• Further Teachings of Yogananda
• Biology Lessons and Some Others

Further Teachings of Yogananda

I give you something to chew on. - TK

Further teachings of Yogananda!

"How insane can I get from master-robber teachings?" Let God sing "Hare Krishna" himself - let him be the Sole Doer of it so far as "God is the Sole Doer (Yogananda)" is true. Is it? Close your eyes for a second. Who did it? It is a simple test.

Have you thought that if God are the sole doer of anything, Yogananda's God has to be a sole doer of all evil too?

Let us not jump to (very wrong) conclusions.

My own life lessons, dearly gathered, includes, "It is better to stay away from rubbish than get enamoured by it." I speak of a mass of Yoganananda verbiage too by that.

Simple Help

Do not let blunderbuss authority figures rob your authenticity. Soap castration of humanity through feigning is no great help.

Diva teachings may not be good. "Original Christianity as taught by Jesus Christ" – what is that? Demand an answer the day you can. [Pa 499]. I think SRF's "original Christianity as taught by Jesus Christ" is much window dressing.

Now look at this:

"Great souls will reincarnate." [Ak 236]
"He who once reaches (the palace of God's bliss) shall "go no more out". [Ak 20]

If you do not go out, you do not reincarnate; that is Yogananda's idea. Even more intriguing: Yogananda says that the great souls who once reach 'the palace of God's bliss', will reincarnate, but "go out no more" ... The guru contradicts himself.

Now compare:

"You are the Imperishable Spirit." [Paramahansa Yogananda, Ak 105]

Contrast it with a saying of Jesus: "Be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. [Matthew 10:28]

You cannot be imperishable and wiped out in hell.

"Five hours of sleep are enough." [Yogananda, Ak 20] "Four to six hours of sleep are plenty." [Yogananda, Ak 53-4]

Six, five or four hours of sleep at night are not enough for everyone. "Sleep as long as you need," is what Yogananda should have been up to teach. Get informed. [Sleep research and good literature]

Some of Yogananda's guidelines against sleeping and insults of sleep, are not good enough. We had better sleep a comfortable amount of hours – and how many they are in each case, can be found out. Thus, get away from the yoga cult. At least I did. See the "Yoganandic infallibility letter" from the SRF Headquarters.

Yogananda's guidelines for nightly sleep do not fit all. The need for sleep is largely individual. Lack of enough sleep for long – called sleep deprivation – can lead to mental disorder. [Sue]. Further, Krishna says in chapter 6 of the Bhagavad Gita that yoga (divine union) is not possible for those who sleep too little and those who sleep too much (verse 16).

Progress in yoga is in part a result of training. That is your part, to adjust things as best you can, in order to make the best of it all. If you are wise, the fruits of your endeavours in training yourself may be good too. It is good to inspect well before committing to anything or anyone "out there".

Salient Points

Look at what the man actually lives up to or lives on top of – not just what he decrees.

Before you commit, look strongly to the leader's prominent fruits. Spiritual-minded persons are seldom helped by overlooking silly discrepancies in a teaching they are committed to.

If you want to be good at something, first study it and then master it by as many steps and stages that it takes.

Freedom to doubt is essential to scientific progress. Candid doubt in the very best ways helps research, since the basic scientific procedure is systematised doubting somehow, and thereby we explore divergent explanations, hypotheses, alternative procedures, and alternative explanations. In the long run we find out if we have anything to say under the conditions, and with what degree of certainty. And there is freedom to seek good explanations.

Words for Self-help Education

Develop a built-in bullshit detector. [Ernest Hemingway]

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. [Daniel J. Boorstin]

The years teach much which the days never knew. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. [Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904-90)]

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger? [Thomas Henry Huxley]

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding. [Ezra Pound]

Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. [Roger Lewin]

Wisdom outweighs any wealth. [Sophocles]

A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it. [Brander Matthews]

One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, "Have a nice day." [Peter Brodie]

Some folks are wise and some are otherwise. [Tobias Smollett]

Wisdom also consists in caring immensely for a few right things. [With John Buchan]

Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't. [Pete Seeger]

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk. [Doug Larson]

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere. [Chinese Proverb]

Learning without thought is labour lost. [Confucius]

I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me. [Dudley Field Malone]

I am defeated, and know it, if I meet any human being from whom I find myself unable to learn anything. [George Herbert Palmer]

Education is the transmission of civilization. [Ariel and Will Durant]

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. [Oliver Wendell Holmes]

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives. [Clay P. Bedford]

Education enables a man to get along without so much use of his intelligence. [With Albert Edward Wiggam]

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age? [Erich Fromm]

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog. [Mark Twain]

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. [Sydney J. Harris]

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught. [Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," 1890]

The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know. [William R. Inge]

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. [John W. Gardner]

Yogananda's Moral Decrees

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952) in his day taught non-violence, and also hailed dictatorship, and then sent disciples to the battle-grounds during World War 2, some six years after he had praised Mussolini and dictatorship. Remarkable inconsistency seems to need escuses; we may expect that.

