Autobiography of a Yogi
by Paramhansa Yogananda
Original First Edition, Copyright 1946,
by Paramhansa Yogananda
First Online Edition
Chapter 13
The Sleepless Saint
"Please permit me to go to the Himalayas. I hope in unbroken
solitude to achieve continuous divine communion."
I actually once addressed these ungrateful words to my Master.
Seized by one of the unpredictable delusions which occasionally assail the
devotee, I felt a growing impatience with hermitage duties and college studies.
A feebly extenuating circumstance is that my proposal was made when I had been
only six months with Sri Yukteswar. Not yet had I fully surveyed his towering
stature.
"Many hillmen live in the Himalayas, yet possess no
God-perception." My guru's answer came slowly and simply. "Wisdom is better
sought from a man of realization than from an inert mountain."
Ignoring Master's plain hint that he, and not a hill, was my
teacher, I repeated my plea. Sri Yukteswar vouchsafed no reply. I took his
silence for consent, a precarious interpretation readily accepted at one's
convenience.
In my Calcutta home that evening, I busied myself with travel
preparations. Tying a few articles inside a blanket, I remembered a similar
bundle, surreptitiously dropped from my attic window a few years earlier. I
wondered if this were to be another ill-starred flight toward the Himalayas.
The first time my spiritual elation had been high; tonight conscience smote
heavily at thought of leaving my guru.
The following morning I sought out Behari Pundit, my Sanskrit
professor at Scottish Church College.
"Sir, you have told me of your friendship with a great disciple of
Lahiri Mahasaya. Please give me his address."
"You mean Ram Gopal Muzumdar. I call him the 'sleepless saint.' He
is always awake in an ecstatic consciousness. His home is at Ranbajpur, near
Tarakeswar."
I thanked the pundit, and entrained immediately for Tarakeswar. I
hoped to silence my misgivings by wringing a sanction from the "sleepless
saint" to engage myself in lonely Himalayan meditation. Behari's friend, I
heard, had received illumination after many years of Kriya Yoga practice in
isolated caves.
At Tarakeswar I approached a famous shrine. Hindus regard it with
the same veneration that Catholics give to the Lourdes sanctuary in France.
Innumerable healing miracles have occurred at Tarakeswar, including one for a
member of my family.
"I sat in the temple there for a week," my eldest aunt once told
me. "Observing a complete fast, I prayed for the recovery of your Uncle Sarada
from a chronic malady. On the seventh day I found a herb materialized in my
hand! I made a brew from the leaves, and gave it to your uncle. His disease
vanished at once, and has never reappeared."
I entered the sacred Tarakeswar shrine; the altar contains nothing
but a round stone. Its circumference, beginningless and endless, makes it aptly
significant of the Infinite. Cosmic abstractions are not alien even to the
humblest Indian peasant; he has been accused by Westerners, in fact, of living
on abstractions!
My own mood at the moment was so austere that I felt disinclined to
bow before the stone symbol. God should be sought, I reflected, only within the
soul.
I left the temple without genuflection and walked briskly toward
the outlying village of Ranbajpur. My appeal to a passer-by for guidance caused
him to sink into long cogitation.
"When you come to a crossroad, turn right and keep going," he
finally pronounced oracularly.
Obeying the directions, I wended my way alongside the banks of a
canal. Darkness fell; the outskirts of the jungle village were alive with
winking fireflies and the howls of near-by jackals. The moonlight was too faint
to supply any reassurance; I stumbled on for two hours.
Welcome clang of a cowbell! My repeated shouts eventually brought a
peasant to my side.
"I am looking for Ram Gopal Babu."
"No such person lives in our village." The man's tone was surly.
"You are probably a lying detective."
Hoping to allay suspicion in his politically troubled mind, I
touchingly explained my predicament. He took me to his home and offered a
hospitable welcome.
"Ranbajpur is far from here," he remarked. "At the crossroad, you
should have turned left, not right."
My earlier informant, I thought sadly, was a distinct menace to
travelers. After a relishable meal of coarse rice, lentil-dhal, and curry of
potatoes with raw bananas, I retired to a small hut adjoining the courtyard. In
the distance, villagers were singing to the loud accompaniment of mridangas 1
and cymbals. Sleep was inconsiderable that night; I prayed deeply to be
directed to the secret yogi, Ram Gopal.
