Morning, everyone.
I observe this every year, but I’m always mystified by it initially that in this deep topic of practicing living in the presence of God is actually the title of it. That the affirmation is practicality. What a great juxtaposition that is.
Swami Kriyananda told us that Yogananda used to say, “Be practical in your idealism.” And one time I remember there was an issue going on in the community where I was residing at Ananda Village in California, which was that our school, in order to be able to function, required tuition. At the time, we had about 70 Ananda children in the school. It required tuition in order to function.
There was this one man who had a family of four children, and he was constantly struggling trying to hold a job. Things were always a financial challenge for him. So, he complained to Swami Kriyananda that the cost of having four children’s tuitions in the school was just prohibitive for him. Swami had compassion for his situation. He put out the thought to the leaders in the community that instead of the parents paying tuition for the children to support the school, the entire community should consider these children the children of the community, and the financial needs of the school should be spread out among all the residents of the community.
That not only made sense to me, but I was also inspired by that thought, and so I really championed that. But when it came up in the Village Council, the decision-making body in the community, there were a lot of people who didn’t like this plan, especially many of the people who didn’t have children and weren’t accustomed to that expense. Everybody lived paycheck to paycheck in those days. We had what I like to call simple salaries, as we still do today.
It was controversial and there was a lot of discussion, and they came up with a compromise plan, which was that the community would contribute a certain amount to the school’s needs, and the other part would still be divided among the parents for the children’s tuition. So, it was a compromise plan. It was still a good plan and a big help to the families. But I liked that original plan, so I was championing that.
At one point, Swami Kriyananda said to me, “We have to be practical in our idealism.” I’ll never forget it because it was an example of that situation. We can hold this ideal high, but it’s a dream. Like it was said in the reading this morning, it has to be made practical. And in this case, that meant harmonious. There had to be a harmonious solution for everyone in this circumstance.
Being practical in our idealism is a thread that goes through all traditions. St. Therese of Avila had as one of the prerequisites to become a nun in her order to have common sense. Common sense was a prerequisite. I know about half of us wouldn’t be in that order if we had to meet that standard.
Swami Kriyananda put it to us this way: with anything, whether it’s the teaching or a solution for a situation, does it work? It’s only real to us if we experiment with it, which is what yoga asks us to do—try it. Does it work? Do you experience what the teaching holds out as our experience when we do it? Or are we dreaming that maybe it’ll work, but does it work?
I’ve shared with many of you through the years, there was a friend of ours who has become a very deep meditator. When he first took a meditation class from Swami Kriyananda in the San Francisco Bay Area in the sixties, when Swami used to teach there, Swami held out to the class: go home and try to establish a practice, morning and evening.
In other words, twice a day, 20 minutes each. And this man went up to Kriyananda at the end of class, and he said, “I can’t do 20 minutes twice a day.” And Kriyananda said, “That’s okay. Do 15 minutes twice a day.” And the man thought for a minute and said, “I can’t do 15 minutes twice a day.”
Kriyananda then asked, “What can you do?” The man thought for a minute and said, “I can do five minutes twice a day.” Kriyananda said, “Very good. Do five minutes twice a day.” In other words, be practical in your ideal. You want to meditate; do what you can do.
I can’t tell you how many people through the years who are training for Kriya, where Yogananda recommends an hour and a half per day of meditation. We say to them, “That’s the ideal, but you need to do what you can. If you have a 2-year-old child, that’s not going to be practical for you. If you have a lot of commitments or something happening in your life where that’s not possible, do what you can.” I can’t tell you how many people say to me they’re not meditating because they can’t do an hour and a half a day. And I say, “No, no, no. What can you do?” That’s where we start. That’s what’s practical for us at that time. Then it becomes a little bit like a commercial in my childhood for potato chips: “I bet you can’t eat just one.” We do what we can and we experience the benefits from it. It works. Because it works, then we want a little more and a little more. That’s how it works.
Yesterday, I got a call from our daughter, Gita. Gita is now a light bearer at Ananda in Portland. I asked her who was giving the service there today. She said, “I am.” Then she asked, “Who’s doing the service there?” I said, “I am.” She asked me, “How many times have you given Sunday service on that particular topic?” I said, “Well, it’s December. I usually give a lot of services in December, so I’m going to say at least 15 to 20 times.” But every time I give the service and I read the reading, something else in the reading jumps out at me.
