Nayaswami Hriman McGilloway

Religion is all too often a source of conflict, division, and judgment between the adherents of different faiths. It doesn’t help that religion is inextricably linked with cultural and national identifies with their numerous biases, prejudices, language, dress, and traditions.

It is experienced spirituality that unites hearts. And not the superficial spirituality born of intellectual speculation or passing sentimentality but the realized spirituality that fosters action, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice.

I remember as a boy, growing up Catholic, Read the rest of this entry »

Paramhansa Yogananda describes how, as a child, he was healed of Asiatic cholera (which is usually fatal) in a blinding flash of light after his mother instructed him to pray to her guru, Lahiri Mahasaya. Albert Einstein, as a young man, was fascinated with the phenomenon of light. His discovery showed that the speed of light is the constant of the physical world around which the duality of time and space revolves. Similarly, in the metaphysical teachings, God is the constant out of which all creation, inherently dual, is made manifest and revolves.

“Turning to the Light” is a constant theme of spiritual teachings both east and west. Paramhansa Yogananda used a simple analogy in Read the rest of this entry »

Paramhansa Yogananda, author of the world renown classic, “Autobiography of a Yogi,” spoke and wrote frequently in respect to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Many of his students and followers have wondered why he did so, especially in light of his emphasis upon respect for and the need to seek a deeper understanding of the underyling truth of all true religions.

He explained that there exists a special link between the lives of Paramhansa Yogananda and Jesus Christ. Though Yogananda himself gave little by way explanation about the nature of this link, his extensive commentaries on the Bible (especially the New Testament) strongly suggest it. At least once that we know of, he was asked directly why he gave special emphasis to Jesus’ teachings. His only comment was Read the rest of this entry »

Nayaswami Jamuna Snitkin

There is a folktale called “God Is Coming To Dinner?’ One day, a lady receives in the mail a letter that states,  “Please prepare a meal for me tonight. I will be coming to your house for dinner. Love, God”

She was poor and lived frugally, so this was a big request. Her heart and soul were thrilled. And so as she hadn’t done the shopping for the week’s groceries yet, she took her basket and walked down the road to the store. After choosing bread, cheese and some eggs she began her journey home. At a dusty alleyway there stood two people looking nearly starved and ragged. They pleaded for food. Read the rest of this entry »

Nayaswami Hriman McGilloway

Creation is our Mother in the form of nature. God, through the power of intelligent vibration, has created and sustains the universe, and is seated at the still heart of all flux. In celebrating Mother’s Day, let us include God as Mother, housekeeper of creation. The Bible tells us that God gazed upon His creation and called it good! We, too, should celebrate the manifest beauty, power, and intelligence in all nature, and, most importantly, witness God’s loving presence at the heart of all things and all beings.

Endowed with God’s desireless desire to create and the intelligence to do so, we are “like gods.” The intelligence streaming out from the heart of infinity begins to stretch like a rubber band until it begins to assert itself separate and apart from Divinity. Read the rest of this entry »

Nayaswami Hriman McGilloway

This topic is based on a reading from the book by Swami Kriyananda, Rays of the Same Light. (We use these readings at the Ananda Sunday Services around the world.) This particular reading begins with Jesus Christ counseling his disciples that their spirituality ought to be something greater than that of his (self-styled) enemies, the Pharisees, who were religious leaders in Israel in his time. Kriyananda comments that surely surpassing the superficial sanctity of these hypocrites could not have been the yardstick of spirituality Jesus was offering his disciples! It is their self-righteousness that Jesus was warning his disciples concerning, Kriyananda explains.

There are many approaches to this topic but one certainly has to do with the “holier-than-thou” spirituality that masquerades throughout religion everywhere. It is all too common the tendency of religionists Read the rest of this entry »

Nayaswami Susan McGinnis

From a Sunday Service talk by Nayaswami Susan McGinnis, at Ananda Meditation Temple in Bothell.

As spiritual seekers, we are engaged in affirming our Oneness with all life. Our daily meditation is one way in which we do this, but much of our time is not spent in meditation.  What we do, and even more importantly, the thoughts and feelings we give energy to, determine to a great extent whether we are moving closer to that experience of Oneness or farther away from it- even in our meditations!

Jesus expresses this in the Bible reading for the week: “‘My message to you,’” he said, “‘is this: Whoever is angry with his brother without cause already stands condemned; whoever contemptuously calls his brother a fool shall answer for it to the Supreme Council; and whoever calls his brother an outcast of God shall be in danger of hellfire.’”

Those to whom he was speaking were fixated on outer laws of behavior, Read the rest of this entry »

(Note: this is a summary of Jamuna’s talk at Sunday Service on February 28, 2010.)

In today’s readings we hear that Jesus scolded the Pharisees for their complaint that His disciples did not wash their hands before eating. Jesus admonishes them for honoring only the letter of the law while missing the spirit. Consciousness, He says, is what ultimately determines a man’s spiritual stature.

How different from the nitpicking reasoned whine of the Pharisees is the experience of spiritual vibrations and consciousness! For example, when I was on pilgrimage in Calcutta in 2004, we spent the afternoon at Yogananda’s family home. In one of the rooms where we meditated was the spot where Babaji appeared to Yogananda in 1920 to bless Yogananda’s journey to America. We could feel in that space (84 years later) the highly charged spiritual vibrations of both Babaji and Master.

