Aum Special Healing Meditation (Nayaswami Jaya Part 2)
Swami Sri Yukteswar
Sacrifice of self. When man thus entering into the spiritual world becomes a Son of God, he comprehends the universal Light — the Holy Ghost — as a perfect whole, and his Self as nothing but a mere idea resting on a fragment of the Om Light. Then he sacrifices himself to the Holy Ghost, the altar of God; that is, abandons the vain idea of his separate existence, and becomes one integral whole. Kaivalya, the unification. Thus, being one with the universal Holy Spirit of God the Father, he becomes unified with the Real Substance, God. This unification of Self with the Eternal Substance, God, is called Kaiualya.
See Revelation 3:21.
"To him that overcorneth will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne."
Jesus With Mary Magdalene at the Tomb
Jesus saith unto her, “Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou?” She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, “Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus saith unto her, “Mary.”
She turned herself, and saith unto him, “Rabboni”; which is to say, Master. —John 20:15–16
Jesus’ resurrection lifted his consciousness beyond all relativities of vibratory creation and merged his Self with the transcendental Father, Absolute Spirit. After attaining oneness with the Absolute, Jesus infused his Spirit-expanded soul back into his crucified body, immortalizing it, and returned to his bereft disciples in physical form.… Liberated souls such as Jesus, whose mission continues beyond their incarnation, are able to materialize their bodies at will anywhere in the astral heavens or in the physical world at any time—today or unto thousands of years after their ascension.
That is why Jesus could say in truth to his disciples: “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”
~ Paramahansa Yogananda
Drawing by Heinrich Hofmann
Prayer at Dawn
With the opening of the earliest dawn and the lotus‐buds, my soul softly opens in prayer to receive Thy light. Bathe each petal of my mind with Thy radiant rays! I saturate myself with the perfume of Thy presence, and I wait to waft with the breeze the aroma of Thy message of love to all. Bless me, that with the spreading dawn I may spread Thy love everywhere. Bless me, that with the awakening dawn I may awaken all souls with my own and bring them to Thee.
~ Paramhansa Yogananda
Demand for Realizing the Expansion of Consciousness in the Cosmic Sound
Manifest Thyself to me, O Father, as the light of reason and as the blaze of wisdom, as the breeze of amity and of self-expanding harmony. Manifest Thyself through the song of atoms and electrons, whose music‐vibration encompasses the universe. Teach me to hear Thy cosmic voice which first commanded all vibration to begin, inspiring every pinpoint of Creation to sing its own special melody. Oh, let me hear within me Thy cosmic voice, so long hidden behind the hubbub of outer Creation. Let my magic wand of meditation touch all sounds and melt them into the One cosmic sound of Aum. Lo! how it courses, o’er the earth, in the sky, and far out from Earth to reach the stars. Appear to me as Aum, Aum, Aum—Thy cosmic song, which gives life to and infuses all sounds. Every cell of my body, every nerve, every ripple of my thoughts now sings with Thy great cosmic anthem: Aum !
Ananda Sangha is a worldwide fellowship of kindred souls following the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda. The Sangha embraces the search for higher consciousness through the practice of meditation, and through the ideal of service to others in their quest for Self-realization. Approximately ten thousand spiritual seekers are affiliated with Ananda Sangha throughout the world. Founded in 1968 by Swami Kriyananda, a direct disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda, Ananda includes seven communities in the United States, Europe, and in India. Worldwide, about one thousand devotees live in these spiritual communities, which are based on Yogananda’s ideals of “plain living and high thinking.”
“Thousands of youths must go north, south, east and west to cover the earth with little colonies, demonstrating that simplicity of living plus high thinking lead to the greatest happiness!” After pronouncing these words at a garden party in Beverly Hills, California in 1949, Paramhansa Yogananda raised his arms, and chanting the sacred cosmic vibration AUM, he “registered in the ether” his blessings on what has become the spiritual communities movement.
