Ananda Northwest visits Yogananda’s Southern California Shrines:
Well, good morning, everyone.
Twenty-six of us returned from Southern California on Friday after five days of a pilgrimage to the places where Yogananda lived & taught. To paraphrase a charming, tongue-in-cheek sentence from the autobiography, fresh from the plane (a euphemism, merely), we were tired, but happy. For those of you who know that sentence. But it’s interesting how this reading and message today fit very nicely, at least in my experience this last week, and I think with many of us.
For one thing, when you go on a pilgrimage and you go to very sacred places and you go inward with your intention, the vibration of those places endorses that intention. What happens, what we experience—and I’ve experienced it many times, whether in India or Southern California, and I think all of us did—is a suspension of time. For us, it was only five days, but it seemed like forever. The blessings there are deeply profound. But I noticed here, in listening to Rika’s reading the rays from the book, the message that we contrast: “I come not to bring peace. I come with the sword.” With the Bhagavad Gita at the end, in which the Yogi sees all things, all phenomenal objects, and experiences as expressions of the One, how do we reconcile that?
During this trip, this last week, there was one theme that came to me that I want to share with you. It takes commitment to achieve success in any department of life worth striving for. It’s as if our conscience is the voice of our soul. Even if you have a guilt complex, the voice of your soul may be a little bit muddied by the voice of the subconscious, but nonetheless, that voice calls us to aspire to goodness, to health, to harmony, to success, even material success. That voice is our Karma, of course, speaking our duty in life. It varies by each of us, but it calls us to awaken and some would say struggle, but others would say to make the effort. And yet, in the transcendent state of inner peace and the vibration that many of us experienced this last week at these blessed holy shrines, all of that sort of vanishes.
Now, I think for many people who visit these places, and many of us, the 26 of us, there were eight from Portland, one from Ananda member from Ananda Houston, and the rest of us from this center here. But I think there’s one thing that stands out typically, which is the opportunity groups have. I don’t know how many individuals who visit Yogananda’s headquarters on the top of Mount Washington overlooking downtown Los Angeles, as if to bless the city of angels with the power of an angel, get upstairs to the third floor to visit master’s rooms. But I know Padma and many of you have been there. You step into that space and it’s a wormhole into an infinite reality. Words don’t really do it justice, but there’s a power there. This time for me, I looked at master’s overstuffed chair there, and it was draped in one of his ochre-colored shawls. I felt power. I don’t mean that’s a strange word in the English language to say power, but strength, you know, just yes, willpower, but in a divine way. This person, this great soul, this avatar was a man of great accomplishments. In his presence, people who felt attuned naturally would become still. I think of the monastics there—obedience, humility, stillness, self-offering. That energy, the same energy that is made, creates, sustains, and dissolves; this great universe that we live in was sort of focused there. I felt it emanating out. If they would’ve let me—and I’ll get into that here in a minute—I’d have fallen to my knees and prostrated for sure, but they don’t let you do such things there. In any case, you feel something. In his bedroom, which adjoins it, it was just peaceful. What else could a bedroom be of an avatar, right? Just waves of silent inner peace.
So, that experience; there are five sites there. There’s the Gardens of Encinitas, the Mount Washington headquarters, which was the first property he got, and then there was Lake Shrine, which was the last property he developed, Hollywood Church, where our founder, Swami Kriyananda, as a young monk, began his ministry. We also went to Forest Lawn, just a few minutes away, where Yogananda’s body remains interred in this beautiful, amazing place that the Forest Lawn people have created. As an aside, we also visited what’s called the Temple of Joy, which is the home of Casey Hughes and his partner. It’s very lovely. It was a place where we got to do our meditations in Encinitas. Now, what’s interesting that came to me in this experience, and I’ll say a little bit about the place, is just briefly. Many of you have been there, many more of you know about them. Encinitas was acquired while Yogananda went back to India in 1935-36. He basically really knew what was going on, but he pretended he didn’t because he had had a vision before he left India of three locations, and a beachside hermitage was one of those locations. When he got back, his chief disciple, Rajeshri Janakananda, whose work and life as a great devotee and a realized soul was to help support, financially, Yogananda’s fledgling work in America. And so, Rajeshri built this beautiful hermitage on the bluff overlooking the vast Pacific Ocean. It’s quite beautiful. Over time, these incredible gardens were built. We were only able to visit the gardens. I’ve only once been allowed to enter the hermitage and see the room where Yogananda wrote the Autobiography of a Yogi. For the sake of Bruce here today, he also wrote the Rubaiyat interpretations. The beauty of all the five locations that SRF manages is beyond compare. The power of the vibration of those places is also beyond compare. Basically, they’re doing something quite beautiful inwardly and outwardly. It’s really a museum.
