Yogananda said He Had Been William the Conqueror
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| "Let us cast aside . . . formalities." - Paramahansa Yogananda, in "Reforming Religion by Science". East West 2-6 October 1927 - November 1927. |
Yogananda Was no Wife-killer in AD 1066
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| William the Conqueror may not have killed his wife in 1066, but he had killed so many others. |
Before he died, William the Conqueror confessed: "I tremble . . . when I reflect on the grievous sins which burden my conscience". Then he died. Was he later reborn as the guru Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952)? Where is the evidence? Is it wholly lacking? Actually, yes.
Read on to see how fond some guru followers are of claiming royalty in previous lives. [1]
JAMES DONALD WALTERS, also known as swami Kriyananda and former vice-president of Self-Realization Fellowship, has written the book, The Hindu Way of Awakening. In a Net article connected with it this was found, and it could still be in the book:
"Once I asked Master a question with regard to William the Conqueror. [Master said he was William the Conqueror in a previous lifetime.] I asked, "... Can an avatar not realize he has attained that stature?" Master said, "You never lose your sense of inner freedom" - a very wise answer."How to react": The William you learn about, was not a good man, but greedy, ruthless and brutal. The blood of many were on his hands, and therefore he confessed when he was about to die,
One can see that Lahiri Mahasaya, for example, wasn’t fully in his body until he met Babaji. (...)
One could say that an avatar incarnates partially and is waiting for the right time to fully express his realization. Before they fully express that consciousness, they go through different experiences to show us how to react to what we have to go through to achieve freedom." [Emphasis added by us.] [Check A The book]
I tremble . . . when I reflect on the grievous sins which burden my conscience, and now, about to be summoned before the awful tribunal of God, I know not what I ought to do. I . . . am stained from the rivers of blood I have shed ... It is out of my power to count all the injuries which I have caused during the sixty-four years of my troubled life. [Confession made by William on his deathbed in 1087. Quoted by Ordericus Vitalis in The Ecclesiastical History (c. 1142)]In still another passage, in A Place Called Ananda, J. Donald Walters writes of Daya Mata:
Master had told Daya that she was one of his daughters when he was William the Conqueror. One couldn't help feeling that there was a certain regal quality about Daya Mata, as also about Virginia, her sister, who now bears the name Ananda Mata, and who also was closely related to Master during that lifetime. I came to believe, though Master had never told me so, that I was Daya's youngest brother, Master's son, in that incarnation. [Source]A CERTAIN REGAL UHH: William mistreated his future wife one day: When he was in his early twenties he asked Count Baldwin V of Flanders for his daughter Matilda's hand in marriage. Matilda was short - almost a dwarf - and slender. But Matilda was already in love with an Englishman named Brihtric. She supposedly proclaimed that she would rather become a nun than the wife of a bastard. This made William so angry that he attacked her in the street as she left church one day. He slapped her, tore her clothes, threw her to the ground, and rode off. - They did eventually marry and had many children. But the marriage was condemned as incestuous by the pope in 1049. [MORE] [See also Ebu, "William the Conqueror"]
What became the lot of Brihtric? William had him thown into a dungeon, where he died. William killed him that way. Now how was William?Looks matter. There are no contemporary paintings of William. What is sometimes used to show him, is "William 1" by George Vertue (1648-1756). A detail of it is shown here. The whole picture is in the Royal British Collection. But there is no evidence of any likeness. It is just a "vision" of the 1600s, made about 600 years after the death of William.
How did William really look, then? Instead of saying "Your guess is as as good as that of George Vertue", one may look up verbal descriptions of William. On two other pages you can find out what many historians decree. Below is a small part of that again, focusing on his life as a married man and how he ruled. His own thoughts are largely lacking, except for those of the dying king's confession.
According to a brief description of William's person by an anonymous author, who borrowed extensively from Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, he was just above average height and had a robust, thick-set body. Though he was always sparing of food and drink, he became fat in later life. He had a rough bass voice and was a good and ready speaker. Writers of the next generation agree that he was exceptionally strong and vigorous. William was an out-of-doors man, a hunter and soldier, fierce and despotic, generally feared; uneducated, he had few graces but was intelligent and shrewd and soon obtained the respect of his rivals. [Encyclopaedia Britannica]The Icelandic historician Snorre writes somewhere in the first half of the 1200s about some traits of William's:
William gathered together a great army in Normandy, and had many men, and sufficient transport-shipping. The day that he rode out of the castle to his ships, and had mounted his horse, his wife came to him, and wanted to speak with him; but when he saw her he struck at her with his heel, and set his spurs so deep into her breast that she fell down dead; and the earl rode on to his ships . . . Earl William was . . . not considered a man to be relied on. [OLD NORSE SAGA (Section 99)].