As the first streaks of dawn penetrated the fissures of my dark
room, I set out for Ranbajpur. Crossing rough paddy fields, I trudged over
sickled stumps of the prickly plant and mounds of dried clay. An
occasionally-met peasant would inform me, invariably, that my destination was
"only a krosha (two miles)." In six hours the sun traveled victoriously from
horizon to meridian, but I began to feel that I would ever be distant from
Ranbajpur by one krosha.
At midafternoon my world was still an endless paddy field. Heat
pouring from the avoidless sky was bringing me to near-collapse. As a man
approached at leisurely pace, I hardly dared utter my usual question, lest it
summon the monotonous: "Just a krosha."
The stranger halted beside me. Short and slight, he was physically
unimpressive save for an extraordinary pair of piercing dark eyes.
"I was planning to leave Ranbajpur, but your purpose was good, so I
awaited you." He shook his finger in my astounded face. "Aren't you clever to
think that, unannounced, you could pounce on me? That professor Behari had no
right to give you my address."
Considering that introduction of myself would be mere verbosity in
the presence of this master, I stood speechless, somewhat hurt at my reception.
His next remark was abruptly put.
"Tell me; where do you think God is?"
"Why, He is within me and everywhere." I doubtless looked as
bewildered as I felt.
"All-pervading, eh?" The saint chuckled. "Then why, young sir, did
you fail to bow before the Infinite in the stone symbol at the Tarakeswar
temple yesterday?2 Your pride caused you the punishment of being misdirected by
the passer-by who was not bothered by fine distinctions of left and right.
Today, too, you have had a fairly uncomfortable time of it!"
I agreed wholeheartedly, wonder-struck that an omniscient eye hid
within the unremarkable body before me. Healing strength emanated from the
yogi; I was instantly refreshed in the scorching field.
"The devotee inclines to think his path to God is the only way," he
said. "Yoga, through which divinity is found within, is doubtless the highest
road: so Lahiri Mahasaya has told us. But discovering the Lord within, we soon
perceive Him without. Holy shrines at Tarakeswar and elsewhere are rightly
venerated as nuclear centers of spiritual power."
The saint's censorious attitude vanished; his eyes became
compassionately soft. He patted my shoulder.
"Young yogi, I see you are running away from your master. He has
everything you need; you must return to him. Mountains cannot be your guru."
Ram Gopal was repeating the same thought which Sri Yukteswar had expressed at
our last meeting.
"Masters are under no cosmic compulsion to limit their residence."
My companion glanced at me quizzically. "The Himalayas in India and Tibet have
no monopoly on saints. What one does not trouble to find within will not be
discovered by transporting the body hither and yon. As soon as the devotee is
willing to go even to the ends of the earth for spiritual enlightenment, his
guru appears near-by."
I silently agreed, recalling my prayer in the Benares hermitage,
followed by the meeting with Sri Yukteswar in a crowded lane.
"Are you able to have a little room where you can close the door
and be alone?"
"Yes." I reflected that this saint descended from the general to
the particular with disconcerting speed.
"That is your cave." The yogi bestowed on me a gaze of illumination
which I have never forgotten. "That is your sacred mountain. That is where you
will find the kingdom of God."
His simple words instantaneously banished my lifelong obsession for
the Himalayas. In a burning paddy field I awoke from the monticolous dreams of
eternal snows.
"Young sir, your divine thirst is laudable. I feel great love for
you." Ram Gopal took my hand and led me to a quaint hamlet. The adobe houses
were covered with coconut leaves and adorned with rustic entrances.
The saint seated me on the umbrageous bamboo platform of his small
cottage. After giving me sweetened lime juice and a piece of rock candy, he
entered his patio and assumed the lotus posture. In about four hours I opened
my meditative eyes and saw that the moonlit figure of the yogi was still
motionless. As I was sternly reminding my stomach that man does not live by
bread alone, Ram Gopal approached me.
"I see you are famished; food will be ready soon."
A fire was kindled under a clay oven on the patio; rice and dhal
were quickly served on large banana leaves. My host courteously refused my aid
in all cooking chores. "The guest is God," a Hindu proverb, has commanded
devout observance from time immemorial. In my later world travels, I was
charmed to see that a similar respect for visitors is manifested in rural
sections of many countries. The city dweller finds the keen edge of hospitality
blunted by superabundance of strange faces.