This time, the title is “Living in the Presence of God.” I thought, “Well, that could mean two things.” When I look at that on the inside, it means I’m living in the awareness of the presence of God within me. What came to me was this excerpt from the life of the priest of Ars in France, a little village a few centuries ago. He was a saintly soul. I’m going to read it because it’s too perfect to mess up. He said, “At the first moment of the day, I endeavor to unite myself closely to Jesus Christ, who was his Guru. Then I perform my tasks with the thought of this union in mind.” How perfect is that? That’s the inner living in the presence. We do that. Yogananda encourages us to meditate morning and evening. In the morning, it helps us to bring the awareness of our divinity, of that presence, of God’s presence into the day. In the evening, we bring it into the night, into our sleep. So, it becomes a 24-hour experience.
Then there’s living in the presence of God, meaning living in the presence of Yogananda or Christ or one of the great ones. Even though they’re not in the body, by living alongside like-minded souls who are also trying to live in that presence, we have a chance to experience that divinity more purely and more constantly by what we read, by the music we listen to, by all the ways in which we surround ourselves with that presence—with their teachings, their inspiration, the vibration, the music. This time of year, especially, we have a lot more beautiful music composed in that higher vibration. It’s not about the music; it’s about the vibration that the music carries. It uplifts our hearts and souls, whether we’re home cleaning the house or at the temple in devotion. We experience that living presence all around us, reflected from what is happening within us—practicing the presence.
Yogananda’s foremost woman disciple, Sister Gyanamata, used to say, “Shut out the noise of the world, or you’ll miss it.” By that, she doesn’t mean pushing it away; she just means being aware of all the influences in our lives that keep trying to define us by our actions, by our personalities. We’re none of these things.
My mother, bless her soul, enjoyed keeping me at about age nine. Whenever I was with her, it was, “Oh, she loves French toast.” All those outer things that people define us by. It’s not that we push it away, but be aware of it.
In the early years of Ananda, when it was smaller, when we were at Ananda Village, Swami would encourage us to connect with our families. In the old monastic ways, you were just put up in a monastery somewhere in the mountains and wouldn’t see them for years on end. But to visit them at times that are not the most sacred spiritually, like Christmas Day itself. My parents got used to us visiting them the day after, and we celebrated Christmas with them on the 26th.
It’s not to break family traditions, it’s to break our own awareness of our spiritual reality. I was going to say intention, but it’s really our reality that we need to affirm because everything—not just families, everything and everyone around us—tries to define us by what’s happening on the outside. It’s none of that.
Whatever we need to do, if we’re blessed with spiritual parents and they see us in an impersonal way, meaning not by our personality, that’s beautiful. But be aware that all these influences have a subtle impression that they leave with us, that we’re something other than what we really are, which is omnipresent.
Yogananda defines self-realization as “the knowing in all parts of body, mind, and soul, that we are now in the possession of the kingdom of God. That we don’t need to pray for God to come to us. That our reality is God’s reality. And all we need to do is improve our knowing.” That’s all we need to do—improve the knowing of that.
We have many opportunities to do that. There’s a great story about a woman in India whose Guru asked her to get up at four o’clock every morning to meditate. Every morning at four o’clock, she’d hear his sandaled footsteps coming by her door, and she’d wake up and get up to meditate. After many days of this, she was a little tired and stopped getting up, and the footsteps disappeared. In other words, we have to extend ourselves to the Divine Mother, to God. We have to reach out, and then the divine can respond. The divine can only respond to our invitation, to our request. Divine will not impose their will on us. Then we can experience God if we continue to invite God into our consciousness, into our awareness. He’s already there, but we have to become aware of it. The eight-hour meditation, the all-day Christmas meditation next week, is a classic breadcrumb to that invitation.
We don’t have to necessarily meditate for eight hours. We can come for part of it to feel the blessings. But I will tell you, the very first year that I did, I was only 19. I had just learned to meditate that summer. By Christmas time, I went to that meditation, and I determined to myself that I was going to sit through it. Mind you, I didn’t meditate for eight hours. I tried to do it; I meditated as long as I could, and as soon as I found my mind starting to wander, I’d read a couple of lines from Metaphysical Meditations, or use my Kriya Mala to count the prayers for those whom I knew were in need of prayers, and then as soon as I could, I’d go back to the concentration in meditation. So this is our opportunity to extend; we give to each individual; extend an invitation, to God and Guru, to join them next week on that holy occasion.
Reading from Whispers of Eternity: The rocket of my love: I withdrew the life force from my body. The breath, which had kept me tied to the burden of flesh, no longer shook my awareness. My rocket of life penetrated through the star in the all seeing eye of light in my forehead. The rocket soared outward, its cone of focused concentration and deep feeling exploded to oneness with the countless atoms of space, and with the little points of self-awareness in all beings. At last, like an expanding cloud nebula, I embraced the vast Spirit beyond space itself, to enter the heart of Thine omnipresent silence!