The Path of the Devotee Leads From Law to Love

I had an interesting experience, five or six years ago, when Crystal Clarity republished Whispers From Eternity, in the original edition that Paramhansa Yogananda first published in 1929.

After Yogananda died, Tara Mata, who was a nonfiction editor but rather tone-deaf when it came to poetry, essentially rewrote the book, and Self-Realization Fellowship published that version. But the original was so much more poetically rich that it raised an outcry from SRF members who loved Yogananda’s original. So SRF was forced to republish the first edition, and now they sell the two books side by side.

At any rate, we decided that we would publish the original also, since it was in the public domain, and it would help ensure that it would remain in print.

As one of the final steps in the publishing process, Crystal Clarity sent the book to Swamiji for his review.

Because Whispers was well-known, the distributors were lined up to begin placing it in bookstores, and Crystal Clarity had committed to delivering it on a specific date.

But when Swami began reviewing the page proofs, he felt a strong inner commandment from Master to edit the book – not in the way that Tara had edited it so radically as to change its vibration and meaning, but as Master wanted it edited.

Crystal Clarity’s first priority was always to help Swamiji serve Yogananda’s work. So, despite the tight publishing deadline, there was no question but that we would wait for him to finishing editing.

Swamiji then began the marathon project of working on the book. And it was particularly frustrating, because we didn’t have a computer version, only the typeset page proofs with small type and no space between the lines to insert the changes.

I had a long history of typing Swamiji’s manuscripts, and I could read his handwriting, which was no small thing, especially as he got older. So I signed on to help him with the project.

Thus we started a cycle where he would edit and I would type, and it all took place in his house, in the downstairs rooms that served as his office. I would sit and type while he sat in the other room and edited. And he could edit faster than I could type, because, as he said, it was as if Master was telling him exactly what needed to be done.

He didn’t want to change the spirit of the book, but as he explained, Master in his exuberance would string together so many images in a tumbling rush of inspiration and enthusiasm that it was sometimes hard to keep the underlying point in mind.

It was very interesting to observe how Swamiji worked. Usually, he would go through a book many times before he finished editing. But with this book, he went through it once, and then he had Dharmadas and Nirmala read the original side by side with the edited version and compare every word, to make sure he hadn’t left out an important thought or accidentally changed a meaning. And then he went through it all again and declared, “This is done.”

The people at Crystal Clarity were understandably skeptical, since Swamiji would usually go over a book many times, and they expected this book would be no different. But he was emphatic that this was it. He said, “If I go over it any more times, I will change the vibration from Master’s to mine. This is Master’s book, and I just helped him.”

I was up very late every night typing, and Swamiji would come in and look over my shoulder to see what I was doing, and he would ask if I couldn’t go any faster. “No, Sir, I can’t; I just can’t. I can’t be certain I won’t make mistakes if I go any faster.”

Somewhere in the middle of the project, there was an interesting interlude. Mukti, a woman who lives at the Village, was professionally trained as a pianist. She was trying to learn to play Swamiji’s sonata, The Divine Romance, and she and Swamiji had a longstanding agreement that they would get together and he would help her learn to play the piece. So, in the midst of editing Whispers, Swami went upstairs to help Mukti.

She sat at the grand piano that had belonged to Swamiji’s mother, and Swami sat in a chair next to her. Later, Mukti remarked that her father would always sit in a chair next to her while he taught her piano, and now her spiritual father had sat beside her.

While she played the sonata, line by line, Swamiji corrected and corrected and corrected. And at one point he apologized. “I’m sorry, I don’t really mean to be so picky, and I know that what I’m telling you is not exactly how it’s written, because I couldn’t write it exactly.”

He said, “It’s not that I’m being so picky as a composer, but this is how I heard it, and I’m trying to tell you how to play it the way I heard it.”

Whenever Swamiji would correct our musicians and singers, he would often say something similar, trying to get them to perform the music as he had received it.

I remember an interview that Swamiji gave in Italy. The reporter asked, “What is your favorite music?” And without hesitation, Swami said, “Mine.”

Realizing that it might sound a little odd, he added, “I’m not saying that mine is the best. If you had asked me what was the best music, I might have given you a different answer. But you asked me what was my favorite. And it’s because it’s not mine, but it’s what I heard. I heard it because it’s the vibration of my soul.”

