Be true to your own path with Nayaswami Padma
I was looking around today for the murti of Lahiri because we’ve been celebrating him. He must have gotten moved to Hansa or something. Anyway, Lahiri Mahashaya is the one on the far left. He was the Guru of Shri Yukteshwar, who was the Guru of Yogananda. Yogananda did make physical contact with Lahiri at birth in his lifetime. His parents were disciples of Lahiri Mahashaya. Lahiri Mahashaya was the one who first received, again in this age, Kriya Yoga from his Guru Babaji, who is right next to him there. It inspired me today to reflect a little bit on Lahiri.
First of all, Yogananda, whose teachings we practice here, felt the motivation to write his ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ to tell the world about the life of Lahiri. It expanded from there. He visited many saints, looked for his own Guru, and ended up finding Sri Yukteswar. He had a powerful path of his own that he went deeply with. He was self-realized, but he also visited other saints, both in India and on a journey from the West back to the East; along that way, Western Saints as well, because as was illustrated in the story about Gyandev this morning, he recognized that the same God is reflected in all of these saintly souls. In fact, the same God is reflected in all souls.
I want to go a little deeper with that, but first, share a story that I read about a disciple of Lahiri. It was a man named Hitlal. He lived in the countryside in West Bengal in India. He was in a field where they made bricks, and he was a supervisor there. He led a very dharmic life (a very righteous life). He supported his family, had children, and so on, a wife and children on a very small amount of money each month. Yet when someone would come to tell him that they were in need of something financially, he would give to them, and it meant that the family went without that month. Nevertheless, he was so generous. He didn’t think that way. He only thought about naturally giving when somebody was in need. He had an inner life; he would sit along the river Ganga, the Ganges, and contemplate and meditate for hours on end. But he didn’t know that he had a Guru at that point. He didn’t know he had a path, right? This is finding the many pathways that we have. One day he was at work and felt somehow frustrated that there was something missing in his life. He didn’t know what, but something was missing. He said, “I need to do something about this.” So, he left and felt like he needed to go somewhere, and he started walking. He got to the rail station, went up to the little man behind the booth selling tickets, and said, “I need a ticket.” The man said, “Well, where do you want to go?” Hitlal said, “I don’t know. This is the money I have. Just give me a ticket.” The man felt his distress and thought, “I’m going to give him a ticket to Kashi,” which was the name of the Holy City in India, which is like Jerusalem in the west, a very holy place. The British called it Benaras, and I think we call it Varanasi today. So anyway, he took the ticket, and the little man who sold it to him said, “May God bless you on your journey.” He went by train to Kashi, and he remembered enroute that there was a section of Kashi where Bengalis lived, and he was from Bengal. So, he asked directions and walked to that section when he got there. He still didn’t know what was drawing him there, but in any case, this very calm looking man came out of one of the homes and said, “You know, why don’t you come with me?” And Hit said, “Well, I don’t know you and you don’t know me.” The man said, “You need some rest. You need a bath; you need some food. When you’re all done with that, we’ll talk about it.” And so, he arranged for this young man to get all of that. When he was finished, he came out of the room and there was somebody standing there. He asked that person, “Who is this man?” That person said, “It’s Lahiri Mahasaya.” He had heard of Lahiri Mahasaya, but he’d never met him. Lahiri invited him into the sitting room and said, “The time for your initiation has come, and that’s why I sent for you. I brought you here.” Hitlal fell at his feet, and he felt so blessed. Lahiri initiated him into Kriya. That’s the kind of pull; it’s a dramatic story, but we all have an inner pull that is pulling us in different directions, spiritually speaking. Then when we find ourselves in a place where we feel resonance, you know, I remember the feeling I had first when I met Swami Kriyananda in 1970. I thought, “This man has something I want.” Peace, joy. He was calm and centered. That’s what I wanted. I came from a family that was not that. So, I recognized it when I saw it.
We all have something that happens to us. I know one of the things I remember thinking was there was not one word that I heard uttered about the teachings of Yogananda that I could find fault with. I resonated with every single word. And so, I was home and I knew it. In 1973, I moved there. But it’s not easy to walk our path. I love that you all sang “Walk Like a Man, Go on Alone” this morning, because that’s really the theme of this subject. Many are the pathways, but to walk our pathway, sometimes we’re going on alone. In reality, there are no two paths that are the same. Even when we’re on the same spiritual path, each of us has a unique expression of that path. I like to think of it this way. If you had these giant glass jars and they’re filled, each of them, with some amount of M&Ms or something, so you can see it clearly, they’re all going to be different. They’re not going to be the same amount. We all have different karma. To the extent of our karma, we resonate more or less with different aspects, even of the same truth, teaching, and have different, slightly different expressions of it. And that’s good. Diversity is good. We cannot walk lockstep, all in the same direction. If we try, we go against our own natures.
