Yoga for the New Age

Talk given by Swami Kriyananda on 30 December 2003 in honour of Mr. O. P. Ghai, at India International Centre, New Delhi.

I'm particularly honoured to be able to speak on the occasion of Mr. O.P. Ghai's life, his passing, and his greatness as a human being, because we share the same values. I have devoted my entire life to just what he talked about. Forty-four years ago, in 1959, I came to Delhi with the thought of founding a centre here. The purpose of that centre was to create a place where people could affirm and celebrate the unity of religions, the oneness of all faiths-just what Mr. Ghai believed in. My reason for seeking the unity of religions is that underlying what they all try to do, there is one basic purpose. That is for individuals to know themselves-to know who they are in relation to a higher and greater reality.

This centre was for me a very big thing. I was able, after months of effort and a great deal of struggle, to get permission of Nehru himself. He walked the land that I wanted in the Green Belt area, near Birla Mandir, and he gave his approval. A great saint, Neem Karoli Baba, said, "It will come up." By contrast, my own organisation was horrified at what I had done. I couldn't understand it. They were sectarian, unfortunately, as most people are. Being sectarian, they were afraid of anything that perhaps would not be under their absolute and rigid control. They threw me out on my ear, as we say in America, and for many years I didn't know what God wanted of me, because I thought this project was something so important.

But, in fact, as always happens whenever we go through a great test and believe in God, and do it for God, it is not the tragedy that it seems. It was my greatest good fortune, and perhaps the most auspicious event of my life, when that happened. This is because, in the meantime, I have been able to build a base of seven communities in Italy and America, with a total of about a thousand resident members. We are dedicated to these principles. We not only practice principles, we seek to experience those principles through the practice of yoga and through communion with God every day, and not just having beliefs. People believed the world was flat, but that did not make it so. Believing in God Himself does not matter, it is what you experience of Him that does matter. Our endeavour, humble but sincere, has been to experience God in our lives.

For many years friends like Mr. Inder Jit and others have urged me to come back to India and take up that work, but I said, "No, not unless I feel my Guru wants it." Finally, just two months ago, I felt that now the time has come. I am 78 years old now. That is not an age at which people can normally be expected to do a new work, especially in a new country. But I have a large team of people who work with me now. They are very competent. My way of management is to empower, not to take power and use them for my glory, but to help them all. I believe in letting people make their own mistakes. In that way they learn. So we have very competent teachers and leaders in many communities. I have a good team. They have come here to do this work in India that I was not able to do then. This work, about which Neem Karoli Baba seemed to be wrong, now is finally bearing fruit and it looks like it will happen.

My effort in this world has been partly what Mr. O. P. Ghai brought to the world; partly to bring in the practices of yoga to make these things real experience and not just beliefs; and partly-entirely, really-to spread my Guru's mission. And what was that mission? It was specifically to usher in a new age. It is very clear, especially to somebody like me who has lived for most of the last century, that we are in a new age. I grew up in Romania, and when I was a child, if an airplane flew overhead we would go out and wave at it, it was so unusual. When my father was brought back to America every three years, we went by ship. There were no planes going across the Atlantic in those days. Our radio was a large piece of furniture, and to get BBC in London from Romania involved turning the dial and getting sounds like, "Ow, ow , ow, this is BB . . . ow, ow." It was very difficult to hear anything. Someone visited us in Bucharest from the U.S. and told us about television. I thought that such a thing was impossible.

Back in 1949, Popular Science magazine, I think it was, stated that one day computers would weigh as little as one ton! Even in 1979 the president of IBM predicted that they would never have computers so small that they would be in the home. Look how this world has changed! Not very long ago, in the 1920s, astronomers still believed that the sun was the centre of the whole universe. Think how fast things have changed. Back in the 1930s when I was in school in England, a teacher told me, "Do you know that there are other star systems like ours? All the stars we see are only one star system, and there are maybe two or even three other galaxies!" Now we know that there are something like 100 billion, and who's counting?