It’s a beautiful thought – I like my music because it’s the music of my soul, and it resonates with me more than any other music can.”

This morning, the choir sang “Brother James’s Air,” a piece that I love, because it’s so beautiful and joyful. But as I listened, I tried to tune in to the underlying vibration, because it wasn’t written by Swamiji, and I was curious to understand the difference.

Much as I love that piece, my favorite music is Swami’s. His music means more to me because I feel more in tune with it, as an expression of his soul.

At the time when he wrote the Oratorio, Swamiji said that he hadn’t felt any need to write it, because his experience of Christ in the Holy Land was complete in itself. So he felt no compulsion to turn it into art. But he said that the inspiration came, and then the melodies began to sing themselves to him without any conscious effort on his part.

He told us how he would receive a melody in a dream, or he would wake up hearing a melody, and he would whistle it into a tape recorder.

When Swamiji returned from Europe, I remember sitting with a group of people in his bedroom on the top floor of the San Francisco ashram. He was thrilled with the melodies that were expressing his experience of Christ, and he played a number of them for us on a tiny keyboard that he carried in his suitcase when he traveled. And then he said, “Isn’t it beautiful?” And, really, this little toy keyboard was so inadequate, and the music sounded like tink-tink-tink. But we all said, “Yes, Sir, it’s really beautiful.” Because we had experienced his creative flow, and we knew there was a time to offer suggestions, but this was the time of original inspiration, when it was appropriate to go along with the flow and say “Yes.”

But what was fascinating to me was that the oratorio was already fully formed in his mind, even though he could only share the bare outlines on this completely inadequate little keyboard. But he had heard the profound musical work that it would become. And even in that little sequence of notes, there was the vibration of his soul.

In our lives, this is what we’re looking for, to unite ourselves with the unique vibration of Spirit that is always expressing itself through us and that is essentially ours.

In the Bible, we read that the law was given by Moses, but truth and grace were brought by Jesus Christ. And it doesn’t mean that Jesus was better than Moses. Because Jesus himself said that He came not to repudiate the prophets but to complete what they had begun. And the progression from the law of Moses to the truth and grace of Jesus is very relevant to what we experience as devotees.

When we first enter the spiritual path, we’re eager to understand who we are, and what our life is about, and where we’re going and what we need to do. And we start by trying to understand it with our minds, because we’re thoroughly confused, and we’re deeply curious about what this new world of spiritual truth that we’ve entered is all about. And we long for a deeper understanding of the laws of life, and how our life works, and where it’s taking us.

Virtually everyone, I believe, comes to the spiritual path through suffering. We’ve lived in a way that isn’t in accord with the divine law, and as a result we’ve suffered. And in the beginning we may project onto God certain qualities that are related to our suffering. In our fear and shame and rigidness, we may conclude that God is punishing us – that He is a mighty judge, glowering at us and telling us about all the terrible things that will happen to us if we make even the tiniest mistake.

In the beginning, we often don’t understand that God has absolutely no inclination whatever to punish us. In fact, quite the opposite, He has sent the great masters to lead us out of sorrow and suffering forever.

When you put your hand in a flame, the flame doesn’t have an opinion about it. It isn’t waiting around, hoping it will have a chance to hurt you. It’s just behaving according to its own nature.

A friend of mine was a soldier in Vietnam, and one night while he was sitting in a tent with two other soldiers, a tiger came along and took one of the other men away. And it wasn’t that the tiger hated the man, but it was hungry, and it was simply its nature to take the first food it could find. It was acting according to its nature, without any evil intent at all.

We may take our suffering personally, but it comes to us quite impersonally, as part of the lawful way in which the world works.

But our suffering forces us to pay attention, and so we begin to ask questions about our existence. “Is the way I’ve been living working for me? And where is it taking me? How can I have more happiness and less suffering?”

In our school, we encourage the children to watch the results of their actions. The teachers are always asking them, “When you hit another child, what do you think will happen? Does it work for you? Is it bringing you what you want?”

Jyotish’s son had an encounter with a bully, and Jyotish tried to help his son understand that the boy had a difficult life. Finally, he said, “That boy just wants to be your friend.” And his son had the self-honesty to say, “Daddy, I just don’t want to be that good!”

