Sunday Messages

This Week’s Message

Soul to Soul

The measure of a person’s life is not valued by the material things they have accumulated, but by the Love they have shared with the world. This is our Soul Work. This is Soul to Soul Love and we each have chosen our own unique way to express this.

Christians sometimes call this your accumulation of Grace. Hindus might say you are gathering good karma, and Buddhists call it your merits. It is the same Soul Love. Every time you do a kind deed, think a kind thought, or speak a kind word, you are accumulating Soul karmic merits of grace.

I want to share with you this morning the story of a man who followed the wisdom of his Soul and reached out to touch other Souls with his Soul Love. Mukundah Lal Ghosh was born January 5, 1893, in India. He followed his Soul’s urging to become a monk and began studying with renowned guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri. At the age of 27 he was sent to America to spread the teachings of yoga to the West. He is considered the “Father of Yoga in the West.” The reason you know about meditation today is because of this man, who followed his Soul’s guidance. He introduced meditation to millions of Americans and Europeans and inspired other Hindu and Buddhist monks to come to America to help expand our consciousness.

He was the 4th of 8 siblings. His brother said that “his awareness and experience of the spiritual were far beyond the ordinary even from his earliest years.” His mother died when he was 11 years old. She left behind a sacred amulet for Mukunda, given to her by a holy man, who told her that Mukunda was to possess it for some years, after which it would vanish into the ether from which it came. At age 17, he met his Guru and said of this meeting “We entered a oneness of silence... This was not the first sun to find me at these holy feet!” His amulet then disappeared.

In July 1915, several weeks after graduating from college, he took formal vows into the monastic Swami order; Sri Yukteswar allowed him to choose his own name: Swami Yogananda Giri. In 1917, Yogananda founded a school for boys in West Bengal that combined modern educational techniques with yoga training and spiritual ideals. A year later, the school relocated to Ranchi. One of the school’s first pupils was his youngest brother. This school would later become the Yogoda Satsanga Society of India, the Indian branch of Yogananda’s American organization, Self-Realization Fellowship. SRF has 500 temples in over 175 countries today.

He received a vision one day in 1920 while meditating at his Ranchi school: faces of a multitude of Americans passed before his mind’s eye and a surprise vision of Mahavatar Babaji, the foremost guru of his lineage, who told him directly that he was the one chosen to spread Kriya Yoga to the West. Reassured and uplifted, Yogananda soon afterwards accepted an offer to go to Boston to lecture at the International Congress of Religious Liberals where he spoke on “The Science of Religion.”

In August 1920, he left for the United States on a two-month voyage that landed near Boston by late September and gave his lecture in October. Later that year he founded Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) to disseminate worldwide his teachings on India’s ancient practices and philosophy of Yoga and its tradition of meditation. In 1924 he embarked on a cross-continental speaking tour. Thousands came to his lectures and he began attracting a number of celebrity followers, including Opera singers and the daughter of Mark Twain. In 1925, he established an international center for Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles, California, which became the spiritual and administrative heart of his growing work.

Yogananda was the first Hindu teacher of yoga to spend a major portion of his life in America. He lived in the United States from 1920 to 1952, interrupted by an extended trip abroad in 1935–1936, and through his disciples he developed various temples and meditation centers around the world. Yogananda initiated over 100,000 students into Kriya Yoga during his time in the West.

Yogananda was the first prominent Indian to be hosted in the White House (by President Calvin Coolidge in 1927. He was dubbed “the 20th century’s first superstar guru” by the Los Angeles Times. By 1952, SRF had over 100 centers in both India and the United States. His “plain living and high thinking” principles attracted people from all backgrounds among his followers.

He published his Autobiography of a Yogi in 1946 to critical and commercial acclaim. It has sold over four million copies, with Harper San Francisco listing it as one of the “100 best spiritual books of the 20th Century.” Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs ordered 500 copies of the book, for each guest at his memorial to be given a copy. It was also one of Elvis Presley’s favorite books, and one he gave out often. The book has been regularly reprinted and has been translated into 45 different languages. It is known as “the book that changed the lives of millions.” A documentary about his life commissioned by SRF, Awake: The Life of Yogananda, was released in 2014. He remains a leading figure in Western spirituality. (Wikipedia)

In India at this time, there was a growing movement for independence. Yogananda was put on a government watch list and kept under surveillance by the FBI and the British authorities. A confidential file was kept on him from 1926 to 1937 due to concern over his religious and moral practices.

In 1935, he returned to India along with two of his Western students, to visit his guru, Sri Yukteswar Giri, and to help establish his Yogoda Satsanga work in India. While enroute, his ship detoured in Europe and the Middle East. He visited many sacred sites, visited other living saints, and saw the pyramids.

In India, he initiated Mahatma Gandhi into Kriya Yoga. His Guru Sri Yukteswar gave Yogananda the monastic title of Paramahansa, meaning “supreme swan” and indicating the highest spiritual attainment. Before he returned to the US, his guru passed and Yogananda conducted his funeral.

In late 1936, Yogananda’s ship arrived in New York harbor, and he and his companions then drove in his Ford car across the continental US to California. He continued to lecture, write, and establish centers in southern California. He took up residence at the hermitage in Encinitas, CA. It was here that Yogananda wrote his famous “Autobiography of a Yogi,” and other writings.

In 1946, Yogananda took advantage of a change in immigration laws and applied for citizenship. His application was approved in 1949, and he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. The last four years of his life were spent primarily in seclusion with some of his inner circle of disciples at his desert retreat in Twenty-Nine Palms, CA, to finish his writings and to finish revising books, articles and lessons written previously over the years. During this period he gave few interviews and public lectures. He told his close disciples, “I can do much more now to reach others with my pen.”

On March 7, 1952, he attended a dinner for the visiting Indian Ambassador to the U.S., in Los Angeles. At the conclusion of the banquet, Yogananda spoke of India and America, their contributions to world peace and human progress, and their future co-operation, expressing his hope for a “United World” that would combine the best qualities of “efficient America” and “spiritual India. Yogananda ended his speech, he read from his poem “My India,” concluding with the words “Where Ganges, woods, Himalayan caves, and men dream God—I am hallowed; my body touched that sod.” His disciple, Daya Mata, stated that “as he uttered these words, he lifted his eyes to the Kutastha center, and his body slumped to the floor.”

According to reports, for three weeks after his death Yogananda’s body “showed no signs of physical deterioration and ‘his unchanged face shone with the divine luster of incorruptibility.’” A notarized letter from Harry T. Rowe, the mortuary director, added: “The absence of any visual signs of decay... offers the most extraordinary case in our experience... This state of perfect preservation of a body is, so far as we know from mortuary annals, an unparalleled one...” Yogananda’s remains are interred at the Forest Lawn memorial Park in the Great Mausoleum (normally closed off to visitors but Yogananda’s tomb is accessible) in Glendale, CA.

He taught of the “unity of the original teachings of Jesus Christ and the original Yoga taught by Bhagavan Krishna.”

In his book, “How you can talk with God,” he claims that anyone can talk with God, if the person keeps persevering in the request to speak with God with devotion. He also claimed that God had spoken to him many times, apart from making miracles happen in his life. In the book, he claims that, “We may in a vision see a face of some divine/saintly being, or we may hear a Divine voice talking to us, and will know it is God. When our heart-call is intense, and we do not give up, God will come. It is important that we remove from our mind all doubt that God will answer.” This is Soul to Soul Wisdom and Love. Namaste.