Yogananda : the nature of God

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The mystery of the Divine Essence, divinity, the Spirit and God have been the constant subject of human enquiry and conjecture, religious speculation and metaphysical research. Divinity is sought to be understood at its different levels from the virtually incomprehensible formless eternal to the more tangible Godhead conceivable with shape and form to its incarnated prophets and Avatars on the physical realm.

Yogananda sought to provide some invaluable insights and answers to what he called ‘ the seemingly unanswerable questions’, answers that he ”received from the very depths of my soul and from God”.

The basic paradox revolves  around the concept of God’s unbreachable ‘Unity’ and the untold diversity of his manifestations in the physical world. Yogananda explains that as the Unmanifest Absolute, divinity or the Spirit was solitary and absorbed in Its own peace, consciousness, wisdom and bliss. In that supreme intelligence then arose a profound creative urge – ‘why have I remained thus alone…absorbed in My own bliss…but now I am going to dream a cosmos’. This urge then translated into a magnificent cosmic dream. The dream began to manifest, causing his consciousness to divide between his absolute unmanifested nature, the still and imperturbable Spirit and a turbulant manifest nature in the form of cosmic energy consisting of ‘different vibrating perceptions or processes of His thought’. This apparent duality was an illusion, being no more than a dream state, giving rise to the law of illusion of duality or ‘Maya’. Thus a portion of that solitary consciousness separated itself from Spirit and proceeded forth as ‘an active intelligent force, restless to express its power’, much like a seed sprouts into a mighty tree his thought ‘sprouted into a vast creation’. This however did not affect  his fundamental Unity, as the apparent separation was only within the confines of a dream state.

The first manifestation was ‘pure thought’. From this primal thought emanated light, which is the same as consciousness, only with ‘greater density’. The thought of light arose first, then transformed into a more tangible ‘dream of light’ – like the difference between thinking of a horse before seeing it actually in a dream. The dream of cosmic light was further empowered to create form. At first the finer light created subtle form and then proceeded to create ‘the grosser atomic light of protons and electrons’. God then empowered electrons and protons to arrange into atoms and molecules and a further thought force impelled them to ‘condense into gases, heat, liquids and solids’ and finally forms of life with man at the apex. This matter was further ‘imbued with a dreaming intelligence’ whose evolution would awaken it to the realization that ‘matter and mind are one’. Mind being the ‘idea vibration of God’. Death became the process by which ‘dream matter changes back into the consciousness of God’. The human being is the most conscious material entity, enabled to ‘transcend His dream’. Through birth and death this highest material entity goes back and forth between the ‘gross dream world’ and the ‘finer astral dream world. Reincarnation was a ‘series of dreams within a dream, man’s individual dream within the greater dream of God’.

Thus in the stormy state of creativity, the Infinite manifests as ‘intelligence, mind, vibrations, forces and matter’ but in the unmanifest state, ‘the Infinite exists solely as Spirit in which all forces lie dissolved’.

The Avatar or prophet is that material phenomenon whose ‘consciousness is one with the Intelligence of God omnipresent in creation and is the sole perfect reflection in creation of the Uncreated Infinite’.

 

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Yogananda: The Soul’s Final Liberation

Swami Yukteswar
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The rarest revelations, for anyone curious about the mysteries of the spirit and the Soul, are to be found in Paramhansa Yogananda’s autobiography, in Chapter 43, ‘The resurrection of Sri Yukteswar”, his beloved deceased Guru. It had me completely enthralled and totally nonplussed. The latter because the language of the ‘spirit’ appears often to be totally beyond our materialistic earthly comprehension when we are not adept or evolved sufficiently to understand what indeed is being said. Yet, with minimal discernment, some ideas do come through to provide some framework of the spirit world and the stages through which the Soul passes from one realm to another of the spirit world and eventually beyond even that, into the release of the Soul and ultimate ‘Union’ with the Godhead, what we may call the Universal Essence.

