From Swami Kriyananda - Continued...
(J. Donald Walters)
November 1992
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The lot of saints in a bureaucracy
Look now at what happens in the individual Catholic churches.
Let us say that a priest develops a reputation for holiness. Naturally, people flock to him from all over, in many cases neglecting their own parishes for the opportunity to get the blessings and wise counsel of a saint.
The priests of other parishes, naturally also, resent his popularity. (After all, they have their own parishes to keep up.) That saintly priest may appear, in their eyes, to be stealing away their parishioners. In time, they may band together against him, and eventually complain to the bishop. (St. Jean Vianney received, by mistake, a copy of such a complaint against him, and cheerfully affixed his signature to the document!)
What can the bishop do, faced with this embarrassing contradiction between dogma and reality? Church dogma insists that all priests are ordained equally. And so indeed they are—by the Church. Here, however, is one priest who appears to have been more ordained than the others—not by the Church, but by God. Under the circumstances, what can the bishop do? The ideal solution, of course, would be to make all those other priests saints, too. Such a solution is, however, beyond the powers of man; only God can make a saint.
Ah, well, one can't argue with God, of course, but there may be ways around some of the problems He poses for His servitors.
After all, who knows whether this saintly-seeming priest really is as holy as people say he is? Even to conduct an investigation into the matter, during his lifetime at least, would mean only giving more weight to the glaring contradictions between him and his fellow prelates. The obvious solution, surely, looking at the matter carefully from an institutional point of view, would be somehow to rid the diocese of this outsider.
And so it is that the priest finds himself being shipped off to Spain, or to France, or, better still, to some remote mountain village, far from neighboring parishes (the congregations of which might, on learning of his presence nearby, become "confused").
The remote mountain villagers may be only dull-minded peasants, incapable of appreciating holiness even if it were ladled into their thick potato soup for dinner. If, however, a few quick spirits among them should, by some fluke, catch on to what a treasure they've had dumped in their midst—well, after all, there are always other remote mountain villages to push him off to.
This is what they did, as an example merely, with St. Joseph of Cupertino. In his case, it was people from all over Italy and Europe who, on learning where he'd been smuggled off to, sought him out again and again, necessitating his repeated removal to parts unknown under the cover of night.
This treatment is so common that Catholics even have an expression for it. They call it, "putting him in prison."
The time to do right by a saint, according to Catholic policy, is after he is safely in his grave. There, he ceases to be an embarrassment at last, and can be added proudly to the Church's "crown of glory," his sainthood proclaimed in churches throughout the world. The Church, of course, claims the credit for his sanctity, and to some extent it deserves the credit, too. Persecution is, after all, a recognized means by which people evolve spiritually.
Meanwhile—so goes the prevailing hierarchical sentiment—if one must pray to a saint, better pray to a dead one.
So then, what opportunity do Christian saints ever get to act as custodians of the Christian religion? It is true they have some influence, especially after their death. That influence is kept carefully reined in, however, by the bureaucrats.
It must be added that even in the posthumous recognition it gives to its saints, the Catholic Church remains more faithful to the higher, spiritual teachings of Jesus than those churches which deny the state of sanctity altogether, or else belittle the practice of rendering homage to the saints by insisting that all believing Christians are "saints," too, the only condition for their sainthood being that they "believe"—and, of course, that they sign up faithfully as tithing members of their churches.
What is most consistently and carefully emphasized in the Catholic Church is not the lives and utterances of the saints, but the essential role of the Church itself as the true and only mouthpiece for Christ's teachings. It is always, Catholic dogma insists, to "Mother Church" that primary reverence is due.
In justification of this position, the Catholic Church claims to trace its lineage of popes back uninterruptedly to apostolic times. The fact that this lineage has, as a matter of record, been interrupted several times over the centuries is of secondary importance to my present discussion. Of primary significance is the clear and obvious fact that, even had the lineage never been broken, excessive dependence on an outward apostolic succession as the means of preserving the purity of a teaching is the surest way of preserving the form, perhaps, but losing touch with the spirit.
