Great Beings

Swami Shankarananda’s spiritual search led him to India in 1970 where he met many of India’s sages and saints, culminating in meeting his own guru, Swami Muktananda. According to Swamiji, studying the teachings of great beings is fundamental to spiritual life. He says, “Real darshan means you cannot be apart from their vision. Have the company of the sages. Stay in their satsang, in their company, in connection. That connection will connect you to the higher. The practices are good but without that connecting point, nothing is kindled. Have their darshan.”

During Satsang on Saturday nights, and in study groups, Swamiji often reads and comments on dialogues between students and great beings, including the following.

Swami Muktananda

Swami Muktananda, widely known as Baba, was born in 1908. Beginning his spiritual search at 15, he walked across India, studied Sanskrit, read the scriptures, became an adept hatha yogi and took the vows of swami. His sadhana culminated under his Guru, Bhagawan Nityananda of Ganeshpuri, where an ashram developed around Baba’s modest meditation hut.

Muktananda made a powerful impact on the West during many world tours in the 1970s, when he awakened thousands of seekers to the lineage and the experience that “God dwells within you as you.” He founded a worldwide organization of ashrams and centres, published many books and created the Intensive, a forum for seekers to experience highly charged spiritual energy. He also was instrumental in bringing the powerful teachings of Kashmir Shaivism to the West. He died in 1982.

Swamiji met Baba in 1971, becoming one of his foremost disciples, with the attainment to continue the tradition of spiritual awakening. Muktananda said, “He (Shankarananda) has the power to make people experience the divine presence.”

Swamiji says, “Swami Muktananda [was] the most remarkable of all. Equal to the rest in love and wisdom, he also radiated spiritual power, shakti, to the most extraordinary degree. . . . In my years at Muktananda’s ashram my inner being woke up. I had spiritual experiences—energy rushing through me, the vision of lights and high beings, out-of-the-body experiences and glimpses of states of perfect peace and freedom. Most significantly, the experience of the Self became more and more my daily and normal experience.”

Swamiji recommends reading Baba’s autobiography, Play of Consciousness, as well as two books that are particularly helpful for those learning to meditate, I Am Alive and Where Are You Going, an easy-to-read guide to the practice of Shiva Yoga.

Anandamayi Ma

Anandamayi Ma was a country girl who became internationally recognized for her high spiritual attainment and the embodiment of her name—“Mother of Bliss.” Born in the northeastern section of India 1896, by the time she went to live with her husband at 17, she was experiencing ecstatic trances and spontaneous yogic postures. These experiences intensified and at the age of 26 she underwent an extraordinary transformation and would enter states of samadhi, or spiritual communion, for the rest of her life.

During her lifetime she founded 30 ashrams and continually traveled the length and breadth of India. Equally adept in the paths of wisdom and devotion, she taught by conducting sessions of devotional chanting and spiritual discourse. Revered by local villagers, Western visitors and world leaders, she saw everyone as the embodiment of the divine. She died in 1982.

Swamiji says, “Anandamayi Ma was one of the great knowers of God, one of the great saints whom I had the good fortune to meet. She was a spiritual phenomenon. She went through a spontaneous spiritual unfoldment as a young person, then she was regarded as a great saint, a great person. People came from all over the world. She was a tremendous blend of jnani and bhakta, wisdom and devotion.

“Anandamayi Ma said, ‘Dig deep and unearth your real wealth. Find your real home in God, who is your own Self.’ That’s the teaching of a great being, always calling attention to who we truly are. A saint will always say, know the Self first. That’s the priority, the first order of business--the real wealth.”

Swamiji talks about the wisdom of Anandamayi Ma in the video presentation, “Dig Deep and Unearth Your Real Wealth,” Volume 1 of Satsang with Swamiji.

George Ivanovich Gurjieff

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born in Russia in the early 1870s. From an early age he was interested in esoteric ideas and took advantage of living along the trade route between Europe and Asia, where he was exposed to a variety of religious practices. According to his autobiography, Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963), he contacted secret societies, studied the occult and was particularly influenced by Tibetan Buddhism and Sufism.

Gurdjieff settled in Russia until 1920, then moved to Paris, where he established the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in nearby Fountainbleau. The work at the institute was a rigorous system of teachings, self-study, physical work and the practice of Gurdjieff's choreographed dances based on Sufi dervish dances. Gurdjieff’s ideas found a receptive audience especially in England and the United States, and after closing the institute in 1934, he traveled widely, lecturing and running groups in Europe and America. He died in 1949.

One of Gurdjieff’s most well-known students was Peter D. Ouspensky (1878-1949), whose book, In Search of the Miraculous, discusses Gurdjieff’s teachings in detail. Another prominent student was Maurice Nicoll. His weekly talks to study groups were published in a six-volume series of books, Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

“The yoga I teach and that of Gurdjieff make a good marriage,” Swamiji says. “Work on the Self, sadhana, is the only medicine for the spiritual predicament. Through sadhana a seeker develops awareness, patches up the leaks in his psychic system and becomes a true human being, not the slave of his unconscious tendencies and external events. The goal is to know the true Self.”

In the 5-CD set, Man Cannot Do: The Yoga of Gurdjieff, Swamiji talks the Gurdjieff mystery school and the practical application of key Gurdjieffian teachings.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Nisargadatta Maharaj was born in 1897 in the state of Maharastra in India. He grew up with little education, helping his father tend cattle, work in the fields and run errands. In time, he married and settled in Bombay, developing a modest business selling children’s clothing and Indian handmade cigarettes. In 1934 he met his guru, Siddharameshwar Maharaj and started his intense self-inquiry, which led to Self-realization three years later.

In the 1970s, Swamiji met Nisargadatta in the upstairs partitioned section of his home, where he conducted discourses with earnest students. Recordings of these dialogues were translated by Maurice Frydman and compiled in I Am That, a compendium of his teachings. He died in 1981.

Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna was born in rural Bengal in 1836 and had his first experience of spiritual ecstasy at the age of six or seven. At a young age, he became a priest at a temple dedicated to the Divine Mother in Dakshineswar, a village about four miles north of Calcutta. Through intense prayer and longing, he obtained the vision of the divine and often succumbed to God-intoxicated states.

Ramakrishna broke through all barriers to caste, gender and colour, and, declaring he had more to learn, practised the disciplines of the 64 principal books of Tantra, immersed himself in the Vaishnava tradition of devotion, studied the philosophies of Vedanta, performed the practises of Islam, and became fascinated by the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. In time he attracted a remarkable group of monastic disciples, including Swami Vivekananda, who took his teachings to the West. Ramakrishna died in 1886.

Swamiji often reads and comments on dialogues from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.

Ramana Maharshi

Born in South India in 1879, Ramana Maharshi had no particular leaning toward the spiritual life until his famous transforming experience at the age of 17. Quite suddenly, he said, he was overtaken by a violent fear of death, which drove his mind inwards to intense self-inquiry and Self-realization. He left home and settled at Arunachala, one of the oldest and most sacred of all India’s holy places.

Known as a master of Advaita Vedanta, Ramana was a jnani, or man of wisdom. An ashram grew around him and he met many spiritual aspirants, including the writer Paul Brunton, whose book, Search in Secret India, helped bring Ramana’s teachings to the West. He died in 1950.

Swamiji often reads and comments on dialogues from Talks with Ramana Maharshi.