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| William the Conqueror kills his wife in 1066, according to Snorre (Casting aside formalities), |
The medieval Icelandic chronicler Snorre Sturlason (d. 1241) writes in the above passage from the Chronicles of the Kings of Norway that William killed his wife on the brink of departing for England in 1066. But there are weighty indications that Mathilda lived on: The famous Baueux tapestry of William's conquest is connected with her - it was called "Queen Mathilda's Tapestry" too earlier, and it is also told that she negotiated between her son Robert and William over some territory many years later - and that she died in 1083, which is a widely accepted year of death for her.
If you are still intrigued by a man who slapped his wife-to-be, tore her clothes, threw her to the ground, and rode off, here is more: The marriage was condemned as incestuous by the pope in 1049, and the couple was excommunicated along with all their people. But in 1059 William was reconciled to the papacy, and as penance the disobedient pair had built two monasteries at Caen. Over the next sixteen years the couple had (at least) ten children. Among them were Robert Curthose, Richard (killed in a hunting accident in 1075), Cecily, William Rufus, Agatha, Henry Beauclerk and Adela. [Main source: Encyclopedida Britannica]
William had paid a visit to the king of England, Edward the Confessor, in 1051. Edward had been raised in Normandy, and he and William were cousins. When Edward died childless on January in 1066, Harold Godwinson was accepted as king by the English magnates, and William decided on war, because he maintained he had a right to the land. William claimed that Edward had promised to make him his heir.
He ravaged the countryside and by the end of the year the people of London, surrounded by devastated lands, submitted to William. On 25th December, 1066, William was crowned king of England by Aldred, Archbishop of York, at Westminster Abbey.
He favoured his own; impartial deals were not for the devout tyrant: After his coronation in 1066, William claimed that all the land in England now belonged to him. William retained about a fifth of this land for his own use. The rest was distributed to those men who had helped him defeat Harold at the Battle of Hastings. In 1067 William and his army went on a tour of England where he organised the confiscating of lands, built castles and established his sort of law and order.
The English, however, did not so readily accept him as their king. A series of rebellions broke out, and William suppressed them harshly, ravaging great sections of the country. Titles to the lands of the now decimated native nobility were called in and redistributed on a strictly feudal basis (see feudalism), to the king's Norman followers. [Columbia encyclopedia]William was not generous to the church with his own property. The reformer-clerical Lanfranc was one of his advisers; but perhaps even more to his taste were the worldly and soldierly bishops Odo of Bayeux (his brother), and Geoffrey of Coutances.
King William and the chief men loved gold and silver and did not care how sinfully it was obtained provided it came to them. He (William) did not care at all how wrongfully his men got possession of land nor how many illegal acts they did. [Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Version E, entry for 1087]In a few years William had ruined the highest English aristocracy and got a distaste for his newly conquered kingdom after putting down the revolts. Old sources tell about these happenings:
In his anger William ordered that all crops and herds... and food of every kind should be brought together and burned to ashes, so that the whole region north of Humber might be stripped of all means of survival. [Ordericus Vitalis: Ecclesiastical History describing what happened after an English rebellion in the winter of 1069. (c. 1142)]
The whole country from York to Durham was laid waste, and we learn, for example, from the Domesday Book, that in the district of Amunderness, where there had been sixty-two villages in the Confessor's time, there were in 1087 but sixteen, and these with a vastly reduced population. Neither was this the only instance of such ruthless severity. A terrible penalty was exacted in other centres of rebellion, and we read not only of a wholesale use of fire and sword, but of mutilation and blinding in the case of individual offenders. [Catholic encyclopeda Link]He had many freedom-loving people mutilated, imprisoned, blinded and killed. In 1071 another revolt broke out. Led by Hereward the rebels captured the Isle of Ely. William personally led the Norman army against Hereward. He punished the rebels with mutilation and lifelong imprisonment and built a new castle at Ely.
