Sayings of Yogananda

• Increasing Awareness T

Increasing Awareness

Things to Gain By

Seek guidance within and find your vocation

About five or ten years are spent in talking and in amusements — How is it possible for the average human being to find time to read of poets? Life seems hopelessly short when you think of that.

How many good books have I read? — Some yearn for knowledge.

Keep the mind engaged — Knowledge can be had in this life -

You want to produce something, do not depend upon the outside source. Go deep and seek the [best] source — Whenever you want to know something, don't start with data — When the mind is receptive, then bring the data.

Start everything from within, no matter what it is . . . Seek guidance within.

Benefit the brain so as to know a lot of what is going on in the world — If the walnut tree can be made to grow in twelve years there is a chance for human beings also.

Man can quicken his evolution in all branches of life, including his own inner life — Evolution has been quickened by the adoption of better methods. Machinery can do that.

Your first concern: you must find your vocation — And develop a taste for better things

Cultivate the habit of picking up in this life more worth-while things. Schedule your life, read the best books in the world. Self-help books can be OK - pick up the best books. Read of medicine, astronomy, science, and the good scriptures. ¤

Increase the grasp of your intuition

Ask divine aid to direct you to right action — By the inner direction that you receive; you will find what you want, and quickly, smoothly, beautifully. The ability to perceive may be increased — Are you going to waste your time by the wayside? ¤

Economize your time . . . stop, think, and find out — If you spend your life gossiping about others, the loss is yours.

Knowledge is so vast — You should start with increasing the receptivity of your intuition.

Jerome Bruner holds that "In virtually any field of intellectual endeavor one may distinguish two approaches usually asserted to be different. One is intuitive, the other analytic . . . The solutions and discoveries of scientists and scholars are often at least partly intuitive [Roe 82-83]."
      Bruner in another book of his: "Intuitive thinking, the training of hunches, is a much-neglected and essential feature of productive thinking not only in formal academic disciplines but also in everyday life. The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work, whatever his line of work. Can school children be led to master this gift?" [Proe 12-13]
      Bruner also affirms that what starts by intuitive hunches and the like, fairly often needs to be confirmed - in part by analyses, which can be hard work.

The intelligent guys scrutinize their lives

In twelve years your brain develops in such a way that it displays a certain kind of mentality. If it takes twelve years of growth and change of tissues to manifest certain thoughts, how are you going to wait indefinitely to make the brain receptive to all wisdom?

In the feeble-minded, God's power shines as much as in the greatest man.

If the brain cells of a feeble-minded man are scrubbed . . . he will display the the same intelligence as the intelligent man. [Uhada (Danish)] ¤

Scrutinize your life—the ten years you may live.

Yogananda talks of quality time, after subtracting time for sleep and routine work. Consider it his rough estimate.

Summary

1. Seek guidance within and find your vocation.
2. Increase the grasp of your intuition.
3. The intelligent guys scrutinize their lives also.

Talking of kriya

Yogananda holds a sort of atomistic view of brain cells in his article, in that he says each brain cell becomes a brain through the method he spreads. Novel brain research holds a quite integrative view mostly, in that electro-chemical discharges of left and half brain get better synchronised, and also the discharges of various brain areas, from frontal parts and backward. There are measurements to show it.
      Further, we have toned down some extreme sayings of Paramahansa Yogananda. We do not dare to vouch for a message like "get all-knowing by the awakened 27.000 million new brains in your skull", for example. Have the good sense not to swallow every big bait.

Some years earlier Yogananda's claim would have been more modest: it was then twelve times weaker: In the first years the "tune" he harped was that twelve kriya rounds equalled a month's progress, not that of a year. It is good to know about such strange improvements (of marketing?) if that is what it was. There is more about this issue on another page or two or three here.

Magnetize and . . . send the current around the brain and spinal column, and thereby secure one year's health by twenty minutes of this practice.

When the divine magnetism touches (your brain cells), the brain becomes a vibrant, synergistic holon ready to grasp knowledge.

We are progressing in numerous ways by machines and outfit and wise use of them, winning spare time.

Many saints get their spiritual knowledge quickly: Things which they perceive in a second amount to years of ordinary experience — By concentration, all the fine spinal and brain cells can be turned on to the Cosmic source, they become highly magnetized.

SOURCE: Swami Yogananda. "Increasing Awareness." Inner Culture, October, 1935. http://www.yoganandarediscovered.com/jaitruth/Mia.html