I was amazed beyond comprehension to read of the manifestation of Yogananda’s beloved Guru, in Bombay at the Regent Hotel, on his Indian sojourn after decades in the USA when he so mourned the passing away of his Guru Yukteswar during that visit. First he saw the vision of the Avatar ‘ Lord Krishna’  in a ‘shining blaze’ over the roof top of a building across the street ‘ waving and nodding greeting’ before the vision disappeared. Then he was accosted by a ‘beatific light’ in his hotel room with the ‘flesh and blood’ form of his Guru Yukteswar.

Yukteswar
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The apparition claimed that he was indeed a ‘flesh and blood’ body whom he hugged with reverence. Yukteswar asserted that he was now a ‘saviour’ on an illumined astral planet called Hiranyalok, to help advanced beings there to rid themselves of ‘astral Karma’ to attain liberation from ‘astral rebirths’. The people on this astral planet plane were highly developed spiritually, yet were bound by karmic effects which yet needed to be cleansed.

The Guru Yukteswar then remarks to Yogananda that the Soul was shrouded in three layers or ‘bodies’ – the gross, the subtle and the causal ( see my posts: The subtle Body and the Law of Karma & The Soul’s Reincarnation and Rebirth ).The gross shield is what we have on earth as the physical body of senses. The subtle shield is that which adheres to the Soul  (after death on the physical plane)  on the astral plane, consisting of consciousness and feelings with a body made up NOT of matter but of ‘lifetrons’ or light. The astral subtle body has to evolve to the Causal stage which is a’blissful realm of ideas’. Yukteswar’s role in the astral plane was to elevate the astral beings to the still higher realms of the Causal world.

According to Yukteswar the astral world  is ‘ hundreds of times larger than  the material cosmos’. The astral world is ‘ infinitely beautiful, clean, pure, and orderly’ when compared to the physical one. The astral world is both ‘gross’ and ‘subtle’. The gross aspect has millions of astral beings arrived from earth on different astral planets depending on their karmic evolution.

The astral beings live on cosmic energy and light. They are ‘exact counterparts’ of their last physical forms, with the same appearance which they possessed at youth on earth. However, they possess a ‘sixth’ sense, intuition, with which they sense their world and a Third Eye over their forehead, ‘open’. The astral bodies can heal by will when ‘hurt’. Yet they suffer ‘mental agonies’ if the truth is not fully comprehended. They communicate through telepathy and television. They ‘consume’ ‘nector’ from glowing fountains of light’. Only later at an advanced level in Hiranyalok ( its subtle level ) are they freed from the necessity of ‘eating’ anything but the ‘manna of bliss’

Life on this astral plane is not however eternal. It could range to a thousand earth years. Often astral visitors, when not ‘permanent’ return to earth when their Karma commands. At astral ‘death’ a being could thus return to the physical plane.

At the Causal level, which is more advanced than the astral, desires manifest as something superior to physical or astral sensations. The  existence of a body ‘would signify that its existence is made possibly by unfulfilled desires’.

The Soul when freed from the gross body at death is still covered by the astral and causal sheaths which debar its union with the Absolute.

When the astral sheath is shed there remains the Causal sheath. This is a mould of ‘thought’. The Causal body ‘feasts’ only on ‘knowledge’, ‘drinks from the springs of peace’, ‘roams on the soil of perception’, ‘swims in bliss’.

Beings remain in the ‘Causal condition for thousands of years. The Soul then tries to shake free from this last bonding or sheath to join the ‘Causal consciousness’ – ‘all the separate eddies of ideas,…. waves of power, love, will, joy, peace, intuition, calmness, self-control, and consciousness melt into the ever joyous Sea of Bliss’. The Soul then is no longer individualized consciousness but merges with the ‘Cosmic Ocean’ of ‘laughter, thrills and throbs’.

The Soul thus released from this last confinement, encompasses and becomes ‘IT’. It ‘expands into the spirit’, ‘in the region of lightless light, darkless dark, thoughtless thought, full of the ecstasy of joy or ‘God’s dream of cosmic creation’.

It becomes one with the infinite, yet without losing its individuality, like ‘Christ had won the final freedom even before he was born as Jesus’. However, such a freed soul may return to earth as a prophet to bring other souls back to God – whether on the astral plane or the earthly plane.