He (William) made large forests for the deer, and passed laws, so that whoever killed a hart or a hind should be blinded. The rich complained and the poor murmured, but the king was so strong that he took no notice of them. [Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Version E, entry for 1083.]The mutilating, blinding William was a Christian tyrant:
William, Duke of Normandy, . . . was moderate in drinking, for he deplored drunkenness in all men. In speech he was . . . skilled at all times in making clear his will. He followed the Christian discipline . . . whenever his health permitted he regularly attended Christian worship each morning and at the celebration of mass. [ William of Jumieges, Deeds of the Dukes of the Normans (c. 1070)]In later life William became very fat. In 1087 William was told that King Philip of France described him as looking like a pregnant woman. William was furious and mounted on an attack on the king's territory. On 15th August he captured Mantes and set fire to the town. While fighting the French at the Battle of Mantes, he was thrown against the pommel of his saddle so violently that his intestines burst. Or, more diplomatically: "While the town burned he suffered some injury from which he never recovered".
In a suburb of Rouen, where he lay dying for five weeks, he prepared for death and made a confession:
I tremble my friends[,] when I reflect on the grievous sins which burden my conscience, and now, about to be summoned before the awful tribunal of God, I know not what I ought to do. I was bred to arms from my childhood, and am stained from the rivers of blood I have shed... It is out of my power to count all the injuries which I have caused during the sixty-four years of my troubled life. [Confession made by William the Conqueror on his deathbed in 1087. Quoted by Ordericus Vitalis in The Ecclesiastical History (c. 1142) - our emphasis]He commended his soul to Virgin and Mother Mary, "that by her holy prayers she may reconcile me to her Son, my Lord Jesus Christ".
On September 9, 1087, England's conqueror died. His servants stripped him bare and abandoned his body, but a kind-hearted knight arranged a funeral for him at the abbey of St. Stephen in Caen.FREE COUNSEL: Rather than sucking up to notorious nobility, strive to be someone of worth.
The funeral was disrupted by the outbreak of a fire. After extinguishing it, the pallbearers tried to cram the king's bloated corpse into a too-small sarcophagus. The body exploded, creating a horrible smell that sent mourners running for the exits. MORE]
Was mutilating and killing good?
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| Paramahansa Yogananda in Encinitas |
What if a martial Norman is later made a world-famous guru? What next?"
Reply: Guru cooperation first, plenty of veiled knowledge, and growth preparations, perhaps important journeys too. Maybe superficial matters and conscious manipulation tricks also.
To some it may sound just awesome to (1) have been a bastard son of a Norman (Scandinavian settler in Normandy); (2) marry a distant cousin and get banned by the pope for some years for such an "incestuous incident" along with alle the people of Normandy; (3) starve, mutilate, blind and kill off a lot of people as a tyrant of England.
A ruthless Norman he was, according to old sources and the younger Icelander Snorre - all in all a very famous historical personage. But the question to look into is how worthy the famous one was, if the sources you have been given access to, look reliable and solid to you..
- FIND AN ALTERNATIVE. To conform to rigorous demands for scientific thinking - and try to reach excellence in it as well - we launch the alternative assertion (hypothesis): Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952) was not William the Conqueror in a former life of his, no matter what he got into his head. He "just dreamt it all".
- LET THE ONE WHO ASSERTS, FURNISH GOOD PROOF, AND NOT ANYBODY ELSE. Immodesty takes many turns, some get grave around the corner. This has to be plain, as the burden of proof is not to be put on the victims of what could very well be a fancy tale, but on the one that propounds such things: in this case Paramahansa Yogananda. It must be good to know that - that in the realm of scientific thinking we hardly think any assertion is true or great just because an authority figure has decreed something. If no scientific evidence is forthcoming, it saves a lot of labour and unwanted "faith" to look on the bold assertion with disdain, and maybe find a plot from there on. That could be fit as one next best thing to do.
- JOKE IF YOU CAN OR DARE. The third best thing could be to joke. There are high-class jokes that could help the beginners to get to grips with some parading claims. Boys will be boys - and some girls and boys need to assert themselves better than to be just taken in. Delicate irreverence could be what is called for. So to a good end we can debunk more than dubious claims because Yogananda asks us not to believe blindly, and yet tells half-canonical things from alleged former lives - now it's also found on sites meant for an American public - without having hard evidence that both scientists and asserting ones need so as not to be called fools.
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| A Norman with his beautiful wife by his side - |
Of an incestuous wedding: William negotiated with Baldwin V of Flanders for the hand of his daughter, Matilda. The proposed marriage was condemned as incestuous by Pope Leo IX, but three or four years after that, the wedding took place anyway. As penance the pair had built two monasteries at Caen, Normandy. The couple got four sons and some daughters.