No formal institution can, by itself, preserve the purity of a divine teaching. Inevitably, the evolution of church dogma, without the continuous influence of living saints, will be toward binding people to the institution as the vehicle for propagating the teachings. Less and less will emphasis be placed on the teachings themselves.
It is an interesting fact that, until the Protestants forced matters into the open by urging their congregations to read the Bible, the Catholic Church actually discouraged its members from reading it—lest they "get ideas"!
Energy, once established, perpetuates itself
About one thousand years ago, a question was put to the abbot of a certain Christian monastery. "What should a monk do," he was asked, "if, while praying to God in his cell, he finds himself uplifted ['translated' was, I believe, the expression used] into a state of ecstasy; and then, while still in that state, he hears the monastery bell toll the hour for communal prayer? Should he leave his ecstasy and go join the other monks in the chapel?"
"No," the abbot replied, "he should remain in his ecstasy. For it is above all with the aim of helping all our members to attain that state that we engage in communal prayer."
What is particularly interesting in this account is that that same question was posed, in the present century, to the abbot of another monastery, and was given a diametrically opposite reply. "The monk should immediately leave his ecstatic state," this abbot replied. "Whatever ecstasies God gives a monk in the privacy of his cell should be considered a foretaste, merely, of what will be his to enjoy for eternity, in heaven. Here on earth, meanwhile, his primary duty is to obey our monastic rule."
This modern abbot's response was in keeping with the official position of the Catholic Church today. A thousand years ago, that other abbot's response was in keeping with the official Church position of his time. It is not that the teachings of Jesus have changed. The change has been in the emphasis given them by the Church during its many centuries of institutionalization.
Is institutionalization in any way a good thing? Has time enabled the Catholic Church to clarify certain of Jesus' original teachings, more or less in the way the reevaluations of historians have corrected erroneous myths surrounding past events?
St. Teresa of Avila commented, "Priestly confessors do incalculable harm in their guidance of souls by their lack of understanding in spiritual matters." She herself suffered serious setbacks for years because of the bad advice she received from her priestly counselor. Unfortunately perhaps, she felt obliged to obey him out of loyalty to the Church, regardless of his ignorance in spiritual matters.
The official Church position on obedience in the face of ignorance is to say, "God protects the obedient devotee. Everything will work for the best for him in the end, if only he remain faithful to his vow of obedience." Maybe so. St. Teresa, however, certainly had nothing good to say about the results of her formal "training."
In India, too, emphasis is placed on the importance of obedience. Because, however, no hierarchical system exists to impose an institutional rule on devotees, these seek the guidance of men and women of divine wisdom, and give their obedience to them as their superiors in spiritual attainment. The question of obedience to a mere superior in a hierarchical order hardly arises. Obedience, after all—so the Hindu mind reasons—should be an apprenticeship in wisdom.
I am not saying that St. Teresa ought to have rebelled. And I'm not saying that the superiors in a Western monastery ought not to be obeyed, though certainly I don't believe that obedience should be given them unconditionally as it would be to a wise guru. What I'm saying is that the Western system itself is mistaken in its over-emphasis on institutionalism.
The Catholic Church was founded in an age when the average person could not conceptualize things unless they were invested with material forms. Even Aristotle believed that air is immaterial, since it can't be seen. (The modern mind wonders how he reconciled the air's supposed "immateriality" with the fact that the wind is so clearly a mighty force, on which, even when it is motionless, the birds soar so freely and joyously.)
God Himself, in past centuries, was conceptualized as an old man with a long white beard. Even today, so I have read, many people imagine Him as we see Him depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in the act of creating Adam. Heaven was conceived of in times past, and still is conceived of in popular fantasy, as a place entered through pearly gates, with a royal castle in the midst of it wherein God is ensconced on a throne of gold, Jesus at his right hand, and the angels ranged shiningly, in descending ranks, on either side of them: a sort of frozen tableau, like the paintings of Beato Angelico. Divine teachings could not be understood in those times except symbolically, their subtle essence encased in the militant armor of dogma. Dogmas had, moreover, to be free of gray areas, of any ambiguities, like legal decisions. The living subtleties of divine truth had to be frozen into immobility by the cold north winds of analytical reason. Reason itself was viewed not simply as a tool for achieving clarity, but as Ultimate Truth, forever binding upon the universe and upon the Lord Himself.
