Attunement to the Guru
Attunement to the Guru – God is the guru and discipleship is not to a person, it is to life!
We will be given all the tests in life that will help us grow spiritually, and the tools and grace to meet those challenges. Attunement is the key to spiritual success.
Look at life in a positive way. Everything that comes can be an opportunity to learn.
Yogananda said, “The greater the will, the greater the flow of energy.” We’ve got to learn to say yes to life. People don’t find that easy. They find some reason to say no.
We are not separate from God, except that we are a particular manifestation of Him. Our potential is endless.
The divinity within us can be hidden, if we are being kind or expressing other elevating qualities, but keeping the thought of “I.” When we say to ourselves, ‘I am kind,’ we are limiting ourselves with that egoic thought. Say instead, I am not the one who is being kind, He is, by being kind through me. He is expressing His power through me.
People who hold onto darkness, are incapable of understanding the truth. They will always twist it in some way to make it dark. No matter what you say, they will turn it in the opposite way. They can still grow spiritually if they can get themselves turned in the right direction. The greatest sin is indifference.
Yogananda wanted people to think things through for themselves. Sometimes when he gave advice, he would do it in a way to confound the person’s immediate understanding in order to force him to come up with a more intuitive grasp.
Kriyananda explained that Yogananda did not say, do this, or do that. He advised people in a way that you had to really think about it to understand what he was saying. In addition, often, it would be put in such a way, that you had to develop a lot of strength to be able to do it at all! You certainly could not have a weak will to survive his kind of discipline. Mt. Washington was like a hotel, people checking in and out all the time. Some people couldn’t take it.
It is not easy to take guidance from a man of God, because he or she put challenges to you that help you grow.
Act to please God.
In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, his description of enlightenment is ‘smriti,’ memory. We don’t have to attain anything. All we have to do is reach the point where we can remember that we have always been one with God. The only thing is, that we’ve been looking in the opposite direction, and so we didn’t see Him there, but He has always been there
