Showing posts with label freedom Independence Day ashram intentional communities Yogananda Kriyananda kriya. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freedom Independence Day ashram intentional communities Yogananda Kriyananda kriya. Show all posts

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Thank You Darwin!

I read once in National Geographic how researchers were analyzing human love and attraction and attempting to show that this, too, was but an outgrowth of our genetically programmed impulse for survival and continuation of the species.

I've never understood all the fuss about the law of survival. It seems so obvious (to anyone perhaps but a scientist) it should never have received tha attention it has garnered.

I suppose some of these "Darwinists" also interpret great works of art and acts of personal self-sacrifice in terms of the law of survival, as well. But the attempts reek of the sterile laboratory of dry, myopic reasoning.

Consider that long before Darwin, Adam Smith published the (then) shocking assertion that self-interest was the motivation behind all human action. Ah, yes,yet another fact of human nature revealed to us that is otherwise so obvious as to never having merited particular attention by people with common sense and a higher vision of life.

And then there's the "pursuit of happiness" enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Who's to argue with these great "revelations?"

Now all told, none of this is either shocking or blasphemous in its own right. The issue I take with it all is twofold: 1) It's simply and truly inadequate to explain anything meaningful to human existence, and 2) Scientists and nonscientists alike have made bold attempts to make a philosophy of life (and in some cases a religion) out of such pedestrian observations. The modern age seems to have gloried in the most banal realities of human existence.

Returning, then, to Darwin and his army of devotees, we can say that competition and survival have been elevated to the heights of the greatest virtue in social theories, pyschology, politics, and the arts. Both communism and capitalism owe their stark, dark, and banal dogmas to the deification of the mundane realities of self-interest and material needs.

Again, who would argue with obvious fact of competitiveness (and its potential benefits when held in check). It's just that the 19th and 20th centuries which promoted this "philosophy" managed to slaughter hundreds of millions of people, wipe out entire species of animals and plants, and bring this earth rapidly towards potential self-destruction!

In other words, philosophy DOES matter. Social values DO MATTER. The Founding Fathers of America created checks and balances to hold at bay the self-interest that they wisely knew was the engine of human motivation. At the same time, they themselves were guided by and extolled for everyone high ideals of the social good, belief in God and recognition of divine love and virtues.

According to the teaching of duality, however, all things have their opposite. I have noticed that since the Sixties, the science of ecology is reawakening a steadily growing and enlightened self-interest that is the necessary counterweight to competition and materialism. Ecology contains an implicit philosophy of interdependence and places a high value upon mutually supportive diversity. At heart, these are, arguably, spiritual values and, in fact, only to some degree, scientific ones.

Of course, religion ought to offer such insights but science and religion have been at odds for centuries, with religion steadily losing ground and science gaining respect and becoming the religion of modern culture. Religious principles founded on a priori beliefs and sectarian dogmas have earned the disdain of intelligent and high-minded people all over the world.

So, if science is the modern religion then it must needs be science that will save us! And that's where the message of ecology seems to have played a role.

Still, science, whether pedestrian or elevated, cannot satisfy the deeper and eternal questions of humankind, nor can it satisfy the heart. For wisdom, too, Paramhansa Yogananda wrote in his famous life story, "Autobiography of a Yogi," we have a hunger (not just for food and shelter).

This is where and why the life-affirming and all-encompassing ancient Vedanta philsophy of India has encircled the globe offering hope for a better world. Vedanta is incomplete with the knowledge, science, and art of how to attains its cosmic vision of the creation and the purpose of creation.

That art and science is the personal and nonsectarian practice of meditation and Self-realization. Science will never be enough to transform civilization. At every great turn of history, it is the saints and men and women of universal vision who guide humanity away from the rocks of self-destruction towards the shores of true survival.

Blessings, Hriman

P.S. If you'd like to learn more about this subject, please obtain a copy of Swami Kriyananda's (J. Donald Walters) insightful landmark book, "Out of the Labyrinth." It's sequel, equally inspiring and forward looking, is "Hope for a Better World."

Friday, September 24, 2010

Fall Equinox Service Recordings!

Dear Friends, we wanted to share with you the Fall Equinox service (Saturday evening in Bothell, WA, September 18) recordings. There are 3 separate tracks: the introduction and chanting; the music, and the talk.

