Sivananda Yoga - YOGALife Fall 1995

International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres

Swami
Vishnudevananda


YOGALife - Fall 1995

Table of Contents

·	Swami Vishnu-devananda Speaks On Samadhi, Rebirth & World Karma

·	Memories of Swami Vishnu-devananda

·	Subramanya/Ayappa temple

·	Yoga Vacations

·	Matsyasan - The fish position

·	Advancing in Sadhana

Swami Vishnu-devananda Speaks On Samadhi, Rebirth & World Karma

Bear insult. Bear injury"; that's the highest yoga, the highest sadhana. Sadhana means spiritual practice or yogic training. The highest is: "Bear insult. Bear injury," and why is it the highest? Why? ... what is Yoga? Yoga means? "Yoga chitta-vrtti-nirodhah" Yoga is the cessation of the mental waves. Someone says, "Swami Vishnu you are a great yogi." "Thank you, my child." Someone else says, "Swami Vishnu you are a crook." Then my pendulum is swinging left and right between flattery and insult. The technique of yoga is not to allow any type of wave to arise and dissolve in the mind. Praise and censure are the same for one who has got control over the mind. Heat and cold are one and the same for a yogi; victory and defeat are one and the same. It doesn't make any difference - you are a yogi. Don't think that by practicing yoga, suddenly everything is going to be alright for you, and that only others will suffer because they're not yogis, they are not practicing yoga. That is not true. You have to work out your own Karma. What you do now doesn't change the Karma you have to work out, which is all the result of your action in the past. A true yogi accepts his present condition, whatever it is. That makes no difference. He is going to keep his mind in the same steady one-pointed state: "Yoga samatvam ucyate."
Karma There are different definitions of yoga. Raja yoga says that yoga is stopping the mental modification: "Yogas chitta-vrtti-nirodhah." Lord Krishna says in the Gita: "Yoga samatvam ucyate." Yoga is 'samatvam', the balanced state, when your mind is balanced between the pairs of opposites. What are the pairs of opposites? Everything. The whole world is made up of pairs of opposites. If there is a day, there'll be a? ... Night. If there is darkness, there will be? ... Light. If there is cold in Canada, there will be? ... heat in India. If there is a winter, there will be? ... Summer If there is victory, there's going to be? ... defeat. Ahh - don't forget. Today you win about ten thousand dollars in the sweepstakes; tomorrow you lose a million dollars. There is no such thing as a one-sided life. "Yoga samatvam ucyate." A yogi who accepts pleasure and pain, victory and defeat, gain and loss, heat and cold as one and the same, his mind is steady; his mind is not being affected by these pairs of opposites. But we are thrown by these pairs of opposites: "There is no salt in the food! O What a cook!" Then tomorrow you get a sweet juicy pear: "O good!" Your mind is like a yo-yo. Today the stock market went up; your blood pressure also went up. Next day the stock market goes down; you jump through the window. That is not yoga.
You see, a yogi is no different from others. He is exactly the same, except that these thoughts which make you go here and there, are one-pointed and focused in one area. After that nothing will disturb him; he is like a mountain, strong and powerful. But he must practice; he must train his mind.
People used to worship Gurudev Sivanandaji; they put gold coins on him and garlands, etc. After receiving such treatment, he would go to his room, he would take an old shoe and beat himself, asking "Hey, you like the gold coins and garlands. Do you like the shoe also?" The yogi should make no difference between gold coins and a shoe, or garlands and dirt. Both are?... What is a garland? What is a flower? It comes from earth, from the dirt, and it eventually goes back to the dirt. So you receive a flower or you receive the dirt; both are the same. And what is the difference between gold and iron? It's all made up of atoms. Have you seen atoms? They are made up of electrons, protons and neutrons. And what are electrons, protons neutrons? Waves. So you've got gold; what's gold? It is just electrons and protons and neutrons. Iron is also. So what difference is there? If you are enlightened, you'll find there is no difference. But, because you are unable to understand this philosophy, your mind goes up in praise - "Oh honey you are beautiful" - and when you hear "Honey you are bad" - it sinks. That is not yoga. So Gurudev Sivananda has written this: "Bear insult. Bear injury." All great sages had to undergo this test; this is the most important test. Everyone - Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Sivananda our Master - they all went through this greatest test. And they passed. Nature is creating exams for you every minute. The exams will be very difficult. The higher you go, the harder the fall. So what does "Bear insult" mean? Why is "Bear insult. Bear injury" called the highest sadhana? Because it shows that your mind has reached a steady state; emotions will not make the mind swing like a pendulum; it is steady. "Yoga samatvam ucyate." Yoga is a balanced state of mind.
