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• Robert Holzhauser

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Lesson Two MAKE ME ANYTHING: A CHRISTIAN OR A HINDU—ANYTHING TO REALIZE THEE WHISPERS FROM ETERNITY BY

PARAMHANSA YOGANANDA

Let me be Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Mohammedan, or Sufi: I care not what be my religion, race, creed, or color, if only I can win my way to Thee! But let me be none of these if that identity enmeshes me in an enclosing net of religious or social formalities. Let me travel the royal high road of realization which leads to Thee. If I am traveling on some bypath of religion, lead me onto the one common highway of realization which leads straight to Thee. Send me the sunshine of Thy wisdom, that it lead me to the morning of my growing powers; and send me the moon of Thy mercy to guide me rightly, if ever I am lost in the dark night of sorrow.

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The Teachings of Patanjali Sutra One: “Now comes the subject of Yoga.” Thus begins the only book on yoga that is universally recognized as a scripture. It was written by a great master of spirituality who lived thousands of years ago. Almost nothing is known about Patanjali. He is believed to have been married, and he lived, obviously, in India. The rest is, as far as I know, obscure. The particularly difficult aspect of his teaching, however, for us who live today, is that he so condensed his explanations as to make them almost incomprehensible! In modern times, we are fond of words, and use them expansively. Adjectives and adverbs are the entrée and dessert of present-day writing. If a writer can tell us that a certain scene included a sunset, he won’t miss the opportunity. If he can describe that sunset as “glowing, multi-hued, radiant,” etc., and tell us that it made him feel “transformed, tranquil, peaceful, and suffused with happiness” as he watched it, he will almost certainly seize the chance. The spiritual teacher in India thousands of years ago would have considered the sunset itself quite irrelevant, related as it was to mere sensory knowledge, and just another aspect, therefore, of the delusion he wanted his students to transcend. Patanjali, for most people in our times, reads rather like a shopping list! And yet his is the only yoga scripture which everyone accepts as authoritative. For the modern reader, his succinctness can cause one to tear out the hair! Fortunately, Paramhansa Yogananda, a modern master, had the same profound insights as Patanjali. All liberated masters have attained the same level of realization, however much their followers may squabble about their relative merits. Yogananda explained Patanjali’s teachings with simple clarity. There is a widely circulated printout of classes my Guru gave on the subject. Those classes, however, were sometimes confusing, for he departed often from his subject to address particular questions in the minds of his audience. The essence of all he taught elsewhere, however, includes Patanjali’s teachings. He spent many hours, moreover, with me alone in the desert, discussing the finer points of these teachings. What I present here are not my thoughts, but those of my Guru. “Now comes the subject of Yoga.” That word, “now,” he explained, contains the essential meaning of this sutra, or verse. It implies that, in order to learn about yoga, one must first be schooled in the principles of Shankhya. One must, in other words, understand the universal need for the higher consciousness which will be provided by yoga practice. The teachings of Shankhya are as ancient as those of yoga. In them, the true nature of human life is explained: not the day-by-day existence we all share, with breakfast, lunch, and dinner; the need for work to support ourselves; the urge most people feel for marriage, sex, the satisfaction of

