TThe founding in the West of a Self-Realization Fellowship organization, a "hive for the spiritual honey," was a duty enjoined on me by Sri Yukteswar and Mahavatar Babaji. The fulfillment of the sacred trust has not been devoid of difficulties.
"Tell me truly, Paramahansaji, has it been worth it?" This laconic question was put to me one evening by Dr. Lloyd Kennell, a leader of the temple in San Diego. I understood him to mean: "Have you been happy in America? What about the falsehoods circulated by misguided people who are anxious to prevent the spread of yoga? What about the disillusionments, the heartaches, the center leaders who could not lead, the students who could not be taught?"
"Blessed is the man whom the Lord doth test!" I answered. "He has remembered, now and then, to put a burden on me." I thought, then, of all the faithful ones, of the love and devotion and understanding that illumines the heart of America. With slow emphasis I went on: "But my answer is yes, a thousand times yes! It has been worthwhile, more than ever I dreamed, to see East and West brought closer in the only lasting bond, the spiritual."
The great masters of India who have shown keen interest in the West have well understood modern conditions. They know that, until there is better assimilation in all nations of the distinctive Eastern and Western virtues, world affairs cannot improve. Each hemisphere needs the best offerings of the other.
In the course of world travel I have sadly observed much suffering:⁷ in the Orient, suffering chiefly on the material plane; in the Occident, misery chiefly on the mental or the spiritual plane. All nations feel the painful effects of unbalanced civilizations. India and many other Eastern lands can greatly benefit from emulation of the practical grasp of affairs, the material efficiency, of Western nations like America. The Occidental peoples, on the other hand, require a deeper understanding of the spiritual basis of life, and particularly of scientific techniques that India anciently developed for man's conscious communion with God.
SELF-REALIZATION FELLOWSHIP LAKE SHRINE AND GANDHI WORLD PEACE MEMORIAL (two photos)
Located in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California, the ten-acre Lake Shrine was dedicated on August 20, 1950, by Paramahansa Yogananda. While supervising the planting and construction work in 1949, Paramahansaji stayed at times in the houseboat shown in the first photo. Visible between the center pillars in the second photo is the carved sarcophagus that enshrines a portion of Mahatma Gandhi's ashes. Across the lake is the Windmill Chapel, seen in the first photo. Self-Realization Fellowship services, meditations, and classes are held weekly at the Lake Shrine, which is open to the public.
The ideal of a well-rounded civilization is not a chimerical one. For millenniums India was a land of both spiritual light and widespread material prosperity. The poverty of the last 200 years is, in India's long history, only a passing karmic phase. A byword in the world, century after century, was "the riches of the Indies." Abundance, material as well as spiritual, is a structural expression of rita, cosmic law or natural righteousness. There is no parsimony in the Divine, nor in Its goddess of phenomena, exuberant Nature.
The Hindu scriptures teach that man is attracted to this particular earth to learn, more completely in each successive life, the infinite ways in which the Spirit may be expressed through, and dominant over, material conditions. East and West are learning this great truth in different ways, and should gladly share with each other their discoveries. Beyond all doubt it is pleasing to the Lord when His earth-children struggle to attain a world civilization free from poverty, disease, and soul ignorance. Man's forgetfulness of his divine resources (the result of his misuse of free will³) is the root cause of all other forms of suffering.
Mr. Goodwin J. Knight, Lt. Governor of California (center), with Yoganandaji and Mr. A. B. Rose, at dedication of Self-Realization Fellowship India Center, adjacent to the SRF temple shown below, Hollywood, California, April 8, 1951
Self-Realization Temple (Church of All Religions), Hollywood
The ills attributed to an anthropomorphic abstraction called "society" may be laid more realistically at the door of Everyman.¹⁰ Utopia must spring in the private bosom before it can flower in civic virtue, inner reforms leading naturally to outer ones. A man who has reformed himself will reform thousands.
Self-Realization Temple (Church of All Religions), Hollywood
The time-tested scriptures of the world are one in essence, inspiring man on his upward journey. One of the happiest periods of my life was spent in dictating, for Self-Realization Magazine, my interpretation of part of the New Testament.¹¹ Fervently I implored Christ to guide me in divining the true meaning of his words, many of which have been grievously misunderstood for twenty centuries.