The marts of men seemed remotely dim as I squatted by the yogi in
the isolation of the tiny jungle village. The cottage room was mysterious with
a mellow light. Ram Gopal arranged some torn blankets on the floor for my bed,
and seated himself on a straw mat. Overwhelmed by his spiritual magnetism, I
ventured a request.
"Sir, why don't you grant me a samadhi?"
"Dear one, I would be glad to convey the divine contact, but it is
not my place to do so." The saint looked at me with half-closed eyes. "Your
master will bestow that experience shortly. Your body is not tuned just yet. As
a small lamp cannot withstand excessive electrical voltage, so your nerves are
unready for the cosmic current. If I gave you the infinite ecstasy right now,
you would burn as if every cell were on fire.
"You are asking illumination from me," the yogi continued musingly,
"while I am wonderinginconsiderable as I am, and with the little meditation I
have doneif I have succeeded in pleasing God, and what worth I may find in His
eyes at the final reckoning."
"Sir, have you not been singleheartedly seeking God for a long
time?"
"I have not done much. Behari must have told you something of my
life. For twenty years I occupied a secret grotto, meditating eighteen hours a
day. Then I moved to a more inaccessible cave and remained there for
twenty-five years, entering the yoga union for twenty hours daily. I did not
need sleep, for I was ever with God. My body was more rested in the complete
calmness of the superconsciousness than it could be by the partial peace of the
ordinary subconscious state.
"The muscles relax during sleep, but the heart, lungs, and
circulatory system are constantly at work; they get no rest. In
superconsciousness, the internal organs remain in a state of suspended
animation, electrified by the cosmic energy. By such means I have found it
unnecessary to sleep for years. The time will come when you too will dispense
with sleep."
"My goodness, you have meditated for so long and yet are unsure of
the Lord's favor!" I gazed at him in astonishment. "Then what about us poor
mortals?"
"Well, don't you see, my dear boy, that God is Eternity Itself? To
assume that one can fully know Him by forty-five years of meditation is rather
a preposterous expectation. Babaji assures us, however, that even a little
meditation saves one from the dire fear of death and after-death states. Do not
fix your spiritual ideal on a small mountain, but hitch it to the star of
unqualified divine attainment. If you work hard, you will get there."
Enthralled by the prospect, I asked him for further enlightening
words. He related a wondrous story of his first meeting with Lahiri Mahasaya's
guru, Babaji.3 Around midnight Ram Gopal fell into silence, and I lay down on
my blankets. Closing my eyes, I saw flashes of lightning; the vast space within
me was a chamber of molten light. I opened my eyes and observed the same
dazzling radiance. The room became a part of that infinite vault which I beheld
with interior vision.
"Why don't you go to sleep?"
"Sir, how can I sleep in the presence of lightning, blazing whether
my eyes are shut or open?"
"You are blessed to have this experience; the spiritual radiations
are not easily seen." The saint added a few words of affection.
At dawn Ram Gopal gave me rock candies and said I must depart. I
felt such reluctance to bid him farewell that tears coursed down my cheeks.
"I will not let you go empty-handed." The yogi spoke tenderly. "I
will do something for you."
He smiled and looked at me steadfastly. I stood rooted to the
ground, peace rushing like a mighty flood through the gates of my eyes. I was
instantaneously healed of a pain in my back, which had troubled me
intermittently for years. Renewed, bathed in a sea of luminous joy, I wept no
more. After touching the saint's feet, I sauntered into the jungle, making my
way through its tropical tangle until I reached Tarakeswar.
There I made a second pilgrimage to the famous shrine, and
prostrated myself fully before the altar. The round stone enlarged before my
inner vision until it became the cosmical spheres, ring within ring, zone after
zone, all dowered with divinity.
I entrained happily an hour later for Calcutta. My travels ended,
not in the lofty mountains, but in the Himalayan presence of my Master.
1 Hand-played drums, used only for devotional music.
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2 One is reminded here of Dostoevski's observation: "A man who bows
down to nothing can never bear the burden of himself."
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3 See pp. 310-313.
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