In Yogananda's special case, resisting violence by tough violence (killing and war) was finally okayed. But the SRF Lessons, which is a mixture of selected paragraphs from old and new lectures by Yogananda, did not present that complete picture when I read them. A man can get confused and stop defending himself and fending for himself when he puts fervent faith in guru guidelines that are said to be without flaw – till they are changed. What an eye-opener.

To elaborate slightly: He came to the West to teach kriya yoga, and kriya is practised in line with Patanjali's Yoga, which tells that ahimsa, nonviolence, is the first thing in the system, a sine qua non (something essential, a necessity, absolutely indispensable), and that the fruit of doing yoga dwindles if the accompanying moral is dispensed with. Ahimsa, (a-himsa) means not-harm. Not harming anyone by thoughts, words, deeds is the understanding of it. Warfare is not exactly it. So Yogananda put in something about "righteous war" at last to accommodate. Note how little remained of his non-violence when it came to warfare.

There can be a better way than turning the other cheek and getting all the worse conditions for it, however. It is proper assertiveness. Further, you could say "thank you" for any help to get skilled in good handling, which tends to help too, and can assist you in many ways throughout life.

A Hagiography

When Yogananda visited home country in the middle of the 1930s, he "was taking every opportunity of contacting direct disciples and relatives of Lahiri Mahasaya (1828-95)." He wanted to write his life, and he did the best he could. In chapter 32 of his autobiography he writes why he tried. First, Lahiri made a prediction:

'About fifty years after my passing,' he said, 'my life will be written because of a deep interest in yoga which the West will manifest. The yogic message will encircle the globe, and aid in establishing that brotherhood of man which results from direct perception of the one Father.'

"My son Yogananda," said Sri Yukteswar to Yogananda before Yogananda was sent to the West, "you must do your part in spreading that message, and in writing that sacred life." [Ibid]

However, when Yogananda stayed in India between the autumn of 1935 and the summer of 1936, direct disciples of Lahiri Baba feared Yogananda would mess things up, and did not want to give him Lahiri material he was after. But he selected the inconclusive material he got after all, and incorporated it into his autobiography (1st ed., 1946) –

In our days much of the Lahiri material is made public in English by other sources. A Lahiri biography or two are published too, but not by Yogananda.

Think of it

Suspect that parts of what a great man sees and tells of, is difficult to attain and keep to.

The wise man writes cleverly – on his own too.

The very best guys may not be found, they may be sitting in secret caves or their apartments.

Make your dreams come true before those of others.

So says the sage: gather in time, before you fall into age.

Warm hearts make all eyes truer.

Sage literature of the best sort happens to go largely unrecognised if the best ones appear confused, adrift, depressed and cannot be estimated, as the Tao Te Ching suggests. In consequence, how many sayings and books of the best ones have been neglected in history? Birds know. This understanding may be laughed at by fools, and if so, it could a token of being good, the Tao Te Ching allows.

Biology Lessons and Some Others

On this whirling globe, nature is a matrix. It is built up by masterly intelligent designs and interactivity. Man and animals depend on plant life (and one another) to survive. It is a complex web we live in, one that allows for estrangements from nature too for humans who wear clothing, build warm houses and much else in inhospitable climates, and further.

There is much to learn. And the learning process can and should be encouraged, not stilted, and especially not stilted by formal schooling, which is widespread.

Much of what is to be learnt in life, is out there. Something is also within. Psychology offers examples. Something is both within and outside. Biology covers that field, among other and in part similar fields of learning.

Often humans learn something of themselves by the living beings around – animals and humans alike. Some of this learning is handed over. Here are a few suggestions. They may be handy if you bear in mind that "a comparison halts" more or less. But often there is no better way of telling things initially. Comparisons – allegories, figurative mentions, and figurative elements – make it easier to grasp intending meanings on some level of interchange.

Learning from Animals

If you want to establish if donkeys can talk as in the Bible (Numbers 22), test it. If not one in a million or trillion can do it untaught, you should perhaps drop fervent belief in the matter. But keep an eye open to that possible one-in-a-trillion donkey if it exists. The reasoning is: "If we have found no talking donkey after testing a trillion of them, that does not mean that the trillion-and-oneth cannot talk unless it has been tested. There should be room for some philosophical indeterminism of such a kind.