We know now, because Sri Yukteswar told us so, and because modern science itself has made the discoveries he predicted more than a hundred years ago, that matter is energy. Matter, then, is not fixed, but mutable. Ultimately indeed, matter is not even real except as a manifestation of Infinite Consciousness. Dogmas, similarly, are no longer acceptable as absolutes—except by churchmen, whose ideological conservatism prevents them from adjusting to new perceptions of reality.
All this new liberalism of thought is due, as you know, to the fact that we have entered what Sri Yukteswar explained is a new age: "Dwapara Yuga."
Under the rays of Dwapara Yuga, with its radically different insights into reality, the Catholic Church is losing ground rapidly as a religious institution. Unless it can manage in time to undergo a radical transformation away from the rigidities of institutionalism, it will not be able to adjust to these new rays of awareness, and will crumble and disappear. Unfortunately, the very institutionalism of the Church is so deeply ingrained in the minds of the hierarchy that it seems highly improbable that they'll ever succeed in metamorphosing it into a more Dwapara Yuga kind of institution.
The religion of the present age
Paramhansa Yogananda told us clearly and repeatedly the kind of religion that will predominate in the new age. He said it would be free from dogmatism, free from rigid institutionalism, and strong in its emphasis on Self-realization.
The kind of religion needed today is, in fact, that which has existed since time immemorial in India, stated simply, with the added advantage of modern, Western organizing skills to give it a new, but not a frozen, focus. As Master said, his message of Self-realization is a new expression of religion.
An organization can prove to be of inestimable value, if it doesn't slip into old Western habits of dogmatism, of domination over its members, and of control over people's thoughts, practices, and beliefs. If it succeeds in following a liberal pathway to inner freedom, it can bring clarity to teachings that otherwise are not likely to be preserved by saints so much as muddled by fools. The important thing is that the organization serve joyfully, and that it not impose control on others. All this, from everything Master ever said or wrote, has to be what he visualized for the future of his work.
Jesus taught freely, outside of an institutional framework
The Western Church was, in many ways, less a Christian phenomenon than a cultural one. Jesus himself moved freely and informally from town to town, in the traditional manner of the East, teaching as he went. Both he and his teachings were purely Eastern in form as well as in content. He had little in common with formalism even in his own religion, and shunned the rabbis of his day, though he was himself a rabbi.
It was upon Christianity's entry into the Greco-Roman world that the religion of Jesus changed, becoming Westernized. As so often happens under similar circumstances, in the process of conquering it became, in its turn, the conquered. Virtually its first step was to adopt the trappings of Western rationalism, and thereby of Western institutionalism. Jesus Christ's teachings became re-cast in a system of dogmatic absolutes, for such was the Greco-Roman approach to truth.
Placing Yogananda in a straight jacket
This approach was very different from the intuitive one Jesus took. Indeed, the Church made a point, increasingly over the centuries, of avoiding intuition, for reality, to it, was something forever fixed and absolute. Things had to be either this, or that. They couldn't be permitted to bleed over into gray, shadow areas in between.
Is this what you want to do with Master's teachings? with his organization? Paramhansa Yogananda, too, was an Easterner. He himself was outspokenly against any excess of rationalism. And he was uncomfortable with too much organizationalism—so much so, indeed, that he threatened several times to walk away from his own organization, "and never look back." You have set out to confine his teaching in a rigid system of "either...or," as the early Greco-Romans did to the teachings of Jesus. And you say that this is what our Guru wanted?
One interpretation, or many?
