On the anniversary of Paramhansa Yogananda's mahasamadhi (conscious, final passing from the body), Nayaswami Jyotish shares about the disciple's role and what it means for us. Recorded March 7th 2023 at Ananda Village.
This talk explores the profound relationship between Paramhansa Yogananda and his disciple Swami Kriyananda, highlighting the disciple's role in the divine mission of a great master. It delves into the dual nature of an avatar's life—embracing worldly limitations while living in God’s bliss—and how the soul’s call draws such masters to uplift humanity.
Through Swami Kriyananda’s example, we find the disciple’s responsibility to attune to the master’s consciousness, balancing outward activity with deep inner communion. Ultimately, it is through self-offering and inward attunement that we create the "inner Himalayan cave" where divine union becomes possible.
Transcript
The Mystery of the Avatar: Embracing Limitation
Nayaswami Jyotish:
It's such a beautiful expression, that last smile of Master’s. The mystery of the great saints, of especially an avatar such as this, is something that we can never really understand with our rational minds. You know, in the Festival every week, we read, “from a life of infinite joy and freedom in God, willingly to embrace limitation, pain, and death, for the salvation of mankind.” Such is the life of all great souls.
So we have to do our best to imagine that Master is in a state of bliss all the time, but he willingly has to come into this world of turbulence, and ups and downs, and likes and dislikes, and all of the stuff that maya deals with. He has to come in, but it's really only God, in visible form, that's coming in to respond to the call of people like us, who are wanting to exit from this grand game. We've had enough, we want to have ‘game over’ and be done with it.
The Soul’s Call and the Master’s Response
And so that soul call is felt by God. Obviously it's felt by God, because it's God within us that is producing that soul call. But because of the veil of separation and delusion, we don't, we don't yet see it that way, so the great Masters come in. Master came in, in order to respond to that call. But it wasn't just a small call, it was the call, let's say of the entire human race, calling out as the ages ascend, calling out for some way to live in higher consciousness.
Whether on a conscious level or not, the souls of mankind, of the whole world, is making that plea to God, “Show me how I can live on a higher level.” And so God responds to that and comes in, in the form—to speak personally for all of us, came in the form of Master, to respond to that call.
Now, Master had a huge mission. He had a worldwide work to do, but he also had a work to do, more specifically, for those disciples that were truly calling out, who had reached a level, or consciously they were calling, almost, as Swami said, calling with desperation, to show us, to show him, how he can live a life that would unite him with God. And so, with varying levels of desperation, all of his disciples are calling out for that too.
Dual Roles of a Master: Bliss in Solitude and Service in Action
But Master had, as Swami says in a play, the Master had a strangely dual role. And so, on the one hand, we read again and again of Master's desire just to be up in the Himalayas, where there are no distractions. It's symbolic, Himalayas are symbolic.
We've been there, you know, there are lots of distractions. We haven't, we haven't lived in a cave in the Himalayas, but basically, that's what they represent: where there isn't an outward pull, an outward responsibility, and one can just be in bliss, in samadhi, in complete union with God.
Master had that pull, and many times he begged Divine Mother to let him out of this workplace and let him go to the Himalayas. And he said in his next life, 200 years from when he passed, he was going to live in the Himalayas with a small group of highly evolved devotees, much like Babaji. And if he had to be there, had to be in this world, for whatever the reasons, that's what he preferred.
But in this life, he had this enormous, dynamic mission, to uplift the consciousness of the world and to especially magnetize and train those devotees who were yearning for knowledge of God, for unity with God. Now Swamiji coming to Master, represented one might say, the single farthest point of his disciples. All of the great disciples, you know… Master, they'd been with Master for many, many lifetimes, and he just drew them into this lifetime to play a particular role.
The role of Swami Kriyananda as an instrument of Yogananda’s global work
So… but Swami, of all of the disciples, represented, one might say, the farthest extension of the desire to share these teachings with the world. And so Master magnetized him to do that, and what a magnificent job Swami did with that work! And so Master said to Swami, “Your [role] in this life will be one of intense activity and meditation.”
Now, we are all children of that ray of Swamis, and so by and large our life, too, is one of intense activity and meditation. And quite frankly, I think Master is very pleased with the level of activity, the dedication, the effectiveness, the life dedication of…call it the population of Ananda… the spiritual family of Ananda. I think he's very pleased with how much we have carried on that mission.
Now it's not the only part of his race, you know. His two, three most advanced disciples were Rajarsi, Oliver Black, and Sister Gyanamata. Two of them didn't teach at all. You know, Rajarsi didn't teach, I mean, maybe he gave a lecture here and there, Gyanamata didn't teach, she related to sister nuns.
So it wasn't like all his high disciples had to have this particular aspect of taking the teachings out and sharing them, just that Swami had that, and Master drew him and drew all of us, to help with that. Oliver Black had it, had a big teaching role, but he basically worked alone. And Swami drew a huge spiritual family to help in the spread of this.
The Disciple’s Journey: Attunement, Self-Offering, and the Inner Himalayan Cave
So with Master's life it's our job to tune in more and more deeply to his consciousness, to what he was trying to accomplish, to attune our will, our individual will. It can't be imposed, it has to come from the deep sincere desire within us to achieve complete attunement with Master.
Master, again, is God in visible form, so that we cannot have something vague that we dedicate our life to, but a clear image and model. And so by attuning to Master ever more deeply, we’re attuning, we’re basically dissolving those parts of our consciousness that don't want to be merged with God. We carry this tale, long tale, from many thousand millions of incarnations, of being involved in the world and functioning in the world. But all of that is dissolving and dissolving and dissolving. What remains when all of the… one might say, mud… is washed off, is only the pure diamond of desire to merge with God.
For us, the way to do that is through ever deeper self-offering and attunement to Master, to this ray, and to the dual purpose that he had, of intense activity, which I think we're doing a really good job with, and deep meditation. As he said to… he would write to Oliver Black… who frankly had too much intense activity, Master kept trying to tell him, “Drop your businesses, just teach. Just come here more often, be with me more often.” But he had a lot of responsibilities.
But so, so that's, that's one part of the role… to attune to Master’s great mission in this lifetime. The other part of the role is to attune inwardly. We have to make, in our hearts, the Himalayan cave that Master yearned to be in. And when we have that Himalayan cave of desire only for God, when we have that beautifully prepared…I don't know if you decorate a Himalayan cave, I don't think you do… but beautifully prepared and just right, then Master will come and be there with us.
