Inner Communion
Dear Friends of Sushumna Chapel there will be no Sunday Service this week…
I thought I would share with you all Chapter 16 Inner Communion from the book Kriya Yoga: Spiritual Awakening for the New Age by the author Nayaswami Devashi…
I hope you enjoy it
Blessings & Love
Rev Dinah Pemberton
Our Affirmation For May
Stanza 5:
“Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.”
Matthew 5:7
Blessed are they who, recognizing the bond they share with all living creatures, are more concerned for others than for themselves. Blessed are they who serve consciously as instruments of divine grace: for in their very giving they shall receive.
Swami Kriyananda
From the book
The Beatitudes: Their Inner Meaning by Swami Kriyananda
88. Demand for the Enjoyment of Everything with the Joy of God
O Spirit, teach me to enjoy Thee in spirit, that I may enjoy the world and my earthly duties with Thy joy. O Spirit, help me to train my senses, that they enjoy only good things. Teach me to enjoy earthly pleasures with Thy joy. Save me above all from the slightest touch of negativity, doubt, and cynicism.
Inner Communion
The sage [Bhaduri Mahasaya] locked his vibrant body in the lotus posture. In his seventies, he displayed no unpleasing signs of age or sedentary life. Stalwart and straight, he was ideal in every respect. His face was that of a rishi, as described in the ancient texts. Noble-headed, abundantly bearded, he always sat firmly upright, his quiet eyes fixed on Omnipresence. The saint and I entered the meditative state. After an hour, his gentle voice roused me. “You go often into the silence, but have you developed anubhava?”* He was reminding me to love God more than meditation. “Do not mistake the technique for the Goal.”
— paramhansa yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi
What is anubhava, the actual perception of God? Does it mean having visions of the Lord in one form or another, or experiencing spiritual phenomena? Beginning meditators often too eagerly seek phenomena as the goal, or as the surest sign of spirituality. Yogananda cautioned people not to seek experiences in meditation. He advised them that if such experiences come, to let them come and be grateful for them. Sometimes a “spiritual experience” may be only a projection of our subconscious mind. The test of a divine experience is that it changes us in real, lasting ways. Even so, Paramhansa Yogananda advised people not to talk to others about their spiritual experiences.
Swami Kriyananda tells a story of Trailanga Swami, a great saint mentioned in Autobiography of a Yogi.
A devotee of his [Trailanga Swami] begged him repeatedly to bless him through that image [he had an image of the Divine Mother in his temple]. One evening the two of them were seated together in the next room. The image itself walked in, sat down, and conversed with them on lofty topics. After some time, the “idol” left the room and returned to its customary position. The divine power left it.
Trailanga looked at the devotee calmly and asked, “And now, what have you got?” That passing phenomenon had been inspiring, certainly, but had it changed the devotee to the extent of giving him God? As my guru was wont to say, “The path to God is not a circus!” The important thing is that we change ourselves. In this respect especially, Buddha was completely right.
Nevertheless, visions can be a consolation, certainly, though they are no guarantee that the visionary is a saint.
Yogananda told his audiences that he hadn’t come to dogmatize them with a new religion, or with new beliefs. “I want to help you,” he said, “toward the attainment of actual experience of Him, through your daily practice of Kriya Yoga. The time for knowing God has come!” Knowing God is far different from having an isolated vision of God, though a single true experience can help us on the way to that knowing. The deeper and permanent knowing comes in meditation through long practice of inner communion with God.
Actual perception of God is the goal — not the practice of techniques. Meditation techniques are like a car that is needed to take us to the ocean — we won’t be able to have direct experience of the ocean until we get out of the car. The experience of God is unique for everyone. Our path to inner communion will also be unique, varying with our nature, our needs, and how God calls us. Here lies the most creative part of a sitting meditation practice. Even though there are no techniques to hold our attention, we do not become passive. The actual experience of God is uplifting, clear, joyful, often exhilarating, and ever new. The art of meditation becomes especially important after we have finished practicing the techniques during our sitting meditation time. Perception of God comes through intuition, the feeling-perception of the heart.