I will tell you, one of the early tests I went through on the path was when, with my Western education, I read Master's interpretations of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and discovered how many different, unrelated meanings he could find in a single quatrain. My thought at that time, no doubt reprehensible in a disciple, was at least honest: I asked myself, "Why doesn't he make up his mind?"
It was only much later, after I'd lived some time in India, that I came to appreciate the subtlety in this ability to discern many meanings in a single passage of Scripture. Master's approach was, I then realized, far truer to spiritual reality with its countless facets than our Western way, which seeks to establish the one, definitive, final meaning of any passage, and to discard all other interpretations as invalid.
Now you want to reduce everything Master said to one interpretation, and to one only. You want to place his teachings in a straitjacket. That is what the Catholic Church did to the teachings of Jesus. Jesus, on the other hand, constantly made the point that his teaching could be taken on more than one level at a time. He addressed each listener's ability to comprehend him. ("He that hath ears to hear," he often said, "let him hear.")
You present the SRF organization, and the dicta of the SRF President, as your means of ensuring that one interpretation, and one only, be accepted as the authoritative, definitive, true, and absolute teaching of Paramhansa Yogananda. You insist that Master himself taught you to do so. In this very insistence you limit everything he said to one track on every issue, like a train. You ignore the many roads, and the countless flowered trails, that lead off fascinatingly toward other voyages of spiritual discovery. You limit his teaching to one level of understanding, and ignore his own deliberate practice of reaching out to people on different levels of experience and understanding. And I, who am, I think, as orthodox to his teachings as anyone can be, am accused of "distorting" them.
Master did not want institutionalism
I say you are wrong. And not wrong only, but wrong in a way that will, if your manner of interpretation succeeds in silencing alternate voices, prove devastating for the future of Master's mission, and for SRF itself. In an age when the power of church institutions as institutions must necessarily diminish—is already diminishing rapidly—your insistence on becoming the one true and universal church—a new Roman Catholic Church, if you will (and as, evidently, you do will)—cannot but leave you in the dust, as mankind moves on toward ever-broader perceptions of reality.
Master never wanted this kind of institution. He didn't want institutionalism. He didn't want dogmatism. Referring to the dogmatism he'd encountered in some of the fundamentalist Christian churches, he said, "We don't want to 'dye people in the wool' of sectarian dogmas. Let us instead 'dye them in the wool' of their own Kriya Yoga practice! Let us hold them by their own soul-perception of truth."
Repeatedly he told us, "SRF is not a sect!"
What is a true disciple?
You actually accuse people of not being true disciples if they try to interpret his teachings. What on earth do you mean? Have I perhaps somehow misunderstood you? Is the apparent absurdity of your statement merely a matter of semantics? I would say, No one is a true disciple if he does not interpret his guru's teachings! The disciple must do his best to understand his guru's teachings in all their ramifications, that he may apply them, and help others to apply them, to life at every level. How often Master told us, "I don't want our ministers to be spiritual victrolas"! What else would we become, if we didn't do our best to interpret his teachings, and apply them creatively?
The more meanings we can find in a single teaching, and the more the applications we can find for it, the more fully we'll have realized its true import. Even so, I doubt that many of us will ever come close to understanding these teachings fully on any of their levels, even the most superficial.
If, moreover, we ourselves, who lived with him, don't do this work, the task will get done anyway—although, more probably in this case, in a hybrid manner.
Even now there is much that none of us, who knew him, is capable of doing. A work of this importance demands, for instance, that Master, his mission and his teachings, be presented also in the context of history and of the development of religious thought through the ages. Speaking for myself, I know that I will never be sufficiently schooled to do more than suggest new directions to others who are equipped with the necessary knowledge. Moreover, though with some regret, I'm not really interested in studying these subjects as exhaustively as they need to be studied. Yet the job begs to be done, and the sooner the better. (When Master told me, "Your job is lecturing and writing," I inquired, "But haven't you already written all the books that are needed?" Appearing slightly shocked at my obtuseness, he replied, "Don't say that! Much more is needed.")
