Maa Anandmayi's book collection
THE DIVINE LIFE SOCIETY SWAMI SIVANANDAJI MAHARAJ
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CITY OF BENIGHTEDNESS:-THIS PHENOMENAL world is a realm of sense perceptions. The mind & the senses are extremely deceptive & unreliable. Therefore all appearances & experiences perceived through them are totally misleading & dangerously deluding. All things seemingly appear to be going one way but turn out to be quite different later on. The painful puts on the garb of the pleasant, whereas the evil masquerades beneath goodness. This is the inscrutable game of Maya. One who deeply reflects upon this & understands it well walks in the path of light. He who succumbs to this deception comes to dwell in the “City of Benightedness” & leads a precarious life that lands him into sense-world constitutes the direct antitheses or total contradiction of the Self. In the Self alone abide eternal life & lasting bliss, whereas sensual indulgence is a poison that destroys life. Listen to this interesting story. There was once a wandering monk & his disciple. The monk was wise & vigilant. The young disciple was impetuous & at times foolhardy, due to his love of pleasure. THE LORD’S COMPASSION:- NARAYANA PRASD’S mother had passed away. Contrary to expectations, Narayana Prasad was extremely happy! He ran to his worship room, fell prostrate at the feet of his Deity—Jaganatha—and prayed: “Unasked you showered your Grace upon me. You have removed the one tie that bound me to this earthly life. I shall now be able to devote my entire life to you & you alone, without any distractions. Lord, grant me pure devotion.” Narayana Prasad & his mother had been great devotees of Lord Jaganatha of Puri. Narayana Prasad now wended his way to Puri. All along the way he was singing Names of the Lord blissful self-forgetfulness.
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INTRODUCTION:- Swami Radha is my guru. Through the stories she told me, I learned how life can be transformed & made purposeful through Kundalini Yoga. She was a wonderful storyteller, but always the stories reflected the wisdom she had gained from using the Kundalini system as a structure for self-examination. For me, her stories had a higher purpose of challenging the conventional ideas & concepts of my upbringing, which I had never questioned. At the same time they inspired me to think about alternative ways of responding. Because she used the Kundalini system to make sense of her life, I was inspired to the same for myself. At the time of our meeting I saw myself as a guarded, cautious person, not one to open his heart to just anyone, & so I was surprised, even a little shocked, by the warmth & felt during our exchanges. Today I can see that I was unconsciously responding to her Light. After many years of working with the Kundalini system, I also understand that speech based on personal experience can be trusted. In workshops & in less formal settings, when Swami Radha asked me questions about my life, on matter how personal they might appear, I could sense that they came a place from a place of deep caring that was inherently trustworthy. I trusted because I know from listening to her that she had looked at the same issues in her life & learned from them. Simple, yet profoundly precious. She had the power of one who is very aware over one who is not, & yet she exercised that power with the care & respect of a loving mother towards her child. Her guru, Swami Sivananda, had said to her, “Be a spiritual mother to all. The mother has all the milk the baby will need, before the baby is born.” And that was my experience. Swami Radha often of the brief & intense time she had with her guru, & of her own introduction to Kundalini Yoga over fifty years ago. Because of visa restrictions, she had just six months in India. Her guru could give her only a taste –a fleeting glimpse—of the yoga system that was to become the foundation of her teaching in the West. That she has done so much with that tenuous beginning is proof that Swami Sivananda knew what he was doing when he asked her to return to the West & update the ancient teaching of yoga. In her hands, he knew that the teaching would be safe. In the spring of 1956, a few weeks after her initiation into sanyas, she left India & returned to Canada to being her work. As soon as the could, she ordered the complete sixteen-volume set of Sri John Woodreffe’s classic translation of the Kundalini Sastra from the publisher in Bombay, & had the books shipped home to Montreal. Titles like The Serpent Power, Shakti & Shakta, Garland of Letters & Ananda Lahari would become a constant source of daily reflection in the years ahead. Swami Sivananda had demanded a lot of her. What would it mean to truly update the teachings? She knew it wasn’t just a question of transposing the language of one spiritual traditions to another. To be meaningful & lasting, the teachings would have to be based on personal to experience. She started with the spiritual practices she had been given in India—the Divine Light Invocation, the Mantra, Hattha Yoga, plus she developed the meditations & exercises that accompany each cakra in this book—and she worked steadily with them until she knew their power as it applied to her life. She practiced the Divine Light Invocation for two years, for example, before she felt ready to reach the practice to other. Working with translated texts of the ancient Kundalini Sastra, she was amazed to discover speech was originally called the goddess, the Devi, the power manifest. After chanting the mantra for five hours a day for two years, she could speak of this power of speech from the own experience. Whenever time allowed, she turned to the verses & scriptural translations to see how they could relate to her life. Through this intense period of study & practice, the hidden, esoteric teaching of the Kundalini system began to reveal themselves. Today, going to her library & picking out any one of these sixteen volumes, I cannot help but feel something of her presence through the quiet wisdom that vibrates in the texture & beautiful language of these old texts. Little bits of yellowing paper, each with a key word or two, or a comment in her handwriting, are still in place marking passages that were particularly important to her. The knowledge gained from her work came together in the first edition of Kundalini Yoga for the West in 1978, over twenty years after her return from India. (Swami Gopalananda Yasodhara Ashram).
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Kundalini is the coiled up,dprmant cosmic power that underlies all organic and any thesis that deal-
sl with it can avoid becoming too abstract, onle with great .
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DEDICATION
To all Gurus who have prepared the Path,especially to Swami Sivananda Sarasvati of Rishikesh, India, whose inspieation in the bieth of my spiritual life, & to my Tibetan Guru, who taught me the ''laying of the foundation.''
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Swami Sivananda's ''Lives of Saints'' was first pubished in 1941 & reprinted in 1943 & 1944. A co-mpanion second volume, under the some title, followed in 1947, the year of the Master's Diamond Jubilee. It contained life-sketches of many more saints not covered in the original publication. In this edition, we have endeavouered to consolidate, not those written by Swami Sivananda in other miscellaneous book. As such, the present publication has verily turned out to be a treasure teove of inspiring spirtual biography,instructive anecdotes & lofty admonitions of men &woman of the highest realisation. For sheer variety & range, this book perhaps has no equal. Here two points deserve special mantion. Firstly, this book is totally non-sectarian & free from prejudice of any kind. It thus manages with marvellous success to draw out the very best from subject it touches, as these. Secondly, as thsese sketches come feom the pen of a spiritual pers-onality, they present all the lives in a distinctive spiritual perspective, which a layman writing the same biographies would hardly be able to do. This fect, in itself, enhances the worth & utility of the book a great deal. We feel privileged to be able to offer this book to the reading public. May the light of these saints guide & illumine the path of the readers. My their blessings shower upon the readers & the whole mankind!
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