This world, as we know it today, is not at all what it used to be, what our grandparents knew. My grandparents were in what we know in America as the Oklahoma Land Rush, when they opened up the Oklahoma Territory and they went in to claim land for themselves. That was not so long ago. How the world has changed. With this change has come an extraordinary complication in people's lives. We no longer know whether our values are valid or not. I remember in 1962 I read an article in Span magazine, which was the U.S. Information Service magazine in India. I was amazed to see how modern scientific discoveries have caused people who think deeply to question whether there is any value in life at all. We find that people today doubt their most fundamental values. What we are really facing today is the confusion between old ways of looking at things and new ways. Copernicus, only four or five centuries ago, announced his discovery that this world is not the centre of everything. Now we find that there is no centre in anything. People don't know what this means.

There is always a balance between West and East, and there is a very important shift now. What India, and yoga specifically, has taught is that you are the centre of the universe. In a universe where you can't find a centre, suddenly you begin to discover meaning in one of the most ancient teachings: "Centre everywhere, circumference nowhere." The centre of everything is right in every atom. It's in you. If you want to know anything in the universe you have to begin by knowing yourself. This is why the ancient Greeks have the saying, "Know thyself."
In this, the West has gotten completely confused. Since the whole world has taken its modern values from the West, everybody is confused. They begin to think that there are no values, there is no truth, there is no meaning in life. Many young children have committed suicide, because learning this kind of teaching in school they come to think that life is useless, and, losing any sense of direction, they kill themselves. It's a terrible disease, this modern philosophy.

But yoga has the answer to all this. Yoga can teach you that from your centre there are certain things that you can comprehend that will help you to get meaning out of everything. I wrote a book called Out of the Labyrinth, which shows how we must begin with ourselves and ask ourselves a few basic questions. One of the most important is, "Does it work?" All these abstract theories-if they don't work, what meaning have they? What is the use of them?

What does work? A very interesting point is one I brought out in another book of mine, Hope for a Better World! Adam Smith pointed out-perfectly correctly-that everybody thinks first of himself, tries to seek his own gains, his own benefits. People, hearing this, were outraged, saying, "This is un-Christian. This is against the teachings of religion." Really, Smith's point is just too evident to doubt. But the question has not been explored completely enough.

I take the example of a small town with two bakers. One of them we'll call William Baker. The other one, who has his bakery shop down the street, we'll call Joe Crumpet. William Baker thinks only in terms of, "What can I get?" With every customer who comes in, he thinks, "What am I going to earn from this man?" That is the kind of philosophy it seems Adam Smith was recommending. Let us say that Joe Crumpet, on the other hand, likes his customers. He is happy to see them, and thinks, "What can I give to you?" not, "What can I take from you?" If you look at these two people you will see inevitably that William Baker is not a happy man. Joe Crumpet is happy. People want to go to Joe Crumpet because they feel welcome. They don't want to go to William Baker because they don't feel welcome.

I was in Taormina, Sicily a few years ago. I was looking for a hat. I asked a shopkeeper there, "What hat do your customers like the best?" She responded, "Oh, I don't care; I just take their money and tell them goodbye." I said, "You have to work in this shop for eight hours a day. If you have that attitude, can you be happy just thinking of these people as statistics? Why don't you think in terms of making friends with them?" This seemed like a pretty impudent thing for me to say, but I did say it, as I felt that this poor lady didn't understand something important in life. The next year I went back there and she greeted me with open arms. She was so happy to see me. I'd evidently really made an impression. Our hotel had given us a bottle of wine, and I don't drink wine. I went and gave the bottle to this lady. She kissed me on the cheek and she was weeping.

Life is so wonderful. Someone said to me just the other day, "I think what you're teaching is very good, but I have to do my work eight hours a day. How can I use that teaching? How can I seek Satchidanandam?" I said, "Why don't you seek it while you are working? Why wait till you get home and shut your meditation room door and sit to meditate? Why not enjoy what you are doing? Why not bring Satchidanandam into your daily activity?"

Bring ananda into your daily activity. That's why we've called our communities, "Ananda." This is what religion is all about-not how to separate God from daily life, but how to bring God into daily life. It is wonderful to see people when they come to visit our communities, because they come from the cities, they come with their faces lined with tension and stress. After only a weekend you see them relaxed and smiling. If they stay there a week they feel as if they had been reborn. It is God who gives you a rebirth. You don't do it. We don't do it. But you can remind people of who they really are.