Swami Kriyananda urged us to sit at the end of our meditation for at least fifteen minutes without practicing techniques. How do we fill that time? Many meditators struggle during what seems like an unstructured time. Below are some suggestions that may help you enjoy the time of inner communion. We’ve touched on most of them already. All of them are worth exploring, in your own way.
Prayer
Inner communion begins by developing a relationship with God. Prayer, or talking to God, is one side of that relationship. Meditation can be thought of as the practice of listening for God’s response, with ever-increasing receptiveness. Deep prayer requires interiorization, full attention, and speaking from the heart. Without some degree of interiorization, our prayer can easily become emotional rather than devotional. Emotional prayer can be a good starting point, but the more we take prayer within, the more we approach that point of stillness where God can be seen and felt.
Concentration, too, is necessary. Imagine approaching a friend to ask for something important. If, as you speak, you keep looking around distractedly at everything going on around you, will your friend take your request seriously? Give God your full attention during prayer.
Pray from the heart, not from the head. Pray like a child, without guile, and with the full expectation that your Heavenly Father or Divine Mother wants to help you. They are on your side! Yogananda spoke of offering God our “prayer demands.” Don’t be a beggar before God, but a divine child, lovingly demanding your birthright.
As we go deeper in prayer, our prayerful state will transcend all need for words. Here is the deepest form of prayer: “Oh, how maddening!” Yogananda wrote. “I can pray no more with words, but only with wistful yearning.” If you are getting started in prayer or you are wanting to deepen your prayer life, I heartily recommend Yogananda’s book of prayer-poems, Whispers from Eternity.
Many meditators make it a practice to read one of the poems from Whispers at the beginning of their daily meditation. Devotional chanting, discussed in chapter seven, is another effective way to offer our prayers to God.
Receptivity
“As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God” (John 1:12).
Christ is reminding us of the importance of receptivity. Try to listen inwardly — to feel in your heart the touch of the Divine. Think of tuning a radio receiver to a particular station.
The radio station’s signal is being broadcast everywhere, but to receive it, we need to sensitively tune the dial. When we are trying to tune in to God’s “wavelength,” we should remember that the heart is the receiving station where we can perceive His response. Spend time during every meditation as a spiritual receiving station. It can help to concentrate your attention at the heart center during this time, with eyes turned calmly upward. Feel the first glimmerings of joy as a pleasant sensation in the heart. Tune in more and more deeply until you are absorbed in that joy. Then offer that feeling upward.
In this way you will be cooperating with grace. Receptivity is not passive. It takes concentration, energy, and a conscious lifting of our heart’s energy. Instead of passively and vaguely waiting for a response, invite God to come in a specific way. You can invite Him to come as one of the eight aspects of God that Paramhansa Yogananda describes: peace, calmness, light, sound, power, wisdom, love, bliss. Read his Metaphysical Meditations to receive the inspiration of his beautiful visualizations of these divine expressions. Also fruitful are prayers offered to, and communion with, a saint, or your guru.
Their magnetism can transform you. Swami Kriyananda encouraged us to feel that Paramhansa Yogananda’s aura was merging with ours as we meditated. You can do this even while practicing your meditation techniques. If you relate to God as Father or Mother, or as one of the many forms in which He has expressed Himself, you can pray to God in that form.
Begin with the personal form you revere, then try to go beyond the image itself. View that form as a window onto eternity. Yogananda’s chant to Kali, a form of Divine Mother commonly worshiped in Bengal, expresses a devotion that expands beyond the limited form to the formless Divine.
Who tells me Thou art dark, O my Mother Divine, Thousands of suns and moons from Thy body do shine!