Truth cannot simply be nailed to a wall
One thing we must get away from is the Aristotelian, and subsequently the Roman Catholic, practice of dividing every concept into "either this, or that," a practice which assigns everything to an absolute category. If there is one thing that is emerging more and more clearly in this Dwapara Yuga—in physics as much as in ethics and in everyday human affairs—it is the growing realization that truth simply cannot be nailed to the wall, dead but well defined and classified. Master never tried to do so. In fact, he made it very clear that it couldn't be done. SRF, however, is trying to do so, and insists that divergent expressions be labeled "distortions." Any such claim only demonstrates a philosophical and spiritual naiveté that Master contradicted by everything he ever said, did, or wrote.
Dogmatism is like still photography. Truth is like a movie: ever fluid, ever changing even when the underlying theme remains the same.
In science, it is a universally recognized fact that the greatness of a discovery lies not in the promise it may hold of offering a Final Solution, but in its capacity to open up new fields of discovery. This is what made Einstein's discoveries so great: They opened the way to an infinity of investigations, not only in science, but in philosophy, in social thought, in religion; the list appears to be never-ending. And the greatness of Master's teachings definitely lies, at least in part, in the fact that they have within them the potential to change and spiritualize an entire civilization. I wonder how many people have any conception of how far-reaching his teachings are in their implications. I myself, though admittedly able to scratch only their surface, am continually in awe at the vastness of their potential completely to re-shape the destiny of mankind.
Dogmatism represents an effort to embalm the truth. This it can do only after the spirit has departed the truth's once-living form. You accuse me of distorting the teachings because I am dedicated to presenting them in all their robustness and vitality. Well, I accuse you of distorting them by, among other things, stripping them of their vitality.
Here's an example of SRF's efforts to "embalm" Master's teachings. I am particularly familiar with this example, for I heard Master speak the words myself; I recorded them, and later submitted them for publication to the Editorial Department.
The actual statement Master made was within the context of a longer saying. His words were, "The dreamer is not conscious of his dream."
Now, it is obvious that the dreamer must be conscious of his dream, or else he wouldn't be dreaming at all. It is equally obvious, then, that this sentence requires editorial clarification. Clearly, Master's meaning was, "The dreamer is not conscious of the fact that he is dreaming."
As this sentence appeared in print, after a laborious process of editorial mummification, it read, "The dreamer is not cognizant of the hallucinatory fabric of his dream."
Whose, please tell me, is the "distortion"? I'm tempted to say of this "official" version that it would take a master even to be able to speak like that!
Why not put it, simply: "The dreamer is not conscious of the fact that he is dreaming"? The process of editing ought not to be viewed as giving the editor license completely to re-write what he edits.
A much more significant alteration occurred in another instance, one with which I am equally familiar since it was I, again, who recorded Master's words and submitted them to the Editorial Department.
Troubling changes to Yogananda's sacred words
One evening at Twenty-Nine Palms, a disciple expressed a desire to hear details of a vision Master had had in Encinitas of a certain saint.
"I don't know to whom you are referring," Master replied.
"It was in the garden," the disciple explained, "behind the hermitage."
"Well," Master answered, "so many have come there. I often see them." Noting the disciple's astonishment, he continued, "Why be surprised? Wherever God is, there His saints come." He went on to tell us, almost casually, how Sri Ramakrishna had appeared to him—"materialized" was the word he used—that very morning in his bedroom.
In the book, Sayings of Yogananda, his statement, "Wherever God is...," was changed to read, "Wherever a devotee of God is, there His saints come."
I can think of two possible reasons why that statement might have been changed. The first would have been that, since God is everywhere, the words Master used failed to indicate that he was speaking of God's presence in a particular sense. To address this concern, however, it wouldn't help very much to say, "Wherever God is manifested." After all, the whole universe is God's manifestation!