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producing children; the need for the pleasure of having possessions, for others’ esteem, for sensory indulgence, and for self-reassurance. What the Shankhya teachings point out is that no fulfillment can ever last very long. Too many fulfillments in life require, moreover, a commitment of energy that binds people to an ever-turning wheel. Every fulfillment is followed by disappointment; every success, by failure; every triumph, by some kind of defeat. It is like a children’s playground swing: forward movement must be followed by an equal backward swing. The farther the swing moves forward, moreover, the farther it must swing back in the opposite direction. The greater the outer fulfillment, the greater also the outer disappointment. One’s happiest moments are balanced by one’s most miserable. If one is lucky—that is to say, if one’s karma is good—his happiest moments will all the sooner result in his most miserable. The very afternoon of the day on which he received his long-awaited promotion, he may learn that he has cancer. Usually, karma is intermixed and complex. The cancer will be discovered years later, and will be attributed to some completely unrelated cause. Thus, people go bumping on through life, never understanding why so many wrong things happen to them, priding themselves for the wrong reasons, and blaming others for every misfortune or unhappiness, though in reality the misfortune was brought on by themselves. The nature of unhappiness is that it creates the thought that one’s misery will never end. Suffering does end of course, and because there is always a dim light at the end of that tunnel, people reach out for it in hope— that one illness preserved by Pandora when she closed her box. “Get away,” Krishna cries in the Bhagavad Gita, “from My ocean of suffering and misery!” Ordinary human beings are spiritually blind. In their ignorance they blame God. They think God is cruel, indifferent, angry with them for embracing error, and coldly callous to their subsequent, inevitable suffering. One wonders why people continue to cling to the wheel. But the answer is recognized by everybody: there is always hope! They have known enjoyment and success: perhaps they will know them again. And in fact these things do come back. People cling by choice to the wheel. Their clinging is not God’s wish for them. Shankhya tell us why we should get off that wheel. Clinging to it will get us nowhere. It could not possibly be otherwise. The deeper “why” of it, however, is not explained by Shankhya. A saying of this philosophy is, “Ishwar ashidha, God is not proved”—the point not being that God doesn’t exist, but rather that knowledge of the world through the senses cannot prove His existence. Shankhya is directed toward proving that sensory knowledge is inadequate for any true understanding. (The labors of science will always be, therefore, futile!) Elsewhere in the Indian teachings, it is made clear that what we call God is, in fact, Infinite Consciousness. That Consciousness, the Supreme Spirit, is without substance, and without any kind of movement. Its nature is 12

Satchidananda: ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new Bliss. The “evernewness” of that state inspires the manifestation of Itself from time to time as Cosmic Creation. This it does by setting Itself superficially—at the surface, so to speak, of the Infinite Ocean of Awareness—in motion. The Christian New Testament, the Gospel of Saint John, begins with the sentence, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The meaning of this sentence is no different from what I have written already. The word of human speech is the vibration of man’s consciousness. And the Word of God is the vibration of Divine Consciousness. Truth, whether in the East or the West, cannot but be the same. The Cosmic Vibration, AUM, is what the Bible calls the Holy Ghost. In Christian tradition we learn that God is a Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; three in one and one in three. The mystery seems impossible of solution. But it is explained quite simply in the Hindu tradition—as simply as anything cosmic can be explained in human terms! God the Father is the Supreme Spirit: Sat. God the Holy Ghost is AUM. The Son is not Jesus Christ, but the Christ Consciousness, Tat, or the Kutastha Chaitanya: the unmoving consciousness of Spirit reflected (so to speak) in every point of Creation. For there cannot be two infinite realities. The vibration necessary to produce Creation cannot exist as a separate reality from that of the evermotionless Spirit. In that vibration itself there would have to exist also the state beyond movement. And so it does. For at the central point between each oppositional movement, there would have to be a point of rest where those opposites are canceled out. That point of rest is the “reflection” of the state of stillness beyond Creation: the Supreme Spirit itself. This still reflection is the Christ Consciousness—Tat in the Sanskrit terminology. Thus, we have the three in one and one in three! Jesus, the man, was not the “son of God.” But in meditative awareness he was one with the Christ consciousness. He himself (be it noted) used both expressions: son of man, and Son of God. It was in that higher state only that he could say rightly, “I and my Father are one.” By his example, and also by the example of all who, by perfect inner stillness and purity, have attained that high state of consciousness, we may all become aware that we are, all of us, products of God’s consciousness. All the talk in churches about our being the children of Adam and Eve, and born in sin, is itself a sin! Sin means error. It means to think we can find fulfillment in acts and attitudes that will in fact keep us bound to delusion: our worldly existence. This whole universe is a dream. It has no actual form, substance, or reality of any kind. It is God’s dream! Our greatest sins are only errors, committed in misunderstanding. We ourselves may sin, but we are not sinners. No sin can define our reality. A saint, Yogananda used to say, is a sinner who never gave up! Our very existence came from God. And our destiny is to return to Him— to merge back in Him. This is Sanaatan Dharma, the Eternal religion. There cannot, in the entire universe, be another. Religions that call themselves