As the event was very well attended and well received, we thought you, too, might enjoy having access to it in this way.

Introduction and chanting:
http://www.anandaseattle.org/downloads/special/2010-09-18-FallEquinox-chanting.mp3

Music:
http://www.anandaseattle.org/downloads/special/2010-09-18-FallEquinox-choir.mp3

Talk:
http://www.anandaseattle.org/downloads/special/2010-09-18-FallEquinox-talk.mp3





Blessings,

Hriman

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Independence Day!

Dear Friends, hundreds of Ananda members are travelling to Ananda Village in northern California to welcome Swami Kriyananda (Ananda's founder) back from Europe and India. July 4 is also the anniversary date of the founding of Ananda Village in 1968.

So this is an auspicious moment to consider what is freedom and what is Ananda's relationship to it! Most readers of this article understand that from the soul's perspective freedom means freedom from untruth and ignorance. Freedom from delusion also is the doorway to the one thing we all seek: happiness (or more accurately and absolutely, we would say immortality and unalloyed, ever-new bliss - the soul's permanent and true state of Oneness with God).

The principal of duality (the existence of the opposites which, like an engine, drives the great drama of life) dictates that truth lies at the center of those opposites. But to land with pinpoint accuracy upon that center when we and everything in creation is in ceaseless flux means that this still point is not easy to find and tends to seem like a moving target. Thus it is that on the spiritual path truth cannot be expressed in precepts or examples except by imperfect analogy and with a certain taint of irony and paradox.

To return to the subject of freedom, then, we find that to achieve soul freedom appears to require entering into a kind of voluntary servitude! At least from the ego's standpoint, the spiritual life, with its daily disciplines, ego-submission to inner or outer authority, and the giving up of pleasures and comforts is like going off to jail. But that's the irony and the price of admission. To most people the need and reasons for such giving up are obvious.

The problem we have is that "we" don't want to. Or, to be perhaps more fair and reasonable, we are not sure whether the brass ring on the "other side" is worth the price of the ride! Thus to assuage modern sensibilities, much of what passes as spirituality has been quietly sanitized of the vestiges of "cross-carrying" burdens.

There is a positive side of this, lest we wax too cynical. According to Paramhansa Yogananda and his astrologically oriented guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar, planet earth is in a long and upward arc of rising consciousness. We naturally tend to be upbeat and want to look for the positive. We don't find inspiration hanging from a cross (mea culpa, mea culpa).

Indeed, even in past centuries when suffering was the summum bonum of the spiritual life, one Christian mystic proclaimed that "a sad saint is a sad saint indeed!" Or, as Swami Kriyananda wrote in the poetic and inspired Festival of Light ceremony (performed on Sunday's at Ananda temples throughout the world), "And whereas in the past suffering was the coin of our redemption, for us now the payment has been exchanged for calm acceptance and joy."

It is important in these times to emphasize that a life of moderation, simplicity, devotion to God and his saints, service to humanity, and silent inner communion with the soul brings to us a satisfaction that no outer success or pleasure can ever offer.

Nonetheless, the pearl of great price cannot be debased. Freedom is not won without sacrifice. When I read about the Revolutionary War which gave birth to America I cannot be but astonished how few people sacrificed so much and how fragile was their margin of victory. Our political and military leaders never fail to remind us that freedom must won again and again, generation after generation.

And so too our soul freedom. Ananda Communities differ from many intentional communities in what seems a glaring absence of democratic and consensus driven decision making. This is because these communities are also ashrams where individuals willingly work together, cooperate, and attune themselves to "what's trying to happen." This includes listening and tuning into the guidance offered to us through what we describe as the "ray of light brought to earth by Paramhansa Yogananda and his line of gurus as represented through Swami Kriyananda, a direct disciple."

It's not that we treat Kriyananda's guidance or that of the leaders appointed by him as infallible. But we do practice the art of discipleship to divine guidance by listening first rather than reacting first; by drawing upon inner guidance and intuition rather than mouthing mere opinion or likes and dislikes.

The path to freedom involves a "give up" and a "take up." The giving up is of inclinations and tendencies inherited or brought over, or which affirm our ego and separate identity. The take up is the taking up of listening instead of talking, of serving without thought of self, and of loving without regard to being loved.

Freedom and Independence to each of you, from Ananda,

Hriman(anda)