One night while I was engaged in silent prayer, my sitting room in the Encinitas hermitage became filled with an opal-blue light. I beheld the radiant form of the blessed Lord Jesus. A young man, he seemed, of about twenty-five, with a sparse beard and moustache; his long black hair, parted in the middle, was haloed by a shimmering gold.
His eyes were eternally wondrous; as I gazed, they were infinitely changing. With each divine transition in their expression, I intuitively understood the wisdom conveyed. In his glorious gaze I felt the power that upholds the myriad worlds. A Holy Grail appeared at his mouth; it came down to my lips and then returned to Jesus. After a few moments he uttered beautiful words, so personal in their nature that I keep them in my heart.
I spent much time in 1950 and 1951 at a tranquil retreat near the Mojave Desert in California. There I translated the Bhagavad Gita and wrote a detailed commentary¹² that presents the various paths of yoga.
Twice¹³ referring explicitly to a yogic technique (the only one mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita and the same one that Babaji named, simply, Kriya Yoga), India's greatest scripture has thus offered practical as well as moral teaching. In the ocean of our dream-world, the breath is the specific storm of delusion that produces the consciousness of individual waves — the forms of men and of all other material objects. Knowing that mere philosophical and ethical knowledge is insufficient to rouse man from his painful dream of separate existence, Lord Krishna pointed out the holy science by which the yogi may master his body and convert it, at will, into pure energy. The possibility of this yogic feat is not beyond the theoretical comprehension of modern scientists, pioneers in an Atomic Age. All matter has been proved to be reducible to energy.
The Hindu scriptures extol the yogic science because it is employable by mankind in general. The mystery of breath, it is true, has occasionally been solved without the use of formal yoga techniques, as in the cases of non-Hindu mystics who possessed transcendent powers of devotion to the Lord. Such Christian, Moslem, and other saints have indeed been observed in the breathless and motionless trance (sabikalpa samadhi¹⁴), without which no man has entered the first stages of God-perception. (After a saint has reached nirbikalpa or the highest samadhi, however, he is irrevocably established in the Lord — whether he be breathless or breathing, motionless or active.)
Brother Lawrence, the 17th-century Christian mystic, tells us his first glimpse of God-realization came about by viewing a tree. Nearly all human beings have seen a tree; few, alas, have thereby seen the tree's Creator. Most men are utterly incapable of summoning those irresistible powers of devotion that are effortlessly possessed only by a few ekantins, "singlehearted" saints found in all religious paths, whether of East or West. Yet the ordinary man¹⁵ is not therefore shut out from the possibility of divine communion. He needs, for soul recollection, no more than the Kriya Yoga technique, a daily observance of the moral precepts, and an ability to cry sincerely: "Lord, I yearn to know Thee!"
The universal appeal of yoga is thus its approach to God through a daily usable scientific method, rather than through a devotional fervor that, for the average man, is beyond his emotional scope.
Various great Jain teachers of India have been called tirthakaras, "ford-makers," because they reveal the passage by which bewildered humanity may cross over and beyond the stormy seas of samsara (the karmic wheel, the recurrence of lives and deaths). Samsara (literally, "a flowing with" the phenomenal flux) induces man to take the line of least resistance. "Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God."16 To become the friend of God, man must overcome the devils or evils of his own karma or actions that ever urge him to spineless acquiescence in the mayic delusions of the world. A knowledge of the iron law of karma encourages the earnest seeker to find the way of final escape from its bonds. Because the karmic slavery of human beings is rooted in the desires of maya-darkened minds, it is with mind-control17 that the yogi concerns himself. The various cloaks of karmic ignorance are laid away, and man views himself in his native essence.
The mystery of life and death, whose solution is the only purpose of man's sojourn on earth, is intimately interwoven with breath. Breathlessness is deathlessness. Realizing this truth, the ancient rishis of India seized on the sole clue of the breath and developed a precise and rational science of breathlessness.
Had India no other gift for the world, Kriya Yoga alone would suffice as a kingly offering.
The Bible contains passages which reveal that the Hebrew prophets were well aware that God has made the breath to serve as the subtle link between body and soul. Genesis states: "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a