Sturdy in what counted: How did William look like? According to an anonymous author, he was just above average, with a robust, thick-set body. He became fat in later life, even though he ate sparingly. He had a rough bass voice and was a ready speaker. Writers agreed he was unusually strong and vigorous, fierce and despotic, generally feared - and intelligent and shrewd even though somewhat uneducated. He was a leader marked by simple plans and direct methods; if he found himself at a disadvantage, he withdrew at once. And he was prepared to improvise as well.
Not over-lenient: The Norman church flourished under William's rule. He was a good administrator who among other things invaded Scotland and Wales and quelled English rebellions. On his death-bed he repented the ruthlessness he had been marked by towards the English. Somewhat later his body was placed in Normandy among his forefathers of a dynasty, the one he rose from, after what some thought was a bit nasty start, to say the least. Many had wanted to kill him as a boy and youth as well.
No fugitive: His father was of the nobility, his single mom was a tanner's daughter. Even so, he won enough, and the Tower of London shows how far he went to bulwark against impending enemies. You have to be stalwart to organise that much lifting of stones - but there is a much smarter way, once you see it.
Shiver!
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| Someone: "Go for no kingly tyranny, Jackie dear, take my whig!" |
Next handsome follower - can it be -?
Uh,
Batard freedom?
The former Paramahansa Yogananda, if you believe a tale-teller
What follows is a short retelling.During Christmas in 1066 William was proclaimed king of England. He sent a message to Earl Valthiof that they should be reconciled, and gave him assurance of safety to come to the place of meeting. The earl set out with a few men; but when he came to a heath north of Kastala-bryggia, two officers of King William met him, with many followers. They took him prisoner, put him in fetters, and afterwards he was beheaded. The English call him a saint.
After this William was a severe king of England for twenty-one years. On his death-bed he had a lot to repent.
Is conscious death the solution?
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| At times the question is who wins the tricks involved. |
If you see above, and discuss what Kriyananda meant, feel free to question very seriously:
"Is killing and maiming very many the way to express one's realisation and guru freedom? Is harrassing one's future wife one more idealised way to behave? Aha!"
Also, is the looting and killing of very many Anglo-Saxons a hallmark of gurus in coming, long before they turn into the skull-garlanded goddess Kali?"
Idea: "Brother, better go for one's own firmness and stoutness than sucking up to bigwigs by proxy or whim, reincarnation theories or not."
Advanced yogic training is suggested here:
THOSE who want to prove for themselves the scientific truth of the doctrine of reincarnation should first prove the principle of continuity of consciousness after death by learning the art of consciously separating the soul from the body. This can be done by following the rules laid down many centuries ago by the Hindu savants: Learn (1) to be conscious during sleep, (2) to be able to produce dreams at will, (3) to disconnect the five senses consciously, not passively as during sleep, and (4) to control the action of the heart, which is to experience conscious death ... [or something like that]. [Ak 215]
NINETY-NINE percent of all people fail under this test. Tell a person, for his own good, to do a particular thing, and he will do exactly the opposite. [Ak 321] See how guru followers comment on this subject:
- William the Conqueror, Part 1: Many scenes from William's Life
- William the Conqueror, Part 1: Medieval Sources on William
- Norse Chronicles: A Complete Medieval Saga to Study
- Rollo the Walker: One of William's forerunners
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Literature
Ak: Yogananda, Paramahansa. Man's Eternal Quest. Los Angeles: SRF, 1975.
Ap: Mieder, Wolfgang (main ed.), Stewart A. Kingsbury, and Kelsie E. Harder: A Dictionary of American Proverbs. (Paperback) New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Ay: Yogananda, Paramahansa. Autobiography of a Yogi. 1st ed. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946. Online. [oaks.nvg.org/pv6bk12.html]
Ebu: Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD. London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007.
Ha: Yogananda, Paramahansa. Autobiography of a Yogi. 12th ed. Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF), 1981.
On: Mata, Daya: "Only Love". Self-Realization Fellowship. Los Angeles, 1976.
Pa: Yogananda, Paramahansa. Autobiography of a Yogi. 11th ed. Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF), 1971.
Say: Yogananda, Paramahansa. Sayings of Yogananda. Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1958.
NOTE 1: The French painter Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) drew inspiration from Baroque painting. His paintings excel in the use of contrasting, complementary colour and rendering of light. His art became leading in the Romantic movement in France.
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