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Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and the like are misnomers. There can only be one Truth, and that truth is this religion. It depends not on beliefs, but on actual, vivid, personal experience. In the end, this experience must come to every soul. Creation can exist only because of the principle of dwaita, duality: action and reaction; up and down; pleasure and grief; fulfillment and disappointment. The underlying reality of all these opposites is the unmoving Spirit, whose nature is perfect bliss. Back, then, to Patanjali. We see clearly from the above that nothing—no outward state of consciousness, no outward state of existence, no outward fulfillment—can ever endure for long. The ancient Greeks had a saying, “Panta rhe, All is flux.” No human fulfillment can endure. Success cannot but alternate with failure; happiness, with sorrow; pleasure, with pain. Remember my analogy of the swing? The farther in any direction the swing of your reactions and emotions, the farther it must swing back in the opposite direction. The greater your personal awareness of fulfillment—any outward fulfillment, whether it be of the body and the senses, the emotions, or the mind—the greater will have to be your disappointment. Is there an answer? Surely, from everything I have written, the answer is obvious. Live more at your center within! Be always inwardly calm. Never allow anything to upset you. Don’t give in to excitement over any gain. Be always even-minded and cheerful. When tests come to you, accept them serenely in the certainty that things will sooner or later turn out for the best—only to worsen again? Well, yes, of course. The wheel of your life will keep on turning, but you will be the less likely to fall, the closer you stand at the center. Always remember, it isn’t any particular thing, condition, or circumstance that can ever make you either sad or happy: It is your self—your reactions! A sunset may thrill you with its beauty, but it is never sunset that provides the thrill. A turtle might see the same event and wonder only if it was something good to eat. The more you cultivate your own ability to enjoy, the more you will delight in everything—even in watching crowds of people as they bustle through the city’s streets. I had an interesting dream not long ago. Some enemies of mine had determined to burn me at the stake. They tied me to a post, piled fagots under me, and set them afire. I remember thinking at the time, “This pain won’t last long, and then I’ll be free from my body altogether. My consciousness will survive. Surely, because I’ve tried to live a good life, I will be happy. What, then, does this little bit of suffering matter? I will accept it calmly.” While I was thus thinking, my enemies (as can happen in dreams) sat down at a banquet table nearby. Laughing happily, they feasted, quaffing one another in merriment with toast after toast. At just that moment, friends of mine came and released me before the flames could rise high enough to burn me badly. At this point I awoke, happy to realize that I had been no more relieved by my friends’ saving me than wretched when my enemies tied me to the stake. This attitude, I realized, is what we should hold always, toward no matter what befalls us. Ours should

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not be so much an attitude of indifference as one of waiting to see what God has in store for us. For indifference falls short of the true mark. I once met a sadhu (one who has totally embraced the spiritual life), who was a hundred and thirty-two years old. That fact alone shows that he must have made notable spiritual progress. He told me, “You should never enjoy anything.” “What,” I asked, “not even a beautiful sunset?” “No,” he replied severely, “nothing!” And I thought, What a dry attitude! Yogananda taught us to enjoy everything with the joy of God. “Even life’s harshest experiences” do you ask? Even dirt and garbage? One time when Yogananda was a boy he saw a pile of putrid rice on the street. A passing cow sniffed at it and backed away hurriedly. “I can eat that rice!” Master exclaimed to a companion. “God is in that rice as much as in everything else.” “If you eat it,” scoffingly cried his friend, “I will eat it!” “Remember your words!” Master answered. He then stooped down and, picking up a handful of the rice, ate it with every evidence of relish. Horrified, his friend bolted as if for his life! But Yogananda (Mukunda he was called at that time) took up another handful of the rice and gave chase. Overtaking his friend, he insisted, “You must keep your promise!” He thrust the handful of rice into the boy’s mouth, who immediately threw up everything in his stomach. I must make it clear that I am not asking you to eat putrid rice! All I’m asking is that you accept with an even mind whatever happens in your life. Whatever comes, it cannot but change in time to its opposite. Death is the fear most people hold supreme in their hearts. Yet what they see when people die is only their vacated bodies. We are not this body. The body is but the vehicle through which we express ourselves on earth. After death, our consciousness becomes liberated from this heavy burden. We become free to experience a new and lighter reality. My own father didn’t believe in life after death. When he died, however, I distinctly felt his presence. It had the same enthusiastic, energetic outlook I remembered so well from my childhood days. When a person dies, he no longer has a body to experience pain, hunger, and disease. Whether or not he is joyful depends on how he has lived. If he has lived a kindly life (as my father did), he will be happy. On the other hand, if he lived viciously, he will experience the pain he inflicted on others as well as the pain of the vicious attitude itself. While he remained in his physical body, there was always that protecting—though at the same time confining—wall of matter surrounding him, within which he could huddle. At death, that protection disappears. A person’s emotions are released and expand into their true nature. Thus, if one has been kind to others, he will experience love and happiness to an intensified degree. But if he has been unkind, he will experience a grayly shriveled existence, cut off from his surroundings and alone. 15