Divine Mother manifests this universe in three different ways in forms. One is the outgoing, creative thing, the other is to preserve, and the other one is to dissolve and clear the veils of duality towards transcendence. Their role in the great work of Yogananda and the lineage of the masters is to preserve these beautiful places. You see the renunciates; the women wear these beautiful saris, and they’re all neat and prim. The monks or brothers wear simple shirts and so forth. They’re all very kind, humble, and inward. It’s that sort of perfect vision of monasticism with the beautiful vibration there. Of course, what goes on behind closed doors is that people are people, and there’s a high turnover among the monks and nuns. Most of them are from foreign countries, which tells me that Americans don’t obey. They’re not humble, and they’re anything but still and not restless. Anyway, that’s my observation. Take it or leave it. Anyway it’s beautiful, and they’re doing a beautiful thing. However, all you get to do is go to the museum and see it and be inspired. But do you live that way? Do you aspire to be a monk or nun? Do you live with humility, calmness, inner peace, with obedience to what the guru has given us? Obedience to your own conscience, not to mention anything, not so much I’d say.
So, it’s a beautiful gift that they have for us. I reflected on that. Here we are at Ananda, we’re all a little bit crazy. We’ve got these communities, and Swami was the only one who took up the challenge that Master gave all the way to the end of his life—that intentional communities would be a way of life in the future. I mean, not for everybody, of course, but as a new age form of monasteries, a new age form of ashrams where people of all states of life—householders and renunciates, single people, old and young, from every different background—could live together and serve in harmony.
We had the opportunity to see a couple of films that I had never seen before. One I want to mention was a film without an audio track, unfortunately. It was a film of Master, of Yogananda, dedicating the Hollywood Temple in 1942. I think it was August 30th, if I remember. For those of you who have been there, you know there’s a dais, and he’s sitting there in his yoga finery and so forth, sitting in a sort of low chair. Beside him on one side is the future governor of California, and on the other side is the consul general from Los Angeles, Indian Consulate and so on, a man who later was present for Yogananda’s Maha Samadhi 10 years later. Instead of the things we see on YouTube where he’s looking into the camera, knowing he’s being filmed, this was him interacting with a number of people in his own way. I had never seen his facial features, which were very distinctly, to my mind, Bengali. That’s a trivial point, but he was a master—not only the master of ceremonies, but in a way, of publicity. He had the chief of police from Los Angeles there, and he’d have these people come up, and he had these ribbons he’d put on their necks. The chief of police got some award for racial integration or something, and then some actors came up from a movie that nobody knows or has ever heard of. And normally, if I was the host of something and I was awarding people, I’d stand up and do it the whole time. He sat in the chair, and he was really the guru, even with these people for whom he was not the guru. To see the expressions on people’s faces, like the Lieutenant Governor and others, each person that he interacted with, it was with love but also very perceptive. There was no sort of personality there. It was like a window. His facial features would change. It was most remarkable. I just have never seen anything like that before. What touched me there, besides what I’ve already said, is the fact that in his life, he was dynamic. He barnstormed across the country, year after year. He came to Seattle twice. Most of those early years, after he purchased Mount Washington in 1925, he wasn’t even there. He put other people in charge. He’d come back for Christmas and so forth. He had a pilot program with intentional communities during the 40s. He tried to start a school at Mount Washington, but it didn’t quite work out. The parents weren’t ready to send their kids there. He had a carrot juice processing plant in Encinitas. He had a farm, and in the Hollywood church that was dedicated upstairs and, on the street, Sunset Boulevard no less, was a mushroom burger cafe in the 40s! Mushroom burgers! This was LA! He was out there! He had billboards of his own picture, and he sold photographs of his own picture at his lectures, which were attended by thousands of people. But what happened? After his passing in ’52 and after the passing of his male successors, one after the other, the monastics took over and created a museum. It’s beautiful, but it’s a museum. You know, when you go to a museum, you’re supposed to be quiet. So, we were quiet. One of our members made the mistake of sitting on the floor in a chapel and was told immediately to get up and sit in a chair. So there were different situations where people were reprimanded in nice tones and so forth. But, you know, if you’re in a museum, you should be quiet. You don’t make a fuss. Thousands of people go to these different places, and if they didn’t enforce that, people would be doing yoga out on the lawn or energizing and doing all sorts of things to attract attention to themselves. To keep the holy vibration of these places, it needs to be still. You need to go there to take the most of it, to be still and quiet. It makes perfect sense. It’s what they do, and it’s who they are. But it isn’t what Yogananda was, in the way that Ananda, following the example and leadership of Swami Kriyananda, who lived with Yogananda in those last years of his life. We’ve had restaurants, we’ve had farms, we have all the same things.