From that moment on, Swami Kriyananda dedicated himself to bringing this vision from inspiration to reality by establishing communities where home, job, school, worship, family, friends, and recreation could evolve together as part of the interwoven fabric of harmonious, balanced living. Yogananda predicted that these communities would “spread like wildfire,” becoming the model lifestyle for the coming millennium. Swami Kriyananda lived with his guru during the last four years of the Master’s life, and continued to serve his organization for another ten years, bringing the teachings of Kriya Yoga and Self-realization to audiences in the United States, Europe, Australia, and, from 1958–1962, India. In 1968, together with a small group of close friends and students, he founded the first “world brotherhood community” in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in northeastern California.
Initially a meditation retreat center located on sixty-seven acres of forested land, Ananda World Brotherhood Village today encompasses eight hundred acres where about 250 people live a dynamic, fulfilling life based on the principles and practices of spiritual, mental, and physical development, cooperation, respect, and divine friendship. At this writing, after forty years of existence, Ananda is one of the most successful networks of intentional communities in the world. Urban communities have been developed in Palo Alto and Sacramento, California; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Washington. In Europe, near Assisi, Italy, a spiritual retreat and community was established in 1983, where today nearly one hundred residents from eight countries live. Ananda Sangha also supports more than hundred meditation groups worldwide.
Excerpted from Whispers from Eternity by Paramhansa Yogananda.
Paramhansa Yogananda, and indeed all great saints, lay great emphasis on “practicing” Silence. Swami Kriyanandaji relates the following charming experience with Yoganandaji in his autobiography, The New Path:
My first visit to Twenty-Nine Palms was for a weekend. We visited Yogananda at his place. My first recollection of him on that occasion isn’t so much of the things he said, as of what he didn’t say. I didn’t know it at the time, but he placed great importance on silence. Disciples working around him were permitted to speak only when necessary. “Silence,” he said, “is the altar of Spirit.”
Yogananda was seated out of doors by the garage; Bernard and I were standing nearby. He asked Bernard to go into the house and fetch something. Suddenly, for the first time since my acceptance as a disciple, I found myself alone with my Guru. It seemed an opportunity not to be missed: a chance to learn something — anything! He, evidently, didn’t see it in the same light. He made no move to speak. Finally I decided I’d better “break the ice.”
I had learned from Bernard how to commune inwardly with Aum, the Cosmic Sound, which manifests itself to the yogi in deep meditation. “Sir,” I inquired, “what does Aum sound like?”
Yogananda gave a prolonged “Mmmmmmmmmm.” He then reverted comfortably to silence. To me, alas, his silence was anything but comfortable.
“How does one hear it?” I persisted, though I already knew the technique.
This time he didn’t even bother to answer, but simply assumed the prescribed position. After holding it briefly, he returned his hands silently to his lap.
Some months later I told him I was having trouble calming my breath in meditation. “That,” he replied, “is because you used to talk a lot. The influence has carried over. Well,” he added consolingly, “you were happy in that.”
Silence is the altar of Spirit. As I grew into my new way of life, I began to value this maxim.
We, as disciples of Yoganandaji, would naturally want to put this maxim into daily practice. However (as we discover soon enough after our first attempts), being “silent” is much more than just not talking. For even when the lips don’t move, the mind can churn endlessly.
Yoganandaji would therefore offer the following suggestions to his disciples so they could “cultivate” true silence, where the mind as well as the lips are still, and focused in inward contemplation of the Cosmic Beloved:
Have one silent meal a day
Yoganandaji strongly urged the monks to have their meals in silence, and almost everybody can begin with having one meal a day in silence. Converse with God, or read something uplifting from our teachings and contemplate its deeper meaning. When we have a meal, Yoganandaji said, we are open to receiving vibrations. The choice, therefore, is ours: To absorb gossip, or to absorb divine vibrations.
