Kashi, Reborn and Discovered — Autobiography of a Yogi — SRF Teachings Portal
28.Kashi, Reborn and Discovered
Paramahansa Yogananda·~9 min
rremain, against all persuasion, in the spiritual vibrations of the school. Somehow I felt that if he did not go home, he might avoid the impending calamity.
No sooner had I left than Kashi's father arrived in Ranchi. For fifteen days he tried to break the will of his son, explaining that if Kashi would go to Calcutta for only four days to see his mother, he could then return. Kashi persistently refused. The father finally said he would take the boy away with the help of the police. The threat disturbed Kashi, who was unwilling to be the cause of any unfavorable publicity to the school. He saw no choice but to go.
I returned to Ranchi a few days later. When I heard how Kashi had been removed, I entrained at once for Calcutta. There I engaged a horse cab. Surprisingly, as the vehicle passed beyond the Howrah bridge over the Ganges, the first persons I saw were Kashi's father and other relatives in mourning clothes. Shouting to my driver to stop, I jumped from the cab and glared at the unfortunate father.
"Mr. Murderer," I cried somewhat unreasonably, "you have killed my boy!"
The father had already realized the wrong he had done in forcibly bringing Kashi to Calcutta. During the few days the boy had been there, he had eaten contaminated food, contracted cholera, and passed on.
My love for Kashi, and the pledge to find him after death, night and day haunted me. No matter where I went, his face loomed up before me. I began a memorable search for him, even as long ago I had searched for my lost mother.
I felt that inasmuch as God had given me the faculty of reason, I must utilize it and tax my powers to the utmost in order to discover the subtle laws by which I could know the boy's astral whereabouts. He was a soul vibrating with unfulfilled desires, I realized — a mass of light floating somewhere amidst millions of luminous souls in the astral regions. How was I to tune in with him, among so many vibrating lights of other souls?
Using a secret yoga technique, I broadcasted my love to Kashi's soul through the "microphone" of the spiritual eye, the inner point between the eyebrows.¹ I intuitively felt that Kashi would soon return to the earth, and that if I kept unceasingly broadcasting my call to him, his soul would reply. I knew that the slightest impulse sent to me by Kashi would be felt in the nerves of my fingers, arms, and spine.
Using my upraised hands as antennae, I often turned myself round and round, trying to discover the direction of the place in which, I believed, he had already been reborn as an embryo. I hoped to receive response from him in the concentration-tuned "radio" of my heart.
With undiminishing zeal, I practiced the yoga method steadily for about six months after Kashi's death. Walking with a few friends one morning in the crowded Bowbazar section of Calcutta, I lifted my hands in the usual manner. For the first time, there was response. I thrilled to detect electrical impulses trickling down my fingers and palms. These currents translated themselves into one overpowering thought from a deep recess of my consciousness: "I am Kashi, I am Kashi; come to me!"
The thought became almost audible as I concentrated on my heart radio. In the characteristic, slightly hoarse whisper of Kashi,² I heard his summons again and again. I seized the arm of one of my companions, Prokash Das, and smiled at him joyfully.
"It looks as though I have located Kashi!"
I began to turn round and round, to the undisguised amusement of my friends and the passing throng. The electrical impulses tingled through my fingers only when I faced toward a nearby path, aptly named "Serpentine Lane."
The astral currents disappeared when I turned in other directions.
"Ah," I exclaimed, "Kashi's soul must be living in the womb of some mother whose home is in this lane."
My companions and I approached closer to Serpentine Lane; the vibrations in my upraised hands grew stronger, more pronounced. As if by a magnet, I was pulled toward the right side of the road. Reaching the entrance of a certain house, I was astounded to find myself transfixed. I knocked at the door in a state of intense excitement, holding my very breath. I felt that my long and unusual quest had come to a successful end.
The door was opened by a servant, who told me her master was at home. He descended the stairway from the second floor and smiled at me inquiringly. I hardly knew how to frame my question, at once pertinent and impertinent.
"Please tell me, sir, if you and your wife have been expecting a child for about six months?"³
"Yes, it is so." Seeing that I was a swami, a renunciant attired in the traditional orange cloth, he added politely, "Pray inform me how you know my affairs."
When he heard about Kashi and the promise I had given, the astonished man believed my story.
"A male child of fair complexion will be born to you," I told him. "He will have a broad face, with a cowlick atop his forehead. His disposition will be notably spiritual." I felt certain that the coming child would bear these resemblances to Kashi.
Later I visited the child, whose parents had given him his old name of Kashi. Even in infancy he was strikingly similar in appearance to my dear Ranchi student. The child showed me an instantaneous affection; the attraction of the past awoke with redoubled intensity.
Years later the teenage boy wrote me, during my stay in America. He explained his deep longing to follow the path of a renunciant. I directed him to a Himalayan master, who accepted as a disciple the reborn Kashi.
1 The will, projected from the point between the eyebrows, is the broadcasting apparatus of thought. Man's feeling or emotional power, calmly concentrated on the heart, enables it to act as a mental radio that receives the messages of other persons, far or near. In telepathy the fine vibrations of thoughts in one man's mind are transmitted through the subtle vibrations of astral ether and then through the grosser earthly ether, creating electrical waves that, in turn, transform themselves into thought waves in the mind of the other person.