There was one other place we went to, and that was Casey Hughes’ little Temple of Joy. Some of you have been there. It’s very sweet. He imported this temple from Indonesia. It’s just outrageous. It’s really beautiful. He sees himself as a bridge between Ananda and SRF. That’s not really true, but that’s how he sees himself. Whereas SRF represents the Vishnu aspect, preserving everything just the way it was, and Ananda represents the vibration of Divine Mother, Casey sort of represents the Shiva. He doesn’t have any institution or organization. He has all these things on his altar from all over the place. It’s very eclectic, very universal.
Master called his Hollywood church the Church of All Religions, but the monk there explained they got rid of that because nobody really knows what a Church of All Religions is. Is it just a bunch of religions doing stuff, or is it a new religion that has pieces of everything? What is it? What Master meant by the Church of All Religions is that the only religion there really is, is the awakening of the soul and the inward practice of meditation, essentially. Even if you don’t know any mystic teachings, the mystics of East and West all had that awakening of Kundalini into spirit.
That’s the real Yogananda. He said someday self-realization, understood in this sense (not an institutional sense) would be the religion of Dvapara Yuga. All the forms would remain. They’d probably still have Catholics and Protestants and Hindus and Muslims and all that. But people would, in their consciousness, realize it’s about their personal experience and relationship with God.
So, all three aspects of Divine Mother’s presence in this world are represented in these three different ways. The thing is though, unless you have a little bit of each, even if one is dominant, you’re going to ossify. SRF has a new initiative for a lay disciple order and for what they call community. Ananda, Swami Kriyananda started a religious order years ago, the Nayaswami Order.
As for Casey, being universal doesn’t have the kind of magnetism. You don’t know what it is. So, it’s just him and his partner Anka. I’ve been to interfaith services, and they generally lack magnetism. Everybody gets up and talks about their way as the great way, and when you’re done, it’s like, “Oh, what do I do with that?” Victory demands conviction one way or the other. You need to walk the path of truth. You need to make some commitment or nothing. This spiritual but not religious way of thinking, which I’m all for, but unfortunately is all too often expressed by doing nothing, is not the true path.
This experience gave to all of us the power of Master’s presence, which is being preserved there. As I say, Mount Washington I think is really the heart and soul of it. Encinitas, where he wasn’t there as many years, but it’s very beautiful. At one point I prayed and asked Master, “Are you still here?”
Then we had this older monk who’d been around for 50 years, I think he said. Anyway, he was really charming, and he talked to us in this little St. Francis circle, and he gave us little holy cards and stuff. It was very sweet. Then later, when everybody else had gone down to Swami’s Beach, I wanted to stay and meditate for the afternoon. Finally, I had to go. So, I went to retrieve the van. I was one of the van drivers (By the way, I’ve worked out all the karma in my life to ever be a bus driver. I’m done!). So, I went out to the van, and Brother Joseph comes running out of one of the nearby houses where the monks lived, with a big bucket like this. I’m thinking, “Oh my God, what’s he going to do? Throw the bucket at me?” In it was crabgrass.
He had been down by the caves that are in the hill and the bluff overlooking the ocean. He had been harvesting this crabgrass, and he wanted us at Ananda to have this crabgrass harvested from Encinitas. I mean, it was the most charming thing. How do you get crabgrass on an airplane? I don’t know. But it was so sweet. I just thanked him, and we chatted for a little bit, and I put it in the van. On our closing night—what was that, Thursday night? —we, we cut up and did a little offering for everybody. I brought my little stick of crabgrass home. We had all of these special interactions with people there. Even Casey, he is an unusual fellow. I’ve known him for years casually. It’s nice for us to meditate there because, you know, when you go into SRF’s place, especially as a group, you’re not going to be allowed to meditate the way you would want to. You’re in their home. I get that. At Hollywood, the monk there let us meditate for a few minutes. It wasn’t very long, but they just don’t want people taking over. It’s their home. If you went to somebody’s home, you wouldn’t do the things that I would like to do. So that was fine.
Lake Shrine was the last project of Master’s life outwardly in that way. It’s incredibly beautiful.
Let me finish with Hollywood Church, where we watched the videos. They told lots of charming stories, some of which we know from Swami’s life and his autobiography, The New Path, like the story about the stained glass and the story about the blue carpet. I won’t repeat the stories. Other stories were told there. Swami, as a young monk, helped with the construction of India House. What I didn’t know that was explained is without getting a permit, back in the day, the monks went underneath the building where the mushroom burger house was on Sunset Street, and they dug out a basement by hand. It’s huge. I don’t know how they did it. It must have been very challenging, but lots of miraculous stories attend these different places.