Swami Vishnu-devananda In the balanced state of mind injury and insult will have no meaning. Recall Jesus' life. He said, "I and my Father are one. I am in you. You are in me. I am He." Well, it is a philosophy: I and my Father are one. I am in you and you are in me. Suppose you and I are one. Then if you scold me, who is scolding me? I'm scolding me. Sometimes I scold myself: "I don't like me. I did a wrong thing. I hate me." Though I said, "I hate me. I don't like me," I did not do myself any harm; I accepted that. So also if you are me, then how can I get insulted? So for Jesus the test came, whether he had reached that stage where he could forget his identity. At the very last moment he still had the duality; Samprajnat samadhi - consciousness of duality. When he was on the cross, he said, "Oh Father, why have you forsaken me?" That means there's duality; he still sees it: I believe in your infinite mercy, yet at this moment what happened to your mercy? I believed in you. I had full faith. Then, at the very moment he said this, suddenly his consciousness entered the next dimension: "Father, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing." Because the same self is in them. Like children, they do not understand their selves. They think the body is the self. So by destroying this body, they think that they are going to destroy me. But our very selves are immortal; this they are unable to understand.
With that, grace came. He became one with divine love and merged in the divine consciousness. That simple example is sufficient to understand all real masters who lifted their vibratory level to a higher consciousness. They are able to remove this ego: I am this body, this name, this form, these qualities: I'm a Catholic; I'm a Protestant; I'm a Jew; I'm a Russian, an American; I'm tall or short, black or white, woman or man. All this is broken down and only "I Am" remains. Period. So the test will come. Tomorrow, if I throw some hot water on your face, what do you say? Thank you? That's good. If you could do that, do you understand how powerful your mind would be? A saint in India was hated by another man. In front of all of the saint's disciples, that man insulted him: Oh you are this; you are that. The sage did not react. So the man persisted: "How shameless you are. You've got no kind of shame at all." Then he spat at him in front of the disciples - point-blank. What was his face like then? It was still; he did not change. A second time the man spat; still his face was calm. Third time, tenth time he spat; fiftieth time he spat; one hundred and eighth time he spat, and still the saint just sat there. Do you understand the power of that man's mind? For him spit and praise are the same. That humbled the other man; he could not understand. He wanted to make the saint really upset but the saint remained still, without having any change in his facial expression. Do you understand the power of that control? It's called Yoga ... a Yogic Master. This does not mean that he is master over you; that's not the meaning in our technique. In yoga, master means he's master over his own lower emotions; lust, anger, greed, hatred, jealousy, envy, fear. He has full control, even when being abused, spat at. Now you understand that technique, that training. Even as a yogi, there will be trials. People will abuse you; people will criticize you; people will give false reports about you. You can't escape that. Nobody can escape. The higher up you go, the more oppositions you'll encounter - negative oppositions. Negative forces will be trying to stop you. And again that is a test, to see whether you use your mental power to destroy him who insults you. Those men, those masters like Jesus, had the mental power: at that time, on the cross, Jesus could easily have had the power he needed to destroy the people who crucified him. If he had done that, then he wouldn't be Jesus; he'd be Hitler. If he had tried to save his flesh he would have lost his soul. But he did not sacrifice his soul. He sacrificed the ego. He did not have any anger; he showed cosmic love: "Forgive them."
That is the test.
The souls of these masters reach the highest planes after death. They enter Mahasamadhi and are not reborn. But there are other planes. As you think, according to your thought vibrations, so shall you find yourself in one of seven dimensions after death. People who suddenly leave this physical plane, perhaps through violent death, sometimes get stuck in the earth-bound state and sometimes get released into the first or second dimension. From there they are reborn. In the first and second dimensions are also the souls full of the lower emotions. When these disturbed souls reincarnate, they still have low cravings; they want to satisfy the lust and anger and hatred they created in their past incarnations. Maybe they were once on the battlefield and there's tremendous anger in them; they were taught hatred. Any soldiers, whether they are Russian or American, their Mantra is to create hatred. If you were to hear some of the words the Marines use at training time, you wouldn't believe it. When I was in the army, we had to repeat mantra each time we loaded the rifle with the dummy rounds for practice. Each time you pulled the trigger, you had to repeat the mantra, 'Ek Japanese'. 'Ek' means one. Aim. Load. Fire. "Ek Japanese." Aim. Load. Fire. "Ek Japanese." The whole idea was to train us to feel that they were not human beings, the Japanese. They are not Indians, they are enemies. So kill them. They make you understand only one thing, hatred. The people who were sent to Vietnam after such training, they became bloodthirsty. They killed. They saw their own friends being blown to pieces, and eventually they also died in the same agonizing condition. They want to take revenge on the human race.
Just this morning I read in the paper about a man who just went to a MacDonald's and started shooting everybody there. He asked everyone to lie down, customers and so forth, and then he systematically shot twenty people. One young boy had come to get ice cream; he shot the boy; he killed a small child. Then for one and a half hours he shot anything that moved. He shot; it didn't matter who they were, what they were .anything moving. At last, after one and half hours, a police sharp shooter was able to aim a bullet and stop him. For one and half hours. Why? There is no absolute motive behind it but people do these things. A child on his bicycle, a young boy; he's shot, he's killed. His bicycle is lying there. He just came for an ice cream. See article below.

