About Our Teachers:
Sri Yukteswar
Babaji
Meher Baba
SRI YUKTESWAR GIRI
Sri Yukteswar is a major teacher in
Babaji’s Kriya lineage and the venerable guru of Paramahansa
Yogananda. During his incarnation, he lived and taught the benefits
of truth, simplicity and man’s ability to realize unity with God --
the essence of the yogic path. He regarded yoga as part science,
part faith and part theory. “For one to know truth,” he discerned,
“one must constantly be asking what is true.” Walking with integrity
and dedication, his journey became an expression of man’s great
potential to realize wisdom.
Born Priya Nath Karar on May 10, 1855 in Serampore, India, he became
a student of medicine, astronomy, Christianity and Vedic astrology.
Advanced in his study, he developed a science and geography
curriculum for young people. He lost his father at a young age and
later his wife as well. In 1883, at the age of 28, he met his
teacher Lahiri Mahasaya, one of the earliest householder yogis.
Priya Nath was initiated into Babaji’s technique of Kriya yoga,
designed for a new era of yogis to achieve God awareness through a
spiritual practice that was woven into their walk in the world. He
would soon become known as Sri Yukteswar Giri.
After ten years of Lahiri Mahasaya’s instruction, Babaji called on
Sri Yukteswar to write a text that would reveal the essential unity
between the Christian Bible and the eastern scriptures. Babaji then
bestowed upon Sri Yukteswar the title of Swami. This text, known as
The Holy Science, points out that at their core all scriptures
address a common goal, and that the innate desire of man, and indeed
all creatures, is an eagerness “to realize three things: Existence,
Consciousness and Bliss.” At Babaji’s request, the text also
recalculated the correct measure of the Yugas, the planetary cycles
which, over thousands of years, influence the seasons of
consciousness that impact man’s spiritual awareness. The Holy
Science demonstrates “the harmony underlying the various religions,”
particularly the similarities between Christianity and the
scriptures of the East. These teachings became the foundation of
Yogananda’s mission to bridge the traditions of East and West, when
he came to America in 1920.
Though not well known or sought out in his time, in part, as
Yogananda said, because “his truthful candor was too difficult for
most to hear”, Sri Yukteswar was of "unerring spiritual insight" and
had merged with the consciousness of the Divine. His relationship
with Yogananda exemplifies a God Realized teacher’s ability to guide
a student to their own realization of God. It was perhaps the
greatest expression of Sri Yukteswar’s incarnation that he was the
embodiment of a Sat Guru, a true Guru, able to afford a great deal
of grace to his student. As he himself explained …
“Life is a vast river, and there are many ways to be in the river.
Many people just swim, or they grab onto a log in the river and make
their way down the river. A few people see the grace of being in the
boat of a Guru, and they find themselves attaching their self to a
boat, so that the boat can take them more easily down the river.”
“But the teacher is also that which grows within you. The teacher is
the place you allow yourself to return to each time you close your
eyes and say, Thy will be done. Each time you let go of your concept
and you help someone else. Each time that you willingly sit to seek
the peace within and to breathe consciously, there lies the teacher.
Because if no student ever realizes God within, then there can never
be a true guru.”
One of the achievements of a God Realized Master is that their death
is a conscious exit from the body, usually while teaching, and that
is how Sri Yukteswar took his Mahasamadhi in Puri, India on March 9,
1936.
Respectfully
submitted by James Baldwin.
.
Avatar Meher Baba was
born February 25, 1894, in Poona, India. He was also called “The
Awakener”. His original name was Merwan Sheriar Irani. He was a
spiritual master in western India with a sizable following both in
that country and abroad. Beginning on July 10, 1925, he observed
silence for the last 44 years of his life, communicating with his
disciples at first through an alphabet board but increasingly with
gestures.
He observed that he had come “not to teach but to awaken”, adding
that “things that are real are given and received in silence”. He
was born into a Zoroastrian family of Persian descent. He was
educated in Poona and attended Deccan College there, where at the
age of 19, he met an aged Muslim woman, Hazrat Babajan, the first of
five “perfect masters” (spiritually enlightened, or “God-realized”,
persons) who over the next seven years helped him find his own
spiritual identity. That identity, Meher Baba said, was as the
avatar of this age, interpreting that Vedantic term to mean the
periodic incarnation of God in human form.
He placed himself among such universal religious figures as
Zoroaster, Rama, Krishna, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad. “I am
the same Ancient One come again into your midst,” he told his
disciples, declaring that all major religions are revelations of
“the One Reality which is God”. Meher Baba’s cosmology may be
summarized as follows: the goal of all life is to realize the
absolute oneness of God, from whom the universe emanated as a result
of the whim of unconscious divinity to know itself as conscious
divinity. In pursuit of consciousness, evolution of forms occurs in
seven stages: stone or metal, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, animal,
and human. Every individualized soul must experience all of these
forms in order to gain full consciousness. Once consciousness is
attained, the burden of impressions accumulated in these forms
prevents the soul from realizing its identity with God.