Lake Shrine, getting back to that, was the last of it. Swamiji tells the story in his autobiography. Master would send the monks out there in a truck, in a pickup truck every day to work on preparing it for the opening dedication, which was in 1950. Again, the Lieutenant Governor attended that opening as well. So obviously there was some connection there between them spiritually. I don’t know what it was. Anyway, so it’s very, very beautiful. Master went swimming in the lake and floated out there seemingly in samadhi for quite a time. The monk we talked to said 45 minutes or so, and infused the water with that divine light. The fellow who hosted us, there were two people we met who had their beginnings of the spiritual path from Ananda and then later went to SRF and became monastics. Actually three, but that’s a different story. We met two on this trip. One fellow was Italian and very charming. As you know, Italians tend to be very charming and vivacious. He remembered me from Lake Como in 1984. Ananda’s work in Europe started up in the foothills of the Alps, in Lake Como in the Lake District of Italy, in a villa that one of the members allowed us to use for maybe a year, not more than two years. This fellow was there. He was very young, obviously at the time, and he was welcoming us quite warmly. It was wonderful and he had lots of stories and so forth. He took us up later; they built this sort of like a temple of light up there, and then they have a retreat house for people to visit.
Lake Shrine is really the heart. I don’t personally feel as much up there, but the Lake Shrine itself, you know, it’s the only place outside India where there’s a little bit of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes. Then there’s the little chapel where Master would go and give services. On the last day of his life, before the day he departed, he visited each of the little centers around there. He was touring Binay R. Sen, a recently appointed ambassador to America, and he wanted to show him his places. But really, what was happening beneath was he was basically saying goodbye to the renunciates, the staff, and they could feel something was off, something was different. It was veiled from people, as Swami himself says, that he was about to check out, he was about to leave. He went around and very sweetly blessed everybody and gave them things. So, in that chapel, which I really loved meditating in, I really felt Master’s presence there. Here’s the thing, thousands and thousands of people, I’ve met Ananda members over the years who lived in that area, Pacific Palisades, and would go there not knowing really what it was. That happens in Encinitas too. You see tourists, you can see by the way they’re dressed and their behavior that they have nothing to do with meditation, but thousands of people go to Lake Shrine and Encinitas especially.
So that was a very blessed experience. At the end, I was talking to another monk who walked up, and I was about to drive the van off. I asked him, “Whatever happened to the idea of moving Master’s body from Forest Lawn where it’s interred?” And he said, “There’s been no change in plans. SRF still would like to move his body to Mount Washington.” But if you drive up there, oh my God, the streets! One time we went with a giant bus, and it was just a disaster. I had to jump out of the bus and direct the driver to get around these corners. We just had three 12-passenger vans, and that was sweet. We could maneuver ourselves.
I doubt they’ll ever get permission. He said they had planned a very small footprint of a mausoleum for Master on the Mount Washington grounds down into the forest. But truthfully, I think it needs to be down in Encinitas on PCH, on the highway there, plenty of land, and it could be really big and beautiful, but they haven’t asked my opinion. So, I keep it to myself.
Forest Lawn is where his body is, and it’s a magnificent place. A lot of celebrities, Hollywood celebrities, are buried there, and other people, I’m sure. As a piece of art, it’s not just a cemetery. In the crypts, these incredibly large buildings that you walk into, it just takes your breath away.
The 26 of us went into this little hallway where his body is. Meditating there, where his body is, is very profound for many of us. I really can’t put it into words, but you go up to the little marble thing, and it is sort of like he’s right there. It’s pretty amazing. So, we meditated, chanted, and sang there, as our groups often do. That’s very special.
Overall, I just realized, with a greater appreciation perhaps than I’ve ever had, what’s going on there, the museum curating aspect of things. I’m deeply appreciative. It’d be so easy to change. Some things change; those buildings are getting so old.
I wouldn’t want to be the maintenance man or whatever. It’s a beautiful thing. What we’re doing is a beautiful thing because the vibration and teachings of self-realization are intended by Babaji and the lineage to go out into the world and to do new ways of living pertinent to our new way of thinking in this age. At the same time, not to get attached to the forms, not to be sectarian. To understand that what it is in the essence is universal. It is for everyone.
Lahiri Mahasaya gave Kriya to Muslims and Hindus and Christians and all sorts of different Hindu sects within India without regard to caste or class. This is our consciousness in America especially. All three are necessary. Any particular reflection of this teaching needs to have at least to some degree, all three components, or it loses attunement with the vibration that we’re attempting to represent and attune ourselves to.
We had a wonderful trip. When you go with a group, you get certain privileges and certain experiences, which are really blessed. But then if you ever go back on your own or with one other person, then you can get away with meditating in these places unobtrusively when you’re not in a group. I thought to myself, “Yeah, that would be great to go back there and meditate in the Temple of Leaves on Mount Washington.” I really felt Master. He used to sit there and teach the monks and give little classes out there under the tree, like Christine has created right out here, the Temple of Leaves. There are advantages. Going with a group has a certain power and energy, and then also going on your own and experiencing it. But victory spiritually does demand that commitment in one form or another.