Massacre at MacDonald's. Gunman kills twenty. San Isidro, CA.

A heavily armed man opened fire at a MacDonald's restaurant late yesterday and killed at least twenty people before he was slain by police sharp shooters. Among the dead was an infant girl, police said. The shooting was said to be the worst single-day slaughter in U.S. history. "It was an absolute massacre," said San Diego police commander Larry Gore. The gunman, believed to be forty years old, was shot and killed by a police Swat team from a rooftop. No motive for the attack was immediately known. In an unsuccessful effort to bring a halt to the carnage, police located the gunman's wife and tried to use her as a mediator. The attack began about 4 pm at the restaurant about 8 kilometers north of the Mexican border in the southern San Diego County community. The man, armed with an automatic rifle, a shotgun, and a handgun, was holed up inside the MacDonald's for one and a half hours and was shooting everything in sight, including a victim on the freeway, several people outside the restaurant, and ten or eleven inside the facility, Gore said. At least six people were shot outside the restaurant, police said. "If anybody moved he just shot them," said one of the survivors, a MacDonald's employee. The manager and somebody else got out the rear. Gore said, "The suspect was seen moving around different locations throughout the inside of the MacDonald's, so one of our team members was finally able to get a clear shot, and was able to down him." An infant girl was taken to the hospital with bullet fragments in her body, a hospital official said. "She was brought in by some bystanders," he said, "we don't know who her parents are."

Why do these people do this? There's no clear motive. Now you can understand: their past lives, their anger, their hatred - all this is there. Suddenly something happens to their emotions and they are ready. That is the situation. Many of the present soldiers and officers of every country, they've also lived in the past. They've gone to war before, and they've seen the suffering. Their hatred is hidden, submerged, but when the right time is given to them, it will come back to the conscious level, and they will try to destroy. That is the lowest state. We are creating more monsters, you will see. When you say: "You are going to be a soldier to protect your country," you are making man an animal. When you join the military, what is the first thing they do? A recruit comes and first thing, he is completely shaved. He is made to completely forget his old identity, completely, from then onwards. Though I was in the army, we never had to repeat that type of hatred word that the Marines are taught here. You can see yourself how they are. They repeat the words. It's the same thing in the P.L.O. I saw on a newsreel the graduation of the P.L.O. from training camp. Do you know what they have to do to show their courage? They are going to kill every Israeli; to prove that they have to take live chickens and live rabbits and bite them with their teeth and tear them apart. They are ruthless; they are going to kill everybody. They literally bite into live chickens and live rabbits, tear them apart with their teeth, to show their courage. That's the type of monster we are creating on this planet earth. Naturally these people die, and when they come back again, they are not going to be saints, nor will they stay in the astral dimension for a long time. They want to take birth again; they're more eager to reincarnate than the people who are highly evolved. Highly evolved people are in the higher dimensions; they don't come back so soon. But the appetites and desires of those in the lower dimensions are so strong that they come back quickly. So this world is filled with this negative type of person; they have control over this world. Like Idi Amin, etc. You have seen these monsters existing in our century. The Libyan Kadaffi, he's another monster. He's the person who is going to bring terrible tragedy to the Middle East. They're all fanatics. Khomeni, what he did in the name of God and religion - you just look into it. We live with monsters, though in human form. Let us pray for their peace.
Swami Vishnu-devananda

