completely unlovable! Yet each one of them is an expression of God Himself. As such, one cannot help loving them, for each one is seeking his own highest nature as Bliss. Even consciously, everyone on earth is seeking happiness. And even though some seek it in dark ways, such as revenge 9

and destruction, all, according to their own level of spiritual evolution, are seeking Bliss. Love is, in fact, only bliss in motion. Divine love is self-expansive. It reaches out to embrace all, rather than narrowly excluding those who are outside its own circle. Bliss I have written about quite often in these lessons. It is the unmoving, vibrationless nature of the Eternal, Supreme Spirit. We should love God, Master said, above all for His bliss. For in bliss there can be no ego. In bliss there is supreme fulfillment. Divine love is the eternal, divine movement toward that bliss. 10 Story Krishna and the Artist Krishna agreed to pose for a local artist. Each time the artist caught his likeness on his canvas, however, when he looked again at Krishna he saw something different. Though he tried repeatedly, each time, though the likeness to what he d seen was correct, Krishna was no longer like that. Finally in his mind a light dawned. He went and fetched a mirror. As he held it up before Krishna, it reflected him correctly. No matter how many times Krishna changed, the mirror reflected him as he was then. There is a meaning to this story. The devotee must become a flawless mirror before God. Thus, his mind will always reflect God as he sees Him then. He will not intrude any fancy of his own. There is also another meaning to this story. A true master is a flawless mirror to everyone around him. This doesn t mean that if someone is arrogant, the master displays arrogance. Rather, what he reflects is the reaction of that person s soul to his own arrogance. I myself had the great blessing of living with a great master. It always amazed me that I could never bring his face clearly to mind when I tried to visualize him. I could instantly bring other faces to mind. But his face, in some subtle way, was always different. He reflected the mood of the Spirit to each occasion, to every circumstance, and to the many people he was with. Always, he was a divine, flawless mirror to whatever he saw before him. The reason was simply that he didn t merely see it before him: he saw everything from inside the person himself, or the circumstance itself. 11

Affirmation In every circumstance, with every human being, I will relate to that at its center, from my own center within. 12