Yogananda: the Soul’s Final Liberation

Swami Yukteswar
Credit: bolstablog.wordpress.com

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
Credit: rockyourboatyoga.com

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.