KASHI
Student at Ranchi School
2 Every soul in its pure state is omniscient. Kashi's soul remembered all the characteristics of Kashi, the boy, and therefore mimicked his hoarse voice in order to stir my recognition.
3 Though many men, after physical death, remain in an astral world for 500 or 1000 years, there is no invariable rule about the length of time between incarnations. (See chapter 43.) A man's allotted span in a physical or an astral embodiment is karmically predetermined.
Death, and indeed sleep, "the little death," are a mortal necessity, freeing the unenlightened human being temporarily from sense trammels. As man's essential nature is Spirit, he receives in sleep and in death certain revivifying reminders of his incorporeity.
The equilibrating law of karma, as expounded in the Hindu scriptures, is that of action and reaction, cause and effect, sowing and reaping. In the course of natural righteousness (rita), each man, by his thoughts and actions, becomes the molder of his destiny. Whatever universal energies he himself, wisely or unwisely, has set in motion must return to him as their starting point, like a circle inexorably completing itself. "The world looks like a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty." — Emerson, "Compensation." An understanding of karma as the law of justice underlying life's inequalities serves to free the human mind from resentment against God and man.
Rabindranath Tagore and
I Compare Schools
"Rabindranath Tagore taught us to sing, as a natural form of self-expression, as effortlessly as birds."
Bhola Nath, a bright fourteen-year-old lad at my Ranchi school, gave me that explanation after I had complimented him one morning on his melodious outbursts. With or without provocation, the boy poured forth a tuneful stream. He had previously attended the famous Tagore school, Santiniketan (Haven of Peace), in Bolpur.
"The songs of Rabindranath have been on my lips since early youth," I told my companion. "All Bengalis, even the unlettered peasants, delight in his lofty verse."
Bhola and I sang together a few refrains from Tagore, who set to music thousands of Indian poems: some of his own composition and others of ancient origin.
"I met Rabindranath soon after he had received the Nobel Prize for literature," I remarked after our vocalizing. "I was drawn to visit him because I admired his undiplomatic courage in disposing of his literary critics." I chuckled.
Bhola, curious, inquired the story.
"The scholars severely flayed Tagore for introducing a new style into Bengali poetry," I began. "He mixed colloquial and classical expressions, ignoring all the prescribed limitations dear to the pundits' hearts. His songs embody deep philosophic truth in emotionally appealing terms, with little regard for the accepted literary forms.
"An influential critic spitefully referred to Rabindranath as a 'pigeon-poet who sold his cooings in print for a rupee.' But Tagore's revenge was at hand; the whole Western literary world paid homage at his feet soon after he himself had translated into English his Gitanjali ("Song Offerings"). A trainload of pundits, including his one-time critics, went to Santiniketan to offer their congratulations.
"Rabindranath received his guests only after an intentionally long delay, and then heard their praise in stoic silence. Finally he turned against them their own habitual weapons of criticism.
"'Gentlemen,' he said, 'the fragrant honors you here bestow are incongruously mingled with the putrid odors of your past contempt. Is there possibly any connection between my award of the Nobel Prize, and your suddenly acute powers of appreciation? I am still the same poet who displeased you when I first offered my humble flowers at the shrine of Bengal.'
"The newspapers published an account of the bold chastisement given by Tagore. I admired the outspoken words of a man unhypnotized by flattery," I went on. "I was introduced to Rabindranath in Calcutta by his secretary, Mr. C. F. Andrews,¹ who was simply attired in a Bengali dhoti. He referred lovingly to Tagore as 'Gurudeva.'
"Rabindranath received me graciously. He emanated an aura of charm, culture, and courtliness. Replying to my question about his literary background, he told me that he had been chiefly influenced by our religious epics and by the works of Vidyapati, a popular fourteenth-century poet."
Inspired by these memories, I began to sing Tagore's version of an old Bengali song, "Light the Lamp of Thy Love." Bhola and I chanted joyously as we strolled over the Vidyalaya grounds.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Inspired Poet of Bengal, and Nobel laureate in literature
About two years after founding the Ranchi school, I received an invitation from Rabindranath to visit him at Santiniketan and discuss our educational ideals. I went gladly. The poet was seated in his study when I entered; I thought then, as at our first meeting, that he was as striking a model of superb manhood as any painter could desire. His beautifully chiseled face, nobly patrician, was framed in long hair and flowing beard. Large, melting eyes; an angelic smile; and a voice of flutelike quality that was literally enchanting. Stalwart, tall, and grave, he combined an almost womanly tenderness with the delightful spontaneity of a child. No idealized conception of a poet could find more suitable embodiment than in this gentle singer.
Tagore and I were soon deep in a comparative study of our schools, both founded along unorthodox lines. We discovered many identical features — outdoor instruction, simplicity, ample scope for the child's creative spirit. Rabindranath, however, laid considerable stress on the study of literature and poetry, and on the self-expression through music and song that I had already noted in the case of Bhola. The Santiniketan children observed periods of silence but were given no special yoga training.
The poet listened with flattering attention to my description of the energizing Yogoda exercises and of the yoga concentration techniques taught to all students at Ranchi.
Tagore told me of his own early educational struggles. "I fled from school after the fifth grade," he said, laughing. I could readily understand how his innate poetic delicacy