End your meditation by transitioning for a while to a silent and inward activity
Swamiji writes:“In the early years of the work, Master conducted early morning group meditations at Mt. Washington headquarters. After each such meditation, he would lead the disciples out of doors to sweep the walks. And he would urge them, as they swept, to continue in the thought of God. In this mild activity it was comparatively easy for them to practice God’s presence. Having once established the habit of feeling the divine presence outside of their meditations, it was easier for them to carry it into the more strenuous daily labors that followed.”
We don’t necessarily have to sweep the walks! It only needs to be an activity that can be done silently, inwardly and gracefully, Nayaswami Deviji often recommends making one’s bed, for example, as another such activity. As we do this, gradually, we develop the ability to hold on to the silence and stillness of our meditations in all our activities.
And finally, this last but extremely important advice:
Be compassionate in your Silence
As Swami Kriyananda wrote “Divine silence is not cold or hostile. The feeling of brotherhood does not diminish in such quietude; it grows warmer and deeper. How often, indeed, do our words merely conceal our real selves! The saints are wiser than most of us; they converse by silences.”
The true nature of a person’s silence can be judged by his words and the tone of his voice when he does choose to converse and interact with others. We should therefore remember to feel warmth and benevolence towards all creation even when we are practicing outward silence, so that when we do converse, we share only kindness, understanding and compassion.
This, without fail, is the nature of all true saints: Silent by default (being contentedly absorbed in the ever-new joy of God); sweet, considerate and loving when they do converse; and stern and strong only when the Divine Will moves them to act in that way to impart to the world some important lesson.
As we “cultivate” this compassionate silence, we too, become saintlike.
By the Author Brahmachari Sagar who currently resides at the Ananda Villiage.
The deeper meaning of “name” is a reference to Cosmic Vibration (the Word, Aum, Amen). God as Spirit has no circumscribing name. Whether one refers to the Absolute as God or Jehovah or Brahman or Allah, that does not express Him. God the Creator and Father of all vibrates through nature as the eternal life, and that life has the sound of the great Amen or Aum. That name most accurately defines God. “Those who believe on his name” means those who commune with that Aum sound, the voice of God in the Holy Ghost vibration. When one hears that name of God, that Cosmic Vibration, he is on his way to becoming a son of God, for in that sound his consciousness touches the immanent Christ Consciousness, which will introduce him to God as Cosmic Consciousness. Sage Patanjali, India’s greatest exponent of yoga, describes God the Creator as Ishvara, the Cosmic Lord or Ruler. “His symbol is Pranava (the Holy Word or Sound, Aum). By prayerful, repeated chanting of Aum and meditation on its meaning, obstacles disappear and the consciousness turns inward (away from external sensory identification)” (Yoga Sutras I:27 – 29). The common condition of human beings is that their consciousness is hidebound by the body. Man’s body, being a delimited vibratory expression, existing in but separated from Cosmic Vibration, similarly circumscribes the consciousness.
Yoga teaches that the spiritual aspirant must retrace the various states of higher vibrations in order to lift the consciousness from the captive vibrations of breath, heart, and circulation to the more subtly vibrating sound emanating from the bodily atoms and life force. By a special technique of meditation on Aum, known to students of the Self-Realization Fellowship Lessons, the devotee becomes aware of his consciousness as limited by the constrictions of the flesh, evidenced by the sounds of breath, heart, and circulation. And then, by a deepening of his meditation, he can hear the voice of the great Aum or Amen, the cosmic sound emanating from all atoms and sparks of cosmic energy. By listening to this omnipresent sound, and merging in its holy stream, the consciousness of the body-caged soul begins gradually to spread itself from the limitations of the body into omnipresence. The mental faculties renounce their boundaries and, with the all-knowing soul faculty of intuition, tune in with the Cosmic Mind, the Intelligence immanent in the all-pervasive Cosmic Vibration.