Another example: If you are told that humans can fly without wings and other outward aids, study the evidence. That is the staunch thing to do.

Those who believe or disbelieve blindly, do not deal well enough with the issues at hand. "Twin fools; the one believes all, the other nothing" is the proverbial judgement. So it behoves us to study fit and great evidence. For example, the many attested stories of Catholics who have been observed levitating or flying. Milarepa too.

Besides, it matters to learn from animals. Human beings can learn to observe animals and birds and reptiles and learn a lot from them. Some proverb contain such learning, but not all of them. Prejudice is into a large number of proverbs too.

Birds fly

Birds will be birds, but pigs are more like us.

The title "supreme swan" indicates that birds have symbol value. The parrot is another bird. When it talks, it is at times surprising.

The Sanskrit work Markandeya Purana is one of the earliest bird conventions in literature. It is a large book.

Can birds talk and not just parrot? There is evidence that some birds do. [More]

Bats fly

In Chinese, 'bat' is called "Fu". That is the same sound as "blessing" or "happiness" in Chinese. So to the Chinese the bat symbolizes blessing, luck, happiness and long life. And to the British, a black cat across the road signals good fortune.

Learn from the bat not to be found flying about in the air in a circus tent for someone else, for no money and no acclaim on your part . . . Watch where the money goes. Esteem in this world tends to follow the money flow.

Bats sleep in caves and you may build a house to sleep soundly in too. Many yogis strive to get their own caves, and one of Yogananda's masters was such a yogi.

Bats fly about in the air at twilight hours – few notice them at it. Two of the masters behind Yogananda have been reported to fly in the air. Few have eyewitnessed it, though. Ram Gopal was one. He saw "a circling mass of mystical light travelling in the sky." It "materialised itself into the body of a beautiful youth". [Autobiography, ch 33].

Bat's excel in the upside-down pose, which they can keep longer than most yoga practitioners. Some make a show of it -

Bats can be met on the porch, and so can firm men and women.

Bats do not try to be darlings to anybody outside their species, and yet they are capable of astounding feats, including top-notch radar navigation.

The bat is the one flying mammal, and is very discreet.

Bats talk by how they manage. Most animals do that. Besides they communicate, "talk", with one another.

Pigs

"It will happen when pigs fly (or when pigs have wings)" is used to mean that the specified event will never occur.

In an ancient tale about Vishnu, the planet was drowned and submerged in the ocean. On seeing this, Vishnu (as Hari) took the shape of a boar and dived so well that he caught it down there, and brought it to the surface by astounding use of his tusks.

A swine deserves more than "Good god!" and a few pats on the back for that feat. Here we are informed that once our world was saved by a big boar dwelling higher up and overlooking it. All details may not have been accurately described in the old tale, though. But still it instills respect for his cousin the pig, I hope. It is a kind animal, much intelligent, full of feeling too, and capable of herding sheep and handling a joystick if given some training. Research shows that well enough. [More]

How kind should men be to pigs, all in all? That should be decided. A general guideline is: allow them their tract of land (habitat) and leave them alone as much as you can. Hinduism finds it appropriate to have a big boar on top (too). What Hindus often did, was to leave animals alone and marry young. Let us hope they still can afford a lot of wildlife in their country.

Bears

Black, brown and white bears have learnt how to lower their metabolism during winter, so as to survive in unfriendly environments. Some yogis are said to hibernate too. But man is not an animal. Bear yoga while aware and awake. If you have learnt to hibernate in a yogic way, have you considered that good men find their inner peace without hibernating for it?

Some bears take sheep. There is much more to say about bears.

Half-rituals bind many, far and wide

Insects communicate by seeming rituals, like "dances". Rituals and half-rituals make people slavish too.

A wise man knows that not everyone met on his porch is a fiend.

A teacher also learns something by teaching her students and pupils. It is often like that. Humans learn by interacting.

If you think everybody is good at heart, you may lose your life: Psychopaths will not mend their hardened ways – do not expect it [cf. Toh].

Heresy is the school of pride. (British). And Christians started as Jewish heretics -

The wife of the former monk Martin Luther was a nun that had fled from a convent, and had six children with him.

Practices that get widespread, why not marrying nuns too, can rise into a main religion. There have been and are religions backing up religious prostitution. Astarte was looked on as the Great World Mother, but not in the Bible.

Half-rituals enslave hordes. Compare football.

It matters what the beliefs are. If they are out of step with reality, it may mean trouble for adherents.

Brutishly had dominance is often found on top of sitting accord among men and women.

What the opponent hold as great, you may try to change the value or esteem of.