The law of Karma has to be completely worked out before graduation to the astral plane, the Causal plane and beyond into Unity. When the earthly Karma is not redeemed fully after even an astral death they cannot enter the Causal realms of ‘ideas’ but must go back and forth from physical to astral levels for further lessons on earth. Others that are freed  of physical Karma graduate to the Causal plane. When ‘seeds of past desires’ are extinguished finally, the soul emerges from the Causal sheath into the eternal.

Having explained the mysteries of the soul’s release from the triple bondage of physical, astral, and causal captivity, the great guru Yukteswar then vanished from Yogananda’s sight saying as he departed ”tell all….that your earth is a dream of God.”

This experience of Yogananda, though hardly fully comprehensible to a soul like mine covered in all the three sheaths, did reveal the mysterious workings of the spiritual realms and its master, the Universal Essence showing the long and arduous path to final liberation.

Yukteswar and Yogananda
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Paramhansa Yogananda

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Yogananda was a remarkable Indian sage who took upon himself  the arduous task of introducing Hindu mystical thought and esoteric practices in Yoga to the West. He traveled to America in 1920 to attend a Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston but stayed on for over 30 years spreading his message from coast to coast. He founded the International Centre for Self Realization Fellowship (SRF) in Los Angeles to disseminate his teachings and practices. A large following of disciples developed over the years with numerous celebrities. Yogananda thus became the first pioneering Indian mystic to set up base in the USA and spread the teachings in the USA rather than in India. The second notable personage to do so was Prabupadh who founded the Hare Krishna movement with branches all over the states and thereafter in most parts of the world including India.

Yoganand’s ‘’The Autobiography of a YOGI’’ ( First Edition Copyright Paramhansa Yogananda) is an extraordinary story of his mystical life full of incredible miracles that gives one a fresh perspective of reality and shakes to the roots our settled beliefs about the ‘Natural Material Order’’. The book relates incredible accounts of Great Master Yogis materializing and vanishing, healing miraculously incurable ailments, bringing back people from death, walking on water, bringing trains to a halt through sheer will power, levitating and even resurrecting themselves.

What particularly struck me in the book was his explanation of our material reality as a grand illusion whose veil has to be penetrated to arrive at the true nature of reality. The Indian Master Yogis and sages appear to have succeeded in piercing that ‘veil’ and learned to become one with the quantum reality thereby performing what appear to be incredible feats. He quotes from Sir James Jeans’s book ‘The Mysterious Universe’ – ‘’the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.’’ An analogy he made impressed me deeply. Holding that the material world and we with it are aspects of light, he likens our ‘real world’ to the projection of images by a projector on a cinema screen . He relates his mystical experience in which his body lost its grossness and acquired an astral quality. While the walls and furniture remained gross, the ceiling of the room  became a blinding mass of light. From within the light a voice appeared to speak out saying ‘’ This is the cosmic motion picture mechanism …. It is producing the picture of your body…. Your form is nothing but light’’.

In the book Yoganand as a youth refuses to conform to an ordinary life despite his father’s every effort and barely graduates before he continues his avid search for masters and Gurus. In the process he finds strange and amazing beings in remote corners of India engaged in their incredible and ‘magical’ feats which appear to give the lie to our settled beliefs about the nature of the reality in which we live, and the natural physical laws which appear to govern us.

‘Third Gender’

There are tribes in India of the so called Third Gender paradoxically considered auspicious at the birth of a child where they will dance till they are given a suitable donation before they bless the child with long life and happiness, though the law prohibits this. A poem to describe their plight

H E R M A P H R O D I T E

Your centre of gravity

Does so vacillate,

While looking masculine

you are so effeminate,

In you the opposites

Have neutralized,

Your desire aborted

Now arises to probe and ape

What is beyond the stars of your reach,

The gap you cannot breach and shape.

 

Printing error in your DNA, they say,

In allowing an additional factor

Have cancelled all factors

Like something inedible, too sweet.

 

This no equilibrium of seers,

Perfect penance of ages,

No prize of Himalayan sages,

 

Your comic inverse

But a failed mutation

To ape the Absolute

In a well tried fluke

Unsublimate,

 

That could not

Put two poles

Back together

Again

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