Children will tell you very frankly how they feel, but with grown-ups, if we aren’t ready to be that good, we’ll look for a loophole in the system, where we can indulge ourselves and it won’t catch up with us. But it always catches up, because it’s the law.

When the Jews were liberated from Egypt, Moses gave them the law, because they had been slaves in Egypt, without a culture of their own, and they weren’t allowed to develop their own moral code. So Moses gave them the law. And Moses was a self-realized master, so he didn’t lay down the law rigidly, with an iron fist. Because the culmination of the law is always love.

So it isn’t as if Jesus brought a radical breach with the religion of the past. Jesus came because the law had become corrupted, and his mission was to set religion on a course that the people of Israel could understand and relate to. So he told them that the divine law operates impersonally, but that its essence is love, because its intention is to bring us back into attunement with the love and joy of the Divine.

Jesus taught the essence of Judaism. It was a very impersonal teaching, but it was not cold. It said, “This simply is.” But it recognized that the end and answer, in all things, is love.

It’s comforting to know how the world works, and to find that it works meaningfully and scientifically. It’s why Paramhansa Yogananda came to the West, to set religion back on its true course, by explaining the underlying meaning of Christ’s words, and to show how they explain the meaning of our lives.

From 1990 to about 2003, we were engaged in a tremendous battle to liberate Master’s teachings from a narrow, institutionalized definition.

In 1990, Self-realization Fellowship sued us, hoping to claim exclusive ownership of Yogananda’s books, recordings, image, and teachings. And the theme we chose for that decade-long court battle was “Yogananda for the World.”

It was based on the indisputable truth that Paramhansa Yogananda belongs to the entire world, because he brought a divine teaching that no single person or organization can possibly claim to own.

Swamiji told us that we were being called by a divine force to stand up for truth. He said, “But if we don’t do it, someone else will.”

There’s such an emphasis today, in the culture and in the teachings of psychology, that we need to find our own special mission in life. And, frankly, most of us don’t have any such mission, because there are only a few souls, like a Yogananda or a Kriyananda, who come with the God-given power to make real changes in the direction of the world. And for the rest of us, our mission is to make as much spiritual progress as we can.

Our mission is to understand the divine law and to learn to live by it. That’s all. And the law is about finding a way to live in the experience of grace.

At this time in the West, when people have forgotten what Jesus taught, Paramhansa Yogananda came to show us how we can find grace in the modern world.

Just as the Jewish people forgot what Moses meant, today most people who call themselves Christians have misunderstood the true inner meaning of Christ’s teachings.

When virtue declines and vice begins to prevail, as the Bhagavad Gita tells us, God sends a great soul to explain truth again – to remind us of the meaning of our lives, and how we can know God and live in His grace.

We are here to find the lost music of our souls. When we start to meditate, one of the first things we learn is to listen to the inner sound of AUM. It’s easier to commune with God as sound than as His other qualities of light, power, etc. Because, as Yogananda explained, we are made of that sound. And when we hear it reverberating within us, and especially as we merge our awareness more deeply with it, we realize that it’s the sound of God expressing His creative presence in our soul.

In this way, Master enabled us to have an individual experience of God, by listening to the divine power resonating inside us.

It can help us to find that attunement by singing or listening to a higher kind of music. Not only Swami Kriyananda’s music, but many beautiful melodies that speak to our souls. And the criterion for the quality of the music is whether it lifts our consciousness and brings us into attunement with God’s grace.

Swami defined grace as the power to rise in God. And then, as the Gita says, in God all is forgiven.

We spend so much time worrying about our mistakes. But when grace comes and we hear the inner sound of AUM, and we dissolve our consciousness in it, everything else becomes as nothing.

Swami said that when liberation comes, you look back and see that everything was a dream, and that God did it all. I love to contemplate this thought – that the only thing that is ever truly real in this life is when we find ourselves in contact with the Divine. Because everything else is smoke and mirrors, and truth and grace are the only enduring reality. So let us seek that lost chord of our souls and sing it with all our hearts.

God bless you.

(From Asha’s talk during Sunday service on February 14, 2016 at Ananda Sangha in Palo Alto, California.)