If you are spoken of as valuable, try and preserve your assets, or else you may be made use of and entangled – caught in many ways that many celebrities do not get away from, even.

Fools may invent standardised ways of expressing things that go contrary to the much revealing ways of offhand and drunk people.

There may be no easy way unless you have a comparatively fine home of your own. For the lack of good housing, straight neighbours and heart-warming friends, some resort just to sexual intercourse.

We like to think that those fit for the torture place are very bad, uncongenital, brutal and vicious, chosen people, and that they are not helped by any God-ordained, vicarious animal sacrifice, including scapegoating and killing of a Son according to a plain that failed. A question is if there is much of value left after a day or three in a glowing pit. But Buddhists and Hindus don't consider hell to be truly real, not a lasting place to remain either.

Some stubborn topics can turn man into a neurotic wailer, but what is deep inside can be activated by art and pets too.

Just don't believe it

Don't let hearsay canon take over valuable recesses of your mind.

When pretexts fail, comes the time for harder measures.

"Oh God"

Many house-wives intuitively gasp "Oh God" in meeting a large rat in the dim cellar. That is how it is.

Letter

To the strange notion that "All Krishna is some dysfunctional, happy go lucky, perverted sex god": Writings of ancient India which tell that Krishna abducted 18.000 women (apsaras), and fathered his own race with them. That is far from being sexually dysfunctional, or is it? Further, according to the scriptures, King Krishna had his own capital, Dwarka, until his kin drowned when the capital was swallowed by the sea. And In SRF, Krishna is venerated and worshippped by monks and nuns who do not live completely as he did, even though "Example speaks louder than words."

The guy also held that "The resurrection of Jesus is the most documented fact in history." No. The Black Plague is more documented, for example.

We often do well if we cut to the chase (cut out long speeches) rather than spending good time on foolish drivel with nothing in it.

The fool on top is not wise

A quotation: "The Emperor has to carry out the functions of a ruler . . . who can spend his time in a life of ease? . . . With time so short, how foolish it is to fail . . . and to waste one's time . . ." – Dogen, [Dog 46]

King Solomon spent long years on building "harem stables". In fact, more time, effort and money on buildings for his harem than on the temple his father David had designed as if by whim and folly led: After all, his God had majestically ordained in previous books of the bible, that he would be worshipped only in his goat skin tent for all time to come. Did it come to pass? Biblical temple worship was not lasting, either.

Despite that Solomon went astray and thereby destroyed the royal dynasty, Jesus calls him the wisest man who had lived. He-he! By contrast, nice and delicate tales may contain useful and true enough teachings if we treat them as partly figurative.

Farm animals (cult and sect members) have a right to get enraged on their own behalf, but see if they do it, and where they funnel their anger in case. It may not be toward the fit target at all.

Yogananda's guru

The swami guru of Yogananda, Yukteswar, did not seem to have much of a will of his own: One day his guru's guru called him swami, and thus swamihood was imposed on him.

It could be better to marry well and remarry well than having to obey even a relative in vital matters.

Some of Yukteswar's preferred articles were of copper, gold, silver, lead. Such items were placed on Yogananda's body here and there and served as his figurative lightning rods - to trick the universe to be far friendlier with Yogananda. This is the gist of what Yogananda writes in chapter 16 of his autobiography. Learn much instead of trusting in tricks. And consider that the highest skill may appear clumsy, as Tao The Ching is into. It may not be so all the same; it may not be noticed at all, not unlike Lao-Tzu's "best of men." [Tao Te Ching, chap. 17]

Promises, broken and kept, may both lead to sorry endings

Promise next to nothing. A rash promise set off the war in the long epic poem that the Bhagavad Gita. You should avoid a rash promise. A certain Drona there refrained from his rightful throne by assenting to something without worrying about possible later consequences. Disaster ensued.

Yogananda often claimed the cosmic fabric is an illusion. Where does it leave us, and him, and his teachings? Nowhere. The bizarre part of it is that he wants his illusion teachings to be taken seriously. Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita that those who teach that the world is illusory, are demoniacs: They err and cause destruction. [Bhagavad Gita 16:7-9 ff.]

Yogananda's "The world is not real" was said in and is found in the world as a minor part of it. That is elementary. It also appears he felt himself over and above right and wrong too. He writes of it in the autobiography chapter called "An experience in cosmic consciousness", a state he was knocked into. Despite his the-world-is-illusion-demagoguery, he demands a power-pledge of each kriya yogi – a pledge that keeps him and his gurus on top, it would appear – or in power.

Obedience to false guys and misleading yogis may be told of as inferior. Faithful obedience is good only if what is faithfully obeyed is fit and not sham.