There are two ways of looking at the universe. One is with dark glasses, the other is with clear glasses. If you can look on life with a kindly eye, you see friends everywhere. I had a wonderful experience in Paris some years ago. It was my birthday and I wanted to go to a concert. I got to the church where the concert was held, and it was completely full. They were turning people away. I said to the person at the door, "But this is my birthday!" He then brought me in and seated me behind the altar in such a way that I was facing the audience of 700 people. It was a wonderful concert, full of joy. After the concert, a woman came up to me on the Metro, the subway, and said, "Don't you remember me? I was in the audience." I said no. With 700 people was I supposed to remember her? She had felt a joy in me that she recognized in herself. That made us kindred. She sat down next to me in the Metro, and told me the problems she was having in her home, with her daughter, telling me the sort of things you would never tell to any stranger. You find that when you have that attitude, wherever you go you make friends. You don't find strangers, if you can reach this point where you feel that everybody is your own family, your own self.
That is what yoga can give to the world. In this world, people don't know whether the Bible is right, whether the Koran is right, or the Gita is right, or all these other shastras and teachings are right. They seem to be different, and in some ways, there are differences. You find that underneath all of that there is a similarity that touches everybody. These teachings begin with you. Don't think about the abstractions-how many angels there are in heaven-it doesn't matter a damn. But if you can find peace of heart through your religion, why bother with terrorism, why bother with blowing up World Trade Centers, why bother with all the stupid acts people are committing these days, thinking they are going to go to heaven. I think that if the average person found himself in heaven, it would be hell for him. He is so used to fighting and arguing, he would be utterly miserable. He would have nobody to fight with anymore. People want disharmony because they are used to it. But if we create harmony in ourselves, we don't have to go to swarg to find it. We have it right here. And you can find it even here in Delhi. Find that bliss within. Yoga is important in this respect. It is not just a teaching.

You have three basic philosophies in India. One is Sankhya, which tells you the need to seek truth. The next is Yoga which tells you how to seek truth. Finally comes Vedanta which teaches you what the truth is. "Aham brahm asmi" is a vedantic saying. But it doesn't have any great meaning if you don't feel it. If you say, "Everything is Brahma and I am Brahma, but where is my next meal?" if you get angry because somebody spilled coffee on your tie, then there is something wrong. Yoga is the important thing because it tells you how to do it. It is important to know that you want it. That is the first sutra of Patanjali: "Now we come to the study of yoga." After the study of Sankhya, you say, "Well, what do I do about it?" And that takes you to yoga.

There are of course many kinds of yoga, but the classic goal is to get into your own spine. Do you know why it is that every religion speaks of heaven as up above and hell down below? People on the other side of the world speak of heaven as in a direction opposite to what we think of as up. This is because they are not talking of objective things; they are talking of their own bodies. When you feel well, when you feel happy, we have words for it: You say you are "uplifted," "high," "like flying." Every language, I imagine-I only speak nine-speaks of an upward movement for feeling good and a downward movement for feeling bad. You don't ever find people slouching, looking down, and saying, "I feel so happy." The very feeling of being happy makes you start looking up. And you don't find people looking up and saying, "I'm so miserable." These are definite directions.

Yoga teaches that there is a corresponding reality between you and what you are trying to accomplish in life. It doesn't matter how your neighbours treat you. Everything you are trying to accomplish is not in relation to other people. This is the great delusion that has been put on man. Even as babies our energy goes outward. The inward movement that takes place when we die is something that we need to practice all the time. We need to withdraw our energy into the Self. Our real search for happiness is a search for our inner Self. The happier we are inside, the more the whole world looks beautiful. The more unhappy we are, the more we think the whole world stinks. We want to find that movement inwardly which can change our level of consciousness. It is so simple. The trouble with spiritual teachings is that they are so simple and man is basically complex. Man can't return easily to simplicity. He can hold that thought for a moment, but then starts thinking other things. Somebody is peaceful in the office and everyone around him feels his peace, and asks him, "Why are you so peaceful?" He says, " I meditate every day and I practice the presence of God." And they say, "Yes, fine, but it is probably because you eat bran for breakfast." They can't get it into their heads that a simple change of consciousness will change your entire life.