After listening to and feeling oneness with the cosmic sound of the Holy Ghost emanating from every part and particle of God’s material, heavenly, and ideationally conceived spheres of being, the consciousness of the meditating devotee will vibrate in all creation as his own cosmic body. When his expanded consciousness becomes stable in all vibratory creation, he realizes the presence of the immanent Christ Consciousness. Then the devotee becomes Christlike; his consciousness experiences, within the vehicles of his expanded Self, the “second coming of Christ”—the presence within him of Christ Consciousness, even as Jesus felt the Universal Christ expressed in his body and taught his disciples to do likewise. When the devotee feels his consciousness one with the Universal Christ, he realizes that Christ Consciousness is the reflection in his soul and in all creation of the Cosmic Consciousness of God the Father. The Cosmic Consciousness (God the Father) existing transcendentally beyond all vibratory (Holy Ghost) creation and the Christ Consciousness (Universal Intelligence, Kutastha Chaitanya) in all vibratory manifestation are realized as one and the same.
The devotee rejoices in the ultimate joy, as Jesus proclaimed, “I (Christ Consciousness in creation) and my Father (Cosmic Consciousness beyond creation) are one.”
Make a resolution today to find that Christ. Open the gates of your heart; expand yourself in serving others materially, morally, and spiritually. And as you become calm through deep meditation, and as the fire of your devotion waxes stronger and stronger, you shall see the face of Christ. Remember—the glowing fires of devotion, not the old way of lukewarm prayers.
Crucify your spiritual ignorance. Stop the storms of mental discord. Christ must come to you, for it is of utmost importance to your happiness.
Make this vow to Christ: “My life shall not slip away this time without my knowing Thee, O Christ.”
Let Him not come and silently vanish without your being aware of it. Somebody once said, “Where is progress? Are we not walking slowly toward death?” It is true of those who do not know Christ. But those who know Him see that they are moving, not toward the valley of the shadow of death, but toward the peaks of Christ Consciousness wherein there lies no death. They see the flicker of Christ’s omnipresent light and joyously exclaim, “O Christ, by my meditation and prayer You are coming into my life again.”
And they shall feel Him everywhere—in the hearts of men, in the fragrance of flowers, and in all other created things.
May Christ come in your consciousness a second time as prosperity, as health, as the perception and fulfillment of all your hopes in the divine consciousness.
And may Christ come to you in finding divine love through the perfection of your love in some human relationship, and in finding omnipresence in your human consciousness.
May Christ come, bringing to you infinite bliss, infinite wisdom, infinite joy, as He is born in the cradle of your heart.
May Christ come to you a second time in the vibration of your body as the Aum out of which all bodies, all universes, have been created.
May He come a second time—to you—and be established in your consciousness forever.
[An ecstatic experience of Paramahansa Yogananda in communion with the Holy Ghost Cosmic Vibration of Aum:]
“When sensory perceptions vibrate their pleasures in the body, I experience a heaviness; a weighty load hangs on the bosom of my soul, and I feel drawn down to matter.
But, O elevating Aum, when Thou dost vibrate within me, oh, what exultant joy and lightness I feel. I soar above the body. I am drawn toward Spirit. O great Aum, rolling ocean of Aum, vibrate long within me so that I may remain awake to Thine infinite presence, broadened into identity with the Universal Spirit. Oh, this is the Voice of Heaven. This is the Voice of Spirit. Aum, Thou art the source of all life, of all expressions of creation in the universe. So let me feel Thee, O great Mother Vibration, rolling within me as a part of Thy Cosmic Self. Receive me; make me one with Thee. Never leave me; be always rolling within me like a mighty spiritual ocean, calling to me and revealing Thine oceanic presence. O Mighty Vibration, O Mighty Truth that percolates through every atom of my flesh, peace and harmony eternal, bliss and wisdom eternal, come with Thy presence, with Thy universal resonance! Oh, these tiny joys, these tiny tonics of sensual vibrations, I wish to forsake. Enfold me in Thy vibration and carry me along with Thy rolling sound. Let me be free from the bondage of flesh; let me roll on with Thine infinite vibratory ripples of omniscient joy, O great Aum. Be with me, possess me, absolve me in Thee.”
