Chapter 15: Through Your Eyes Only

Paramhansa Yogananda would sometimes gaze lovingly at his disciples and say, 

“If you only knew how beautiful you are. I see you all as beings of light.”  It’s often challenging to see the best in the world around us, faced as we are with  life’s many contrasts: beauty and ugliness, wisdom and folly, integrity and dishonesty, kindness and cruelty, to name but a few. 

Yet striving to see other people in their highest light helps them as well as us. I’ve read many stories about young gang members or hardened criminals who were able to turn their lives around because one person saw the goodness in them. They changed because someone saw them as God sees them.  I’ve taken up the practice of inwardly asking, when I see something or someone that evokes a negative reaction in me like judgment or dislike, “Master, how do you  see this?”

When I imagine my Guru looking at the world through my eyes, it’s  amazing how my perception of everything begins to change. 

As Yoganandaji wrote: “When my two eyes that behold both good and evil become single, and behold in everything only the divine goodness of God, I shall see that  my body, mind, and soul have become filled with His omnipresent light.” 

May God’s vision become your own.   

Nayaswami Devi

Sri Yukteswar was boundless in his kindness when confronted by the urgent prayer of a devotee.

It was my proudest privilege to bring college friends to meet my guru. Many of them would lay aside—at least in the ashram!—their fashionable academic cloak of religious skepticism.

One of my friends, Sasi, spent a number of happy week ends in Serampore. Master became immensely fond of the boy, and lamented that his private life was wild and disorderly.

“Sasi, unless you reform, one year hence you will be dangerously ill.” Sri Yukteswar gazed at my friend with affectionate exasperation. “Mukunda is the witness: don’t say later that I didn’t warn you.”

Sasi laughed. “Master, I will leave it to you to interest a sweet charity of cosmos in my own sad case! My spirit is willing but my will is weak. You are my only savior on earth; I believe in nothing else.”

“At least you should wear a two-carat blue sapphire. It will help you.”

“I can’t afford one. Anyhow, dear guruji, if trouble comes, I fully believe you will protect me.”

“In a year you will bring three sapphires,” Sri Yukteswar replied cryptically. “They will be of no use then.”

Variations on this conversation took place regularly. “I can’t reform!” Sasi would say in comical despair. “And my trust in you, Master, is more precious to me than any stone!”

A year later I was visiting my guru at the Calcutta home of his disciple, Naren Babu. About ten o’clock in the morning, as Sri Yukteswar and I were sitting quietly in the second-floor parlor, I heard the front door open. Master straightened stiffly.

“It is that Sasi,” he remarked gravely. “The year is now up; both his lungs are gone. He has ignored my counsel; tell him I don’t want to see him.”

Half stunned by Sri Yukteswar’s sternness, I raced down the stairway. Sasi was ascending.

“O Mukunda! I do hope Master is here; I had a hunch he might be.”

“Yes, but he doesn’t wish to be disturbed.”

Sasi burst into tears and brushed past me. He threw himself at Sri Yukteswar’s feet, placing there three beautiful sapphires.

“Omniscient guru, the doctors say I have galloping tuberculosis! They give me no longer than three more months! I humbly implore your aid; I know you can heal me!”

“Isn’t it a bit late now to be worrying over your life? Depart with your jewels; their time of usefulness is past.” Master then sat sphinxlike in an unrelenting silence, punctuated by the boy’s sobs for mercy.

An intuitive conviction came to me that Sri Yukteswar was merely testing the depth of Sasi’s faith in the divine healing power. I was not surprised a tense hour later when Master turned a sympathetic gaze on my prostrate friend.

“Get up, Sasi; what a commotion you make in other people’s houses! Return your sapphires to the jeweler’s; they are an unnecessary expense now. But get an astrological bangle and wear it. Fear not; in a few weeks you shall be well.”

Sasi’s smile illumined his tear-marred face like sudden sun over a sodden landscape. “Beloved guru, shall I take the medicines prescribed by the doctors?”

Sri Yukteswar’s glance was longanimous. “Just as you wish—drink them or discard them; it does not matter. It is more possible for the sun and moon to interchange their positions than for you to die of tuberculosis.” He added abruptly, “Go now, before I change my mind!”

With an agitated bow, my friend hastily departed. I visited him several times during the next few weeks, and was aghast to find his condition increasingly worse.

“Sasi cannot last through the night.” These words from his physician, and the spectacle of my friend, now reduced almost to a skeleton, sent me posthaste to Serampore. My guru listened coldly to my tearful report.

“Why do you come here to bother me? You have already heard me assure Sasi of his recovery.”

I bowed before him in great awe, and retreated to the door. Sri Yukteswar said no parting word, but sank into silence, his unwinking eyes half-open, their vision fled to another world.

I returned at once to Sasi’s home in Calcutta. With astonishment I found my friend sitting up, drinking milk.

“O Mukunda! What a miracle! Four hours ago I felt Master’s presence in the room; my terrible symptoms immediately disappeared.

I feel that through his grace I am entirely well.”