To gain this realization the individual must traverse an inward
spiritual path, eliminating all false impressions of individuality
and eventuating in the knowledge of the “real self” as God. Meher
Baba saw his work as awakening the world through love to a new
consciousness of the oneness of all life. To that end, he lived a
life of love and service which included extensive work with the
poor, the physically and mentally ill, and many others, performing
such tasks as feeding the poor, cleaning the latrines of
untouchables, and bathing lepers. He saw a responsibility to give
spiritual help to “advanced souls”, and travelled throughout the
Indian subcontinent to find such persons. These outward activities
Meher Baba saw as indications of the inner transformation of
consciousness that he came to give the world. He established and
later dismantled many institutions of service, which he compared to
scaffolding temporarily erected to construct a building that really
was within the human heart.
He said that a “new humanity” would emerge from his life’s work, and
that he would bring about an unprecedented release of divine love in
the world. Between 1931 and 1958 he made many visits to the United
States and Europe, on one such trip in 1952 establishing the Meher
Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach, S.C. A similar centre, Avatar’s
Abode, was created at Woomby, Queensland, Australia, in 1958. From
the mid-1960s Meher Baba was in seclusion, and during that period
several U.S. drug experimenters were drawn to him in a quest for
spiritual truth. Through them, his admonitions against the
non-medical use of psychedelic and other drugs came to the attention
of the news media in the U.S. and the West. He warned young people
explicitly that “drugs are harmful mentally, physically, and
spiritually,” – trying to draw them away from drugs and toward a
spiritual life.
Meher Baba never sought to form a sect or proclaim a dogma; he
attracted and welcomed followers of many faiths and every social
class with a message emphasizing love and compassion, the
elimination of the selfish ego, and the potential of realizing God
within themselves. Although his equation of the several
manifestations of God was syncretic, he won many followers from
sects and denominations that repudiated syncretism, and encouraged
those followers to be strong in their original faiths. After his
death his followers heeded his wish that they not form an
organization, but continued to gather informally and often to
discuss and read his works and express through music, poetry, dance,
or drama their reflections on his life.
His tomb at Meherabad, near Ahmednagar, has become a place of
pilgrimage for his followers throughout the world. His books include
Discourses (5 vol., 1938-43; the earliest dictated on an alphabet
board, the others by gesture), God Speaks: The Theme of Creation and
Its Purposes (1955), and The Everything and the Nothing (1963).
For more information visit Meherana http://www.meherana.org/about-meherana/
Or to personally visit, Meherana located in Mariposa and near
Yosemite National Park is a universal center for spiritual renewal
dedicated to Avatar Meher Baba and His principles of active love and
service to both the Meher Baba community and all humanity. It is
intended for the enhancement and strengthening of the spiritual
life, without supplanting professed religious convictions or
beliefs.
Respectfully submitted by Therese Williams
Reference Books:
Practical Spirituality with Meher Baba by John A. Grant
The Beloved, The Life and Work of Meher Baba by Naosherwan Anzar
God
manifests all of creation out of the substance of God. And as we
journey toward the realization of our union with that source, we
often receive the gift of God’s guidance through the many relatable
forms that God takes. On rare occasions, the consciousness of God
directly incarnates for the development of those truly seeking God,
and to assist the planet through its transitions.
These “God births” have been called avatars. Shiva, Krishna, Buddha,
Christ are all examples of avatar incarnations where God walked the
Earth in a human form. Each of them brought the light that was
needed to address the darkness of the time and place in which they
walked. The aspect of God that incarnated as Krishna was the same
avatar seed that gave birth to Babaji. Those familiar with the
writings of Yogananda will remember that he acknowledged this
connection, as he would often address Babaji as Babaji-Krishna.
Mahavatar Babaji resides high in the Himalayan mountains, in the
regions near Badrinath. The purpose of his incarnation is to
facilitate Earth’s shift to a new age of consciousness, an age where
people of all walks can expand beyond the limitations of the self to
realize a state of God awareness.
Pure service is the pinnacle of Babaji’s expression. His gifts to
humanity and the planet have included guiding the currents of higher
thought and consciousness, the advancement of yoga toward its truest
alignment, and his dedication to the world’s teachers and true
seekers with whom Babaji shares instruction, sometimes directly, and
sometimes indirectly.
Perhaps Babaji’s most recognizable expression has been the gift of
Kriya yoga, an advanced meditation technique allowing higher states
of consciousness to be reached outside of previous disciplines that
included isolation and renunciation. As a reflection of Babaji’s
dedication, today’s yogis have the potential to carry more light
into the world by their participation in it. Using the tool of Kriya
Yoga, they can maintain careers and families while developing their
awareness and consciousness to states of God-realization. Lahiri
Mahasaya and Sri Yukteswar, early students of Babaji, are examples
of this outward yogic path.
While some accounts of Babaji’s birth are more recent than others,
Babaji arrived shortly after the time of Krishna, and has been in
this world ever since. Babaji actively holds the potential for
advanced states of consciousness and a higher awareness of our union
with God. His expanded state of being is helping to make such
consciousness available to all those who thirst for it.
Respectfully submitted by James Baldwin.
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