I began my work without knowing anything. I have never studied the subjects I am considered to be an expert in. The reason is, quite simply, that I have experienced them, I have lived them. Many large corporations in America have bought my book, The Art of Creative Leadership, and shared it with their staffs, in the hundreds. I have never read a book on leadership. I think that is why it is a good book. I have not written from theory; I have written from actual experience. It is the same with everything else I have done. Even the music I have written has come from experience. Try to gain experience in life. Ask yourself this simple question: not, "Is it logical?" but, "Does it work?" I read a book not long ago, called, Books that Changed the World. It includes people like Darwin, Freud, Smith, and Machiavelli-all these people who have undermined the faith of humanity. I have asked the simple question in addressing each one, "But, does it work?" You find in every case that it doesn't. Look at Freud. How many saints has that man produced? I think it is very simple. The sum is zero. How many happy people has he produced? I think probably zero, except that happiness being a relative term, you can't always be sure. Somebody may say he is happy because he is less miserable than he used to be. Darwin is one of the basic dogmas of our age. But he doesn't bring in the most fundamental thing, which is consciousness.

Always my question is, "Does it work?" That is the question that brought me to yoga. I read Yogananda's book, Autobiography of a Yogi in New York. I had just put my mother on a ship to go to Egypt, to join my father who was posted there by his company. I was free. Free, but desperate. I wanted to know what life is all about. I wanted to know whether there is a God and what He is like. I didn't know anything about Indian philosophy. I went uptown in New York City, and there I discovered Autobiography of a Yogi. I read that book without stop. One week later I was going cross country, four days and four nights-America is a big country-all the way to Los Angeles. There I met Yogananda. This was in 1948. I was 22 years old.

I was a typical, arrogant, young American male. I didn't think I would ever say these words to anybody, but when I met him, I said, "I want to be your disciple." Sudden decisions usually don't remain. This remained all my life. Never for a moment have I doubted he was my guru. Finally in my life I had met a great man. One great man can inspire others to seek that greatness. This is what we need today. We need to aspire to human greatness.

How many newspapers have I read in which half the parliament got up and stormed out in disharmony, arguing, and bickering! In our community, which is now 35 years old, I cannot remember a single meeting that did not end in complete harmony. I think that is the kind of example that is needed today. China and Russia have killed something like a hundred million of their own people since 1917. That is a hard thing to believe, but it is true. Killing their own people just because they didn't agree! I happened to meet J. P. Narayan on a train. I didn't even know who he was, but I found that we had the same ideas. He used to be the number two man in the government, but he left government because, he said, "These things can't be imposed on people. We have to inspire people to want them." It has to come up from a grassroots level. This is what we have done in our communities, too-to try to create examples that other people will find inspiring and decide, "Why don't we do that, too?" So it is that people come from great distances-India, Taiwan, China, Japan, all over the West, even Africa-everywhere. They come to find out, "Why does this place work?" It works because we believe in changing ourselves. We are not interested in converting others. I've always said, "I don't want to convert anyone, except to his own higher Self." When people come and see an example that makes them think, "Maybe I could be happy. Maybe I could learn to like others. Maybe I could be peaceful."-when you see examples of it actually working-that's when people say, "Yes, let me try it." If we want to change the world, this is how it must begin.
I think in this context the most important contribution that India has to make to the world is yoga. I don't mean yoga asanas. I mean becoming centred in yourself, learning to raise your energy and to unite it with the higher consciousness. You can do it. The most criminal person in the world has God in him if he would only know it. If he would learn to raise his consciousness he would change. Many years ago I was a young man, twenty-three, and I fell into a mood. I couldn't talk myself out of this mood. Every time I tried to reason, my reason would show me all the reasons why I should be in a mood. Then I asked myself, "Do you like being in this mood?"-"No, I don't like this mood at all." I said, "Then what are you going to do about it?"-"Well, I am going to try to change. If I can't reason my way out of it, I'll try to change my level of consciousness."