As Kali, the Divine Mother is portrayed as having dark skin. Yogananda is playfully telling Her that he knows Her truth—that She is not limited to that singular dark form but is present beyond form in all creation. A Christian saint, St. Teresa of Avila, had an experience of Jesus in meditation in which he came to her without form. Her monastic superiors expressed concern about the experience, thinking that it was heretical — then they discovered a teaching by an early Christian saint that the experience of Christ’s consciousness beyond form is the highest experience of him. God is infinitely vast and beyond all forms, but He is also in the forms in which we worship him. He can be known in form or beyond form. The devotee can worship the Divine in whatever way his natural inclination takes him. In a wonderful chant, Ram Prasad, a Bengali householder saint, said, “Thousands of Vedas [scriptures] say that Divine Mother is without form; but come to me as the Mother whom I hold most dear.”
Self-offering
Yogananda repeatedly emphasized the importance of self-offering. What we receive in meditation, including visions and phenomena, are not nearly as important as what we give. What matters most is the complete self-offering of ourselves to God.
This is how we become absorbed in His love.
Selflessness and self-offering are the surest paths to divine freedom. When we practice any form of meditation selfishly, including the highest technique of Kriya Yoga, our practice can strengthen the ego’s hold. The best results are attained by humble, childlike devotional self-offering in prayer, meditation, and while practicing the techniques.
Selfless service, seva, is one powerful form of self-offering. When the experience of samadhi comes, then giving and receiving become merged in divine union. As Yogananda put in his great mystical poem, Samadhi, “Thou art I, I am Thou, Knowing, Knower, Known, as One!”
Pray and Meditate in God
Until the experience of divine union comes, it can help to visualize or feel that there is no separation between us and God. Try to feel that we are in God, and God is in us.
Merging in God can be visualized as a gradual progression, even as Patanjali describes the four highest states of the eight-limbed path of yoga: interiorization of the mind and life force (pratyahara); concentration on God or one of His aspects (dharana); meditation in God (dhyana); complete absorption and union with God (samadhi).
Of the many ways we can develop in inner communion, of special importance to Kriya Yogis is communing with God as the cosmic sound of creation, AUM. Yogananda gave a specific technique to help people become absorbed in that cosmic vibration.*
The time for knowing God has come. Kriya Yoga is a spiritual practice that will take us to the actual perception of God. If you don’t pick up the cloth of Kriya by the right thread, it will unravel over time. But when practiced with devotion and deep attention, Kriya has the power to bring us to the divine experience, to turn ordinary people into saints.
I have seen firsthand the proof of Yogananda’s promise:
I can take a few young men of the most restless sort and let them practice Kriya for two hours every day in the way I tell them, and, without question, in four or five years I can make saints out of them. I won’t preach a single sermon to them. I will simply tell them to practice.
Kriya for two hours a day, and they will see the difference in their lives. That is a good challenge. Of course, they must practice in the way that I tell them. That won’t be easy. But it is surely worth the effort.
— paramhansa yogananda, The Essence of Self-Realization
In the end, words and theory can only hint at the divine experience. Always remember: those who make the right kind of effort will find the fulfillment of all their wishes — a fulfillment that comes only with the taste of the Divine.
While it is true that only God’s grace can free us, we can never attain divine freedom if we await it passively. The miracle of salvation comes only to those who hold their hearts consciously open to God, and who entertain deep love for Him — who do not believe in God only with their minds, but receive Him in their hearts, into the darkest corners of their being.
Eventually, by deep, inner communion with the divine light, the darkness will be banished from your consciousness. When at last it vanishes, it will leave you forever, as though it had never been!
— swami kriyananda, Rays of the Same Light
Thousands of Suns
Lyrics
Thousands of Suns
(by Paramhansa Yogananda)
Who tells me Thou art dark, O my Mother Divine?
Who tells me Thou art dark, O my Mother Divine?
Thousands of suns and moons from Thy body do shine! Thousands of suns and moons from Thy body do shine!