To make the point unmistakably clear to the most literal mind, an editor might decide to elaborate on the phrase, changing it from its divine simplicity to something complex, pedantic, but admittedly explicit. For essentially what Master was saying—if one insisted on spelling it all out—was, "The consciousness dwelling within this physical form is that of one who, having achieved the state of perfect union with God, attracts those spiritually advanced souls whose sainthood has been ordained by the Divine and not merely by a religious institution. Wherever such an exalted being is to be found, there such divinely recognized saints love to come, and to render homage."
Were an editor, however, to presume so greatly to alter Master's words in the name of clarification, not only would he deprive the statement of every vestige of immediacy, but he'd make Master himself look more like a lawyer than like an "exalted being."
Personally, I see no better way of phrasing his thought than in the words he actually used: "Wherever God is, there His saints come." Sometimes, let's face it, it is better simply to let the reader grapple with the teachings as best he can. Only by stretching for the truth can he make it eventually his own. It won't help him to be forever spoon-fed.
The other reason for an editor to feel a need for changing Master's statement would have been to emphasize Master's humility. And this was, I believe, the real reason for the change. In other words, the editor felt that Master's statement, "Wherever God is," in reference to himself might make him appear boastful in the reader's eyes.
The trouble with this change is that it dilutes the truth Master was trying to convey. Indeed, "Wherever a devotee of God is" actually blunts the whole point of his statement. Aren't we all devotees of God? But do His saints appear to us "often"? If not, why not? Although we can, of course, take the edited version as indicating how much greater Master's devotion was than our own, still, Master's clear implication was that more is needed than being a mere "devotee of God" for so many saints to be attracted to one. What drew those saints to Master was the fact that God was so perfectly manifested in his human form. As he told us often, "I killed Yogananda long ago. No one dwells in this temple now but God."
SRF dilutes Yogananda's teachings
SRF accuses others of diluting Master's teachings. Yet this change from expressing Master's divine greatness to admitting only to his being a great "devotee of God" affords an extraordinary example of dilution on SRF's part. I grant that Master spoke more frequently toward the end of his life in advaitic, or non-dualistic, terms—as Brahman Itself (aham brahm asmi), rather than as a humble devotee of Brahman. Nevertheless, this was his true and permanent state of consciousness, as he clearly explained to us. He spoke that way especially during those days out at Twenty-Nine Palms, after he'd completed his commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita. It was during that period, in the spring of 1950, that he told me, "Write down my words. I don't often speak from this level of absolute wisdom."
The damage done by changing that single statement might not give serious cause for alarm, did it not demonstrate a basic editorial direction that SRF has taken over many years: away from presenting Paramhansa Yogananda in his full vigor as a great master of yoga, and toward a policy of reassuring people that he remained always true to a limited—sweet, but entirely human—image of him as the "ideal saint," one to which no Christian could reasonably object. As a certain journalist once wrote me, "What comes through the SRF literature often seems like 'Norman Vincent Peale Goes to India.'"
SRF's effort to "sanitize" Master
Worse still, this effort to "sanitize" Master's image makes him out to have been not only sweetly humble (which of course he was), but also a person too timid to make any statement that could not actually be proved. As you yourselves have often put it, "We can't say that! What would people think?" Declarations that he made with divine authority have become all too often emasculated, editorially.
I tremble to contemplate how many of the gloriously bold statements he made in his commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita may fail to appear in that book. As you know, I myself worked with Master at Twenty-Nine Palms on the original manuscript of that book. And I recall quite a few passages that seemed to me important at the time, and that still seem important, but that didn't make it into the supposedly complete commentaries which appeared for years in "Self-Realization Magazine." You will recall how Tara Mata, SRF's editor-in-chief, assured you that the material in this series was complete.
A great Master spreads many seeds of inspiration among his disciples
To return to my main theme: SRF is not growing significantly, considering the vast relevance of Master's teachings to the needs of this age. Nor will it be able to grow, unless and until you change your suffocating policy of institutionalizing everything: words, people, policies, precedents—you name it.