I sat down in my little meditation room. I put my mind very strongly at the point between the eyebrows. Five minutes is all it took. All of a sudden I saw the world in a completely different light. I saw my life in a completely different light. I saw all the reason in the world why people had done things the way they had. I realized that my whole understanding of life was different. We can do that ourselves. Don't think that the world will change for you. But, if you change, not only can you find that the world looks better, but you will see that somehow it reacts differently. Somehow it wants to act differently with you.

An interesting example was one time in 1955 when I was going to fly from London to Paris. I was a little worried because I was standing in line behind a man who had excess baggage. He was furious and demanded to see the manager. The angrier he got the more determined the clerk was to make him pay extra. I had many more bags than the man in front of me! I prayed, "Divine Mother, help me." I came to the clerk, thinking, "Divine Mother is in this form," and looked at him with a smile. He looked at me and looked at my bags, and just said, "Oh, okay."

The world changes in response to who you are. And if it doesn't, then at least you don't lose your peace of mind. When I was thrown out of my organisation I figured it would be very easy to be bitter. Then I would lose twice, because I would also become bitter and unhappy. Why not just love? I discovered that by loving I was happier. I don't worry about how others treat me. That doesn't matter to me, because I have my own peace. You can change the world, to the extent that you will ever be able to, the more you change yourself. The wonderful thing is that every great master who has come into this world has had enemies, has had opposition. But it doesn't matter anymore. You just realise that in every play there has to be a villain. It would be very boring if it were always the same. But you can be peaceful always. The great avatars, the great masters, always forgave. They did it for a very selfish reason, you might say: They were happy when they forgave. The truth is that in that state you see that all really are your own. You don't have to reason it through. You love them no matter how they treat you.

Yoga for a new age I think is a very, very important thing. The more that people can be brought to know the world from their own centre, the more they will be able to emanate peace. This is what Mahatma Gandhi was trying to say. If we are peaceful, then we can change the whole world. Then there is no wish to do harm to anybody. Those who wish you harm are only hurting themselves. They can't hurt you. Your attitude changes other people. This is true when we bring God and religion into it. Without religion, humanity is like a body without a head. We have to bring the head in, and that is the soul-the inner, guiding spirit. Without that, humanity is lost. But, thank God there is that.

We need to show people not just beliefs. Science has brought us the way to prove what it states. Many years ago people thought the world was flat. Then Columbus went to America and discovered that it wasn't. I've always wondered why people thought that way. When you see a ship in the distance, you first see the mast, then you see the deck, then finally the whole ship. There is a curvature in the ocean. Nobody thought of that. I don't know why.

There are truths staring us in the face, but they won't change you. You can change yourself. You read about the New Age, and about how different everything will be. We have found enough outer changes already to realize that these are not changing man. There was a book by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward. In the book, he fell asleep and woke up after a hundred years. In the late 1900s he woke up and found that every home had a radio with music that came from a central station. He said, "I can't imagine anything more wonderful. Having music in every home is my ideal of perfection." Well, you and I live in that kind of world. Is it any better? If anything, it may be a lot worse. Things are not going to make you perfect. This is one of the great superstitions that the West has imposed on the world, that somehow happiness will come from things. It will never come from things. You must make yourself happy.

This is where the East and the West need to be combined. Don't take too much from the West. Remember that your values are always going to be, as they were in ancient times, in your own self. Yoga can bring you back to that. Yoga can give you the compass that you need, where the understanding is always turned toward the truth. It can give you that direction that you need in order to remain unshaken in this time of change. I believe that we are coming to a time of great change. I don't think you've see anything yet. I think there will be a great economic upheaval. I think there will be great wars and troubles-all a part of the shakedown. But we are in a new age. My guru's guru said that we are in fact in Dwapara Yuga, not Kali Yuga. This new age is an age of energy-an age in which energy can be used benignly, not destructively. I urge you to take these things seriously. Don't take too much from the West. Don't take too many values from the West. Look into your own culture and realise what you've got right here, because the West needs it and needs it badly.

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