Ask Ananda’s Experts
Questions and answers about meditation, yoga, the spiritual life, and more

Tyagi Jayadev

Ananda Assisi, Italy

Answer

Dear Mike,

God sometimes communicates through dreams, but if so, they are superconscious dreams, full of light, inspiration, beauty, upliftment. Horrible nightmares on the other hand come from our subconscious mind, never from God.

Yes, all our difficulties are karma which we ourselves have created, and which has to be worked out. It is best worked out by giving strength to its opposite positive quality: fill your day consciously with whatever is the antidote to your nightmares. It might be calmness, love, joy, courage, or peace. Use affirmations, songs, thoughts, your behavior, to strengthen that quality. In this way you consciously oppose this nasty "inner warrior" which causes you nightmares with the good soldiers of the soul, with its divine qualities. The good news is: the soul wins in the end, always. But it is not effortless.

Nayaswami Gyandev

Ananda Village

Answer

Dear Michael,

What you are thinking is coming from neither your conscience nor God. It comes from your ego, which tends to switch into high resistance mode when we get serious about God; it tries to throw up a smokescreen so we can’t think clearly. And it can do a very good job of that.

Nayaswami Gyandev

Ananda Village

Answer

Dear Nirja,

You are right: Yoganandaji was not sexist. And certainly women do not drink men’s blood, nor by any means are all women temptresses. As you surmised, he was using stern language to help his monk disciples remain celibate. (He might have made a corresponding remark about men to his nun disciples, but being a male, Swami Kriyananda would not have been present to record such words.)

Nayaswami Hriman

Ananda Seattle

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Dear Friend,

God’s love is always there for us. God knows our soul and our soul is ever perfect, ever-free. Affirm your love for God, for freedom from delusion, and your ever-joyful Soul inheritance and nature.

You can mitigate the karmic push back of the past actions you’ve described in a number of ways: making good to those you may have hurt (beginning with prayer and intention and extending into outward words and actions where feasible and appropriate); extending friendship and love to others (esp where those whom you may have hurt are no longer around or for whatever reason you cannot approach them); deepening your love for God and service to God through your daily activities;

Nayaswami Hriman

Ananda Seattle

Answer

Dear Mary,

While I do not know specifically what "grave injustice" you might be referring to, there is a difference between righeous indignation and anger or upset.

As Arjuna conducted his part in the battle of Kurukshetra and as Jesus drove the moneychangers from the temple in Jerusalem with a whip, and as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King expressed with great force their campaigns for social justice, there is a place, in principle, for responding with great energy.

Nayaswami Parvati

Ananda Village

Answer

Actually, God’s gift to this world are those people who realize that God is the Sole Reality behind all of creation. They are also those who love the Creator more than the creation, and do so because they realize they are children of that Creator. The more we begin to tune in to our deeper, inner reality, that of being made in God’s image, then we begin to become truly tender and sensitive without being subject to suffering.

Tyagi Jayadev

Ananda Assisi, Italy

Answer

Dear Mona,

Yogananda did not give a specific order for the highest virtues. I am pretty sure, however, that he would put "love for God" on the very top.

In fact he wrote in an article: "If you are true to yourself, if you love God above all, day and night wrapped in Him, that is the highest virtue in the world."

Nayaswami Gyandev

Ananda Village

Answer

Dear Christin,

Thank you for writing and for your honesty. I’m sorry to hear of what you’re going through, but it is quite understandable, given what you did last year. Each of us has parts of our being that resist the spiritual quest, and when we shift into high gear, spiritually speaking, those parts can rebel. They can give rise to thoughts of abandoning the spiritual path, living an anti-spiritual life, being hypercritical of others who are on the path, even doing deliberate damage to ourselves. They can be strong.