You seem to want to forget that I too was with Master. Admittedly, he told you many things that I didn't get to hear. He also told me things you didn't get to hear. All of his more important pronouncements, however, were consistent with everything else he ever said and did throughout his life. I cannot accept, and I don't believe for a moment, that some of the things you quote him as saying, which contradict those lifelong teachings, were actually his words, or were meant by him in the sense that you claim.
The time has passed for insisting on private knowledge in these vitally important matters. Master simply cannot have made certain statements all his life, both publicly and in private, only to renounce them at the end as you now claim that he did. (One thinks here of deathbed confessions!) You insist that he made this about-face during his final year in the presence of a select few of you, whom he then authorized to pass along to the world what amounted to a totally new "gospel." I say it is you who have misunderstood his intentions, and who have interpreted them in keeping with your own personal predilections.
Did Yogananda change his mind about communities at the end of his life?
One of the changes he is purported to have made "at the end" concerned the forming of spiritual communities ("world-brotherhood colonies," as he called them). All his life he campaigned for this idea. You will recall, Mrinalini Mata, that you told me not long after the founding of Ananda, "Master changed his mind at the end of his life on the subject of communities." Well, I disagree with you.
Kamala, in her book, The Flawless Mirror, reports his enthusiasm for this idea in a conversation she had with him only four months before his passing.
Master's autobiography, in its first two editions, ended with a stirring call to form such intentional spiritual communities. His book was changed in its Third Edition, dated 1951, which was the last to come out during his lifetime. This edition described such communities as already existing: "A Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) World Brotherhood Colony in Encinitas...serves as a model for several smaller SRF colonies." It goes on to insist on the universal need for such colonies: "An urgent need on this war-torn earth is the founding, on a spiritual basis, of numerous world-brotherhood colonies." These statements continued to appear through the Seventh Edition, which announced that it included changes made by Master himself during his lifetime. It was not until the Eighth Edition, which appeared, I believe, in 1958, that Master's statements about world-brotherhood colonies were omitted from the book altogether.
At that time also, Master's basic "Aims and Ideals of Self-Realization Fellowship" were changed. Master had originally written one of these eleven "Aims and Ideals" to read, "To spread a spirit of world brotherhood among all peoples and to aid in the establishment, in many countries, of self-sustaining world-brotherhood colonies for plain living and high thinking."
For the Eighth Edition of the Autobiography, and in all subsequent editions, this "aim and ideal" was changed to read: "To encourage 'plain living and high thinking'; and to spread a spirit of brotherhood among all peoples by teaching the eternal basis of their unity: kinship with God." All mention of world-brotherhood colonies was omitted; nor has it appeared in any of your other literature for the past thirty or more years.
It was you, not Master, who changed this statement concerning one of the basic aims and ideals of his world mission. I remember approaching you, Daya Mata, I think it was in 1956, with the question, "When will we start developing Master's 'world-brotherhood colonies'?" Your reply to me on that occasion was, "Frankly, I'm not interested." (Wouldn't you have replied differently, had you known that Master himself had renounced the idea?)
I didn't fault you for your own lack of interest. Master said we'd find God if we followed even a hundredth part of his teachings. I do fault you, however, and I fault all of you, for claiming that he "changed his mind at the end" on the need for colonies—something which, as you very well know, he never did.
Did Master want SRF to be organized along church lines?
I recall also how you, Mrinalini Mata, insisted that Master had decided—again, "at the end of his life"—that the work should be developed more strictly along church lines, with the members being required formally to renounce any prior church affiliation. Master's successor, Rajarsi Janakananda, remarked, "But that's just what I've always loved about his teachings: their universality; the fact that this isn't a church and that it isn't exclusive." I myself was present on that occasion, and have quoted his sentiments here exactly; his words, more or less exactly.
I've no doubt that Master told you he wanted SRF to be organized more as a church. What I contest is the further meaning you've read into those words. I know, because Master said so, that you personally have strong Roman Catholic tendencies brought over from past lives. As nearly as I was able to observe in India, you feel little kinship with that country's informal traditions in these matters, and with the freedom of religious expression there. It is owing, I think, to your influence that SRF has come more and more to resemble the Catholic monastic orders: rules, dogmas—everything.