So, what happened to me in 1973 is I moved to Ananda in California. There were, at that point, about 500 acres that we now call Ananda Village, which grew to become about a thousand acres. Five miles down the road was the original 72 acres that Swami Kriyananda had purchased. We call it, or I call it, the old retreat versus the new retreat. That’s where most people were living back then. I had a little A-frame. There was no running water, no electricity. It was very, very rustic. My parents, our family, had immigrated to America when I was 10 to the land of opportunity so that I could, and my two older brothers could, go to university and live the good life. And I end up in this little cabin with no water, no electricity—this tiny little thing made out of a reject cord of wood that we got from the lumberyard. And in any case, let’s just say my parents were not pleased yet. They loved me. They loved their three children, and so they didn’t, they knew they couldn’t stop me at that point. I was 22, but they definitely were not pleased. And it took a lot to walk my path and take the criticism and questioning that was constantly coming whenever I would visit them.
And so, each of us walking our path, it’s not that easy to do, but if we feel that inner resonance, it’s so important that we heed that call, that Lahiri pulling Hitlal all in that direction to him. God is calling us all the time, and we can’t walk somebody else’s path. People try to do that. But the reading this morning that I’m going to just read the exact words, “the pursuance of another’s duties is fraught with spiritual danger.”
So, when we try to do it the way somebody else is doing it, it backfires. It may not in that first moment, but it will in time because we’re out of resonance with our own nature. There are as many paths as there are souls when we look at it that way. Climbing up the mountain of God, realization or not. I mean, my family ranged from agnostic to atheist, but they were good people. So eventually, their souls would get there. But until then, it was sort of a limited perspective on life. That’s why in the prior age, tribalism was so dominant because people would hang out with those who did the same thing. And then that’s how they lived back then. We’re not in that age any longer. My good friend Devi tells the story of taking Swami Kriyananda to the dentist, and they’re in the waiting room at the dental office, and she’s looking through a magazine and lands on a picture of a beautiful woman in a business suit. It was some kind of advertisement or something. And she commented, “Oh, that poor woman to live that life, you know, that she was leading.” Swami said, “Why do you say that? Everything is needed in God’s play. Every role is needed. We all have a different role. There’s no sense to judge one or another. The recognition that God is in everyone and that woman was fulfilling her dharma in that moment keeps us away from any kind of judgment that says, “no, not this pathway, not this pathway, only my pathway is going to work.”
And so it was, he took it to that level. But people who have refined spiritual realization recognize God in different ones in different paths that we’re all aware of. For instance, Martin Luther King went to India to study directly. He had read books of Gandhi’s method of non-cooperation with injustice. He went to India to see how Gandhi’s followers, because Gandhi was no longer alive, actually lived that. How does it work on the ground in reality? He brought that back and used much of that in his own efforts towards equality in this country.
When Yogananda went from the West back to India in 1935, he visited Theresa Neumann. She was a stigmatist; she received the stigmata every Friday in her adult life, and he wanted to meet her. So, he found her in a little village in Bavaria. She was secluded in such a way that the church didn’t want her meeting with a lot of different people. It was tiring for her. They were holding Yogananda at bay. Then she sent a message. She said, “I will see the man of God from India.” So, she did meet with him. The great ones don’t have to see you physically to know your vibration, to know your essence. She hadn’t even seen him, but she knew that he was a man of God. They recognized each other instantly. The longer we meditate and do our spiritual practices and live in Satsang; in fellowship with one another, we begin to feel each other’s vibrations. Our aspirations, our desire to love God, to know God becomes more apparent until we see it in everyone, because everyone on the planet has that! It may not be as front and center as it is for some, but it is inside all of us.
I remember being in a waiting room with Swami Kriyananda myself. We were visiting him in India and he needed to have a medical test. The test turned out to show that he had colon cancer and required surgery. So, it was a serious test that he was taking, we were in this hospital, very, very modern; very, very clean in Delhi. The waiting room was tiny though. It was maybe 10 by 10 or something. There was a Muslim family sitting next to us. Swami, just being Swami, engaged them in a friendly conversation. Then he started talking to them about how he had just finished Yogananda’s commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita. The family was Muslim. The Bhagavad Gita is not their scripture, but there was a deep respect. So, Swami told them about how he’d finished that, and he had the little book of Shlokas. He gifted that to the father in the group. They were just thrilled. Then Swami burst into song. He remembered Yogananda singing Bengali Divine Mother love songs. He remembered each word from that time, and he started singing. That family was just so charmed by it; they felt so much gratitude for that connection they were having. And so, it didn’t matter if you’re practicing the teachings of Krishna and they’re practicing the Muslim faith, Christianity—it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we connect on that level: their love for God, our love for God, my love for God, and your love for God. That’s what it’s all about.
I just want to close with how much it means to me that EastWest is alive and well again in Edmonds because our EastWest bookshop is where Ananda has the opportunity to practice the universality of Yogananda’s teachings. We offer their books from every spiritual tradition and also just modalities like healing and so on. People can find what is meaningful to them and take it home. It’s not that they find Ananda necessarily, although some do, but most just walk away with something that they resonate with and we’re happy that they do. So many are the pathways.
Blessings.