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Ananda Sunday Services, 2009
Every Sunday morning Ananda Village residents and guests meet for meditation, chanting, readings, and a sermon by one of the Ananda ministers. Recording of a part of the Sunday Service is posted online within a few days.
Prayer is a power, provided we believe deeply in that power.
When our thoughts and feelings are strongly focused and then
united in growing awareness to the Divine Presence within, they
can bring even seemingly unrealistic wishes to fulfillment.
God knows everything already. He knows what is in your
heart. It is you who need to clarify your feelings, that you attune
yourself to Him in turn more clearly. For only by such clarity
will you be able to receive perfectly what He gives you.
Jesus Christ and Sri Krishna, both, advised praying to God
as personal. Yet both emphasized also that God is above form, and that He must be sought, ultimately, in Infinity.
The struggle Jesus describes is not a war against unknown enemies, but the struggle with our own attachment to all that is nearest and dearest to us, humanly speaking. Ultimately, it is a war against the ego itself, and against anything with which we surround ourselves to bolster the ego’s fragile sense of security.
Human will is, as Paramhansa Yogananda used to say, guided by whims and limited understanding. The divine will is in harmony with every level of reality. Though the divine will sometimes appears to us, at first, to be wrong, it proves always, eventually, to be for our highest good.
Let no one tell you what your path to God ought to be.
Many are the paths. Select your own according to the dictates
of your own nature, no matter how out of step that puts you
with other people.
The intellect separates; it analyzes, then puts things together again piece by piece. Intellect lacks intuition’s flow, which descends smoothly, like a river, from the superconscious.
Nowhere do we find Jesus condemning, or even gently
criticizing, other spiritual masters. His criticisms were reserved
for worldly attitudes, and for those hypocritical Pharisees who
had allowed religion to become, for them, a pretense.
Yogananda, quoted in The New Path, said, “I used to think Satan
was only a human invention, but now I know, and add my testimony to that of others who lived before me, that Satan is a reality.
“He is a universal, conscious force whose sole aim is
to keep all beings bound to the wheel of delusion.”
There are exoteric truths, and there are also esoteric truths.
There is that which is revealed impersonally and left up to
us to interpret — such as the thunder and our perception of
it as divine wrath; the rain and our perception of it as God’s
sympathy. But behind even God’s most open expressions there
lies impenetrable mystery.
In the case of subtle knowledge, the main disadvantage in
making it universally available is the harm it might do to one
who isn’t ready for it, and who might even mock it.
Even a mountain guide wouldn’t presume to do one’s climbing for one; his purpose would be only to help the neophyte to climb safely. To have a wise guru is not a sign of weakness, but of plain common sense.
For disciples of this path, the more, in their hearts, they live consciously in the presence of the masters, the more they will find the divine presence living within them.
The divine light—pure, calm, liberating—is the only final cure for every kind of delusion: ill health, emotional grief, and spiritual ignorance. Seek it daily in the silence, in deep meditation.
God is with us now as much as He will ever be. It is not Him who needs to come to us: we need to come to Him! And that process of coming is a matter of transforming our self-perception.
Doubt not the power of delusion. Respect it indeed, fear it, though not in the sense of cowering before it. Yogananda said, “One is not safe until he attains the state of final union with God.”
The legend of Adam and Eve describes how the first human beings dissipated their spiritual energy, centered in the spine. The spine is the channel through which flows the river of baptism and of spiritual life.
God sent different religions into the world to satisfy different human needs. Each person should find those practices and observances which are compatible with his own nature.
See everything that comes to you unasked for as a manifestation of God’s will. Be grateful for the pains you experience, for they are healing strokes of His love.
Our faith is the attractive power of our underlying state of conciousness. Goodness attracts goodness. Evil attracts evil. Whatever there is in you of lightness or dark, offer it up to the heights.
Was Jesus a human being, merely? Those who, on Palm Sunday, called him “King” little realized the actual nature of his kingdom. His consciousness was centered in Infinity.
Christianity describes the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. In Vedanta philosophy, the Father is “Sat,” or existence beyond creation; the Son is “Tat,” or the Christ Consciousness reflected within creation; and the Holy Ghost is the “Aum” vibration.
If we think of God in terms of “cold spiritual mathematics,” we hold Him at a distance. But if think of Him as the Presence that beats in our hearts, we make Him our own.
—Maria Warner
The Importance of Soul-Receptivity February 8, 2009