Excerpted from The Second Coming Of Christ by Paramhansa Yogananda.
SUTRA 17: "What is needed is a Guru, a Savior, who will awaken us to Bhakti (devotion) and to perceptions of Truth." When man finds his Sat-Guru or Savior. When man understands by his Aparokshajnana (true comprehension) the nothingness of the external world, he appreciates the position of John the Baptist, the divine personage who witnessed Light and bore testimony of Christ, after his heart's love, the heavenly gift of Nature, had become developed. Any advanced sincere seeker may be fortunate in having the Godlike company of some one of such personages, who may kindly stand to him as his Spiritual Preceptor, Sat-Guru, the Savior.
Following affectionately the holy precepts of these divine personages, man becomes able to direct all his organs of sense inward to their common center — the sensorium, Trikuti or Sushumnadwara, the door of the interior world — where he comprehends the Voice, like a peculiar "knocking" sound, [the Cosmic Vibration that is] the Word, Amen, Om; and sees the God-sent luminous body of Radha, symbolized in the Bible as the Forerunner or John the Baptist.
See Revelation 3:14,20 and John 1:6,8,23.
"These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true-witness, the beginning of the creation of God. . . . Behold, I stand at the door, and knock; if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him and will sup with him, and he with me."
"There was a man sent from God, whose name was John... He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light... He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord. "
Ganga, Jamuna, or Jordan, the holy streams. From the peculiar nature of this sound, issuing as it does like a stream from a higher unknown region and losing itself in the gross material creation, it is figuratively designated by various sects of people by the names of different rivers that they consider as sacred; for example, Ganga by the Hindus, Jamuna by the Vaishnavas, and Jordan by the Christians. The 2nd birth. Through his luminous body, man, believing in the existence of the true Light — the Life of this universe — becomes baptized or absorbed in the holy stream of the sound. The baptism is, so to speak, the second birth of man and is called Bhakti Yoga, without which man can never comprehend the real internal world, the kingdom of God.
See John 1:9 and 3:3.
"That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. "
"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. "
Aparokshajnana, the real comprehension. In this state the son of man begins to repent and, turning back from the gross material creation, creeps toward his Divinity, the Eternal Substance, God. When the developments of ignorance are stopped, man gradually comprehends the true character of this creation of Darkness, Maya, as a mere play of ideas of the Supreme Nature on His own Self, the only Real Substance. This true comprehension is called Aparokshajnana.
Excerpted from The Holy Science by Swami Sri Yukteswar.
The Holy Sound of Aum
Teach me to hear Thy voice, O Father, the cosmic voice that commanded all vibration to spring forth. Manifest to me as Aum, the cosmic song of all sound.
O Holy Ghost, sacred Aum vibration, enlarge my consciousness as I listen to Thine omnipresent sound. Make me feel that I am both the cosmic ocean and the little wave of body-vibration in it.
O omnipresent cosmic sound of Aum, reverberate through me, expanding my consciousness from the body to the universe, and teach me to feel in Thee the all-permeating perennial bliss.
O infinite Energy, infinite Wisdom, recharge me with Thy spiritual vibration.
O cosmic sound of Aum, guide me, be with me, lead me from darkness to light.
~ Paramhansa Yogananda
Excerpted from Metaphysical Meditations
Prayer at Eventide
The day is done. Refreshed and sanctified with the sunshine of the day I pass through the portals of evening, dimly adorned with faint stars, to enter into the temple of silence and worship Thee. I worship Thy Spirit of approaching calmness. What prayers can I offer? For I have no words to offer Thee. I shall light a little fire of devotion on the altar of my soul. Will that light suffice to bring Thee into my dark temple—my dimly lighted temple, dark with my ignorance? Come! I crave, I yearn for Thee!
~ Paramhansa Yogananda
Music: Bhagavati and Ramesha Instrumental, Aum Namo Bhagavate, Om Namah Shivaya, Aum by Paramhansa Yogananda & Aum by Swami Kriyananda