It is important, along with the teaching that we should enjoy all things with the joy of God (from within, in other words, from the higher Self), for us to love all—again, with the love of God. Human love is possessive. Divine love is self-giving. Human love thinks in terms of what it might receive from others. Divine Love seeks satisfaction in giving. Why should these statements be true? Because all of us are, in essence, children of God. It is our ego-consciousness that makes us see ourselves as separate—not only from God, but from one another and from everything else. Ego-consciousness is the source of all our suffering. When we draw anything to ourselves, the result is that we narrow our consciousness and thereby submit ourselves increasingly to our own suffocating littleness. But when we give of ourselves, we expand our self-identity and embrace a larger, freer reality. To be ready for the spiritual path, you must have reached—or must try to reach—the understanding that this world is not for you; that only God can satisfy your every need. “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind, with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and love thy neighbor as thyself.” Your neighbor is, in the highest sense, yourself. To hurt him is to invite the same hurt to yourself. To make him happy is to increase your own happiness. These truths are easy to test! Why not make the experiment? Why doesn’t everyone realize their truth? The answer is quite simple: It takes a long time to reach high levels of maturity. And a very long time is always necessary. One lifetime is simply not enough. Not nearly enough! Is it possible that we have lived before? Is it likely that we will live again? These questions must wait to be answered in the next lesson.

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Story Nothing Works A certain lover of God was frail and sickly. His frailty kept him from meditating as deeply as he would have liked. When death came, as it must to all, an angel appeared before him and asked, “Is there anything you would like in your next life?” “Yes!” cried the devotee. “I would like to be reborn with a healthy, strong body.” “Is that all you want?” the angel asked. “Yes!” the devotee replied with certainty. In his next life, that prayer was granted. Alas! however, he was born poor, and never had the means of satisfying his robust appetite. When death came this time, the angel appeared and said, “I see you still have a desire.” “Yes!” cried the devotee. “In my next life I would like not only a healthy body, but also money with which to enjoy my good health.” In his next life, accordingly, he was born to both health and wealth. But—he was lonely! This time, when death came, he asked for health, wealth, and someone with whom to share his good fortune. Thus, in this new life he was given health, wealth, and a beautiful wife. But alas! she died after one year. He spent the rest of his life worshiping her gloves, her dress, her jewels. When death came this time, the angel asked, “What now?” “In my next life I want health, wealth, and a beautiful wife who lives a long life.” And in his succeeding life he got all that. This time, however, his wife lived too long. He tired of her, and at last went off with his beautiful young secretary, who cared only for his money. She took that, and ran off with her handsome young lover. This time, when death came and the devotee still looked unsatisfied, the angel came and demanded, “So what is it this time?” “Nothing! I want nothing! I see that, with every fulfillment, there is always a catch. I want only one fulfillment now: the joy of union with my Infinite Beloved. Then, even if I am sickly, poor, and bereft of human love, I will find complete and eternal fulfillment in God.” Affirmation I will seek in my higher Self for every fulfillment.

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