I have it on what I believe to be good authority that Master was distressed, in 1935, at the very need for incorporating SRF as a church. This was simply a legal requirement, to obtain tax exemption for SRF as a religious work.
I am aware of the fact that, at the end of his life, he stressed the need for emphasizing more strongly the religious aspects of our work, and that in this context he used the word church. Anything he said "at the end," however, must be weighed against all that he ever said previously. For a true Master is never motivated by whim. His every utterance in the name of truth—and even, perhaps, when he appears to be speaking lightly—is part and parcel of the teaching he has been charged to bring into the world. Never would he change his mind in the sense you've implied.
I happen to know what he did say on this subject "at the end of his life." He was concerned that too many people, after taking Kriya Yoga initiation, failed to appreciate its spiritual significance, and didn't understand the importance of belonging to the spiritual family of a line of great masters. "They leave here after taking initiation," he said, "and go back to supporting their own churches. They should be shown the importance of supporting this as their spiritual work."
What you have done is take a perfectly sensible admonition to involve people more in the work, and make it a basis for binding people hand and foot. You've turned what might have been an expansive concern for their higher welfare into a contractive concern for the supreme and central position of the Church itself. ("Ask not what your church can do for you. Ask what you can do for your church."!) Really, it's a question of emphasis. The emphasis, however, on what we can get out of people instead of on what we can give to them cannot but change this religion of divine love into one of worldly power and universal control.
Signs of an unhealthy organization
I discussed the contractive consciousness in the booklet, "My Separation from SRF." SRF, as I wrote there, is ambivalent in its attempts to be expansive. Though missionary by intention, what it actually does is not so much reach out to people and touch their hopes and aspirations as seek to control the spread of the teachings. Such an attitude is not expansive, but contractive.
Generally speaking, SRF's influence, both internally and externally, is not supportive, but suppressive. The monks and nuns themselves complain that they can't meditate enough. They dream nostalgically of a more cloistered life, and wish they were free to devote themselves to simple tasks that would permit them, even while working, to think one-pointedly of God. To them, their administrative duties are a burden, not a joy. This is what happens when people view their duty with a contractive consciousness. Were they to view it expansively, nothing they did would seem burdensome to them. They'd welcome it all gratefully and view it as a blessing, as an opportunity to grow in God. Any work that one does for Him ought to inspire joy. And so it will, if one accepts his duties as being truly the Lord's will for him.
The SRF monks and nuns, with their nostalgia for the cloister, are actually biased against pursuing their missionary activities with expansive zeal. Who could maintain for long a division between serving outwardly on the one hand, and rejecting outward involvement on the other? A devotee would more easily fulfill his inner, spiritual aspirations if he developed a spirit of self-offering both inwardly and outwardly, giving of himself in both worlds with an attitude of expansive joy. But if he sacrifices the joy of inner expansion in spirit for the joylessness of outer contraction, he ends up substituting a desire to rise through the organizational ranks for the desire to soar inwardly in God. The desire for position is, unfortunately, quite common in SRF. Contractiveness, if it isn't made a means to inner expansion, is spiritually unhealthy. It cannot fail in time to produce a desire for power, in the process feeding such spiritually harmful, pride-affirming attitudes as spiritual narrowness, lack of charity, and fanaticism.
Is any of this what Master wanted? I put it to you boldly: Is the process of institutionalization what you yourselves want, really? I cannot believe that it is. I think you've accepted this direction because you believe it is what you are supposed to do. But it goes against your own grain, spiritually; that is why you find so little joy in it, and why there is so much stress and tension at Mt. Washington. (Your ministers, so I was told, admitted publicly to the tension during this year's SRF Convocation.) It is also the reason you so often refer to your work as a burden to you. There is no room, when the attitude is right, for talking—still less for complaining—of one's "heavy responsibilities."
Continued on page 4 >>>>>>>>>
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