You are brought up in a society where everything is black and white, through a microscope or without a microscope. This is the tradition existing in Western society: only visible matter - visible things - are important. What is not visible is just an illusion. But we all have to leave this physical plane; we are only here for a short time. Out of a hundred years, you are sleeping for fifty - and dreaming - and childhood is gone in a dream. In old age you'll be sitting in a wheelchair. So we are here in this physical plane for a very short time only. But we have to face the future of this physical plane as well as of our souls.
I am also interested in the peace of this planet earth, and not only the planet earth. You forget the peace in the next plane. You have to leave here, either naturally or unnaturally, either by war or by natural death - you have to leave this planet earth. Have you ever thought of that? What is going to happen to you? What type of life will you have? What type of experience? The Western mind, with a few exceptions, never wants to think in this way. Very few people want to think in these terms. They think that after death they'll have a long, long holiday, permanently on vacation, forever. That idea is the worst idea you can have. That's why you have problems. You create societies, you create weapons for mass destruction. Only living now is important; there is no importance in life after death.
But your consciousness will continue to survive. Your spirit will be exactly as you are now. Your individual consciousness; your love, your compassion, your devilish nature, whatever - it will continue after death. If you are not prepared for that type of experience after death - that continuation - there are enough people on other planes to help you. But look for a moment at the earth. Look to the coming days. The tragedy in store for this planet is unbelievable, because of the nuclear threat. This earth won't be habitable even for the survivors; radiation will affect their astral bodies terribly. Mutations will take place. Even if birth takes place, the babies will be without noses and hands; psychologically, their brains will not function. So in the physical dimension there will be problems. And because their deaths will have been sudden, millions and billions of people will be reborn quickly. There will be few to help them here on the earth plane . a minority, a microscopic minority. People concern themselves with Presidential elections. They talk about four more years. That's all they understand . four more years. They don't understand anything beyond four; that's all they can count. Four more years in their life. They don't understand how life continues. They've got no idea; they don't understand that they have to continue to survive afterwards, and these are the people who have the button in their hand. Once the button is pushed there is nothing we can do. Pray that somehow we'll be able to communicate so that these people will understand that after death there is life, and that they are going to create tremendous problems in the astral dimension.
Everything continues in exactly the same situation. This is the reason for my peace mission. If the nuclear war were going to destroy this planet earth and afterwards we wouldn't have to worry about it any more, then I am the first person to start the nuclear war. I will send you all to heaven forever. If that is the only effect, we could destroy the world easily today. We can carry the war and finish the world today - we have the capacity. Within twenty minutes we can wipe out this planet earth and we can close God's work here, but have you ever thought of what would happen afterwards. That is why my peace mission is not only for peace here; if some great destruction occurs, hell will exist there for you afterwards, on other dimensions - hell. That's the whole purpose of this talk.
If you talk to presidents and prime ministers, they won't understand anything. They only understand their champagne and their parties. They are actually having them. I've seen it on the television. My God! Everything party, party, party. What is it? Party means kill animals, eat, and get drunk. And that's the situation. Such leaders exist now - you are in trouble. The energy level is so low that God may destroy this planet earth. If God destroys, you will reincarnate in some other place where you can start your life in a different pattern. It's possible that this planet earth may close or it may not close - we do not know the Lord's intentions. On this planet earth as it is now, the sinful experience, the negative experience, like drugs, is prevalent throughout the West. Doctors and congressmen, senators and dentists are all taking alcohol and drugs. In these conditions we have no spiritual growth at all. There are only more and more arguments and more missiles. Very few people are talking about the inner spiritual life and society is going on, increasing this type of negative living. How can you change this world? There is no way ... unless there is some kind of punishment to warn us. And the punishment is going to be very, very bad for all of us and that's also God's will; it is the Karma of the whole planet. The present situation is so horrible; it is unbelievable - what is going on from morning till evening. Hear all the things that are going on. There is no spiritual life. Spiritual people, religious people like us, they cheat people and tell them lies: "Give me $150 I'll send you to heaven." In that condition God will just destroy this planet. He will start all over again. But the souls, they won't die. The souls will come back again according to their Karma, good or bad. They will reincarnate after some time on another planet and will continue. Think of good for everybody. May the Lord bless you all.

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Related Pages:
Karma and Reincarnation
The Law of Karma

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