Nayaswami Jamuna Snitkin

To recall the story from Yogananda’s autobiography, it was with intense prayers and copious tears that Master called to Babaji to confirm Babaji’s blessing upon this momentous undertaking. At last, Babaji appeared to him and announced “I am Babaji” and you are the one I have chosen to go to America.” Master’s joy was so great that he wanted to follow the mahavatar out of the room, but his feet were held fast to the floor. How can we grasp such an experience with just our minds? Yet, the supernal realm of Spirit is our home and our destiny.

The spiritual path is not primarily an intellectual journey, like a tour through a museum listening to historical information on headphones. It is through love and devotion that we grow spiritually, and draw to ourselves the wisdom and blessings of the great lovers of God. Yogananda put it this way, ”where religion rules, love grows dry; where theories rule, understanding diminishes.” Our society is dominated by dogmatism in religion and by theories of human behavior in psychology. We box people in and categorize them in order to simplify or eliminate the imponderables of life.

I am reminded of a story out of the inner city of Los Angeles in the 80’s. A man is riding in downtown L.A. when he finds himself in the crossfire of a shootout. Bullets are flying everywhere. His wife is killed and he is shot repeatedly. At one point he catches sight of a vision of his mother in the back seat of the car and he turns to better see her. She draws him into her heart and at that moment a final bullet enters his back. If he had not turned that would have been a fatal shot to the heart. Afterwards and in preparation for trial, his lawyer counsels him not to tell the full story to the jury because they will think he is crazy. When he gets on the stand he tells the story anyway. The jury is stunned. He is asked later why he defied his lawyer’s advice. He said if he had denied that God existed the last bullet might as well have taken his life.

In the book “Conversations with Yogananda,” Yogananda describes how he had wanted to know more about some of the details of Ramakrishna’s life and consequently he had a visitation from Sri Ramakrishna (the great saint of India in the 19th century). They sat together holding hands. Swami Kriyananda, then a young monk, asked Yogananda: ”Did he tell you about his life? And Master responded, “In the interchange of vibrations I got the whole picture.” This is where we are headed!

Blessings,

Jamuna

We have inherited a medieval mindset when we unthinkingly relegate “God” to some distant universe of indifference or even some unfathomably vast distance from our own daily life and concerns. Yet the life and teachings of God-realized saints and masters are vibrant testimonies to God’s being our closest, and our nearest and dearest friend. God, Yogananda and others have reminded us, has everything, indeed, IS everything in creation. The only one thing God doesn’t possess is our love, our interest, and our attention. This only we can give of our own, free will.

We do not “see” God, or feel God’s presence in our lives, because of our preoccupation with our own thoughts, fears, desires, and activities. As Swami Sri Yukteswar noted in a meeting with a skeptical chemist who couldn’t isolate God in the laboratory, if you could but watch your thoughts for one day you would know why you haven’t “found” God!

In the chapter, “An Experience in Cosmic Consciousness” (in Autobiography of a Yogi), Paramhansa Yogananda was given that supernal experience by the grace of his guru, Sri Yukteswar. He was given the key to entering that blessed state at will, and to bestow that state upon others whose intuition was sufficiently developed to handle the experience. He would enter that state, he wrote, for months at a time. (Incredible to even think of it!).

Nonetheless, after some time, he asked his guru, “When will I find God?” Sri Yukteswar chuckled and commented that surely Mukunda (Yogananda’s pre-monastic, birth name) didn’t expect some bearded man on a throne in some corner of antiseptic space? Sri Yukteswar explained that meditation furnishes a two-fold proof of God: ever-new joy, experienced in meditation, convincing to one’s very atoms, and His adequate guidance to our every need. Yogananda replied that indeed he had found the joy of meditation bubbling up from the subconscious during daily activities, guiding him even in the smallest detail of his actions.

In fact, the superconscious state of our soul manifests itself to us in eight distinct forms of consciousness and feeling (Chitta): peace, wisdom, energy, love, calmness, Aum sound, light, and bliss. Each of these corresponds to the one of the chakras in ascending order (the six chakra has a negative pole at the medulla and a positive pole at the spiritual eye, hence “eight”). Each of these levels of consciousness gives us a gift, both an inward beatitude and an outward one.

For example, peace, the guardian of the higher seven states, washes us clean in meditation of the attachments of daily life, even while, outwardly it blesses us with peace emanations in our work and at home: such emanations are blessings easily felt and appreciated by those around us. Wisdom is more than mere intellectual knowledge. It is grace. It is the vibration of purity and knowing: gnosis. The highest wisdom is to know the Self as the soul. Energy is the fire element that ignites our desire to find God in meditation and to walk the path of daily life with integrity. Love is devotion to God and love for God through our fellow man. Calmness gives us confidence and insight under stress and deep expansive vistas of space in meditation, as well as the beatitude felt when restless thoughts at last subside during meditation. The Aum vibration begins our final ascent to Oneness, for communion with Aum is entrance to higher realms, including communion with its companion, light, and final entrance into the final state of union in unalloyed Bliss.

When we contact any level of these eight aspects of God when are in direct contact with God. Thus even the beginning meditator can access the Divine presence easily. “The time for knowing God has come” Paramhansa Yogananda declared.