A PILGRIMAGE TO RISHIKESH
Swami Sivananda Saraswati (1887 - 1963)
Just up the hill from our ashram is the ashram of Swami Sivananda Saraswati. His teachings drew upon all the formal doctrines of yoga. Sivananda was a medical doctor before renouncing worldly life for the spiritual path. During his lifetime he authored of over three hundred books on yoga, based not on theory but his own personal experience. I would highly recommend them; they are thorough, accurate and extremely well written. Sivananda’s main philosophical message was: “Serve, Love, Give, Purify, Meditate, Realize. Be Good, Do good; Be kind, Be compassionate. Enquire 'Who am I?' Know the Self and be Free.” On the walls of the temple this message was summarised to “Be Good. Do Good.”
Sivananda Saraswati does not ask you to give up your home, wealth and job, and to escape into a cave or jungle. Instead he assures us that it is possible to attain divinity while living in our present surroundings and discharging all our worldly duties. He assures us that the yogi who keeps up meditation while performing actions is a powerful yogi indeed.
Speaking about the researches of Sir Oliver Lodge Sivananda Saraswati he wrote “To the student of Eastern philosophy, bred and brought up in the sacred scriptures of India, the existence of a soul and its transmigrations are only the beginning of his philosophy. To the West it has come to be almost the end of their researches till now…. Modern spiritualism has given wonderful demonstrations regarding the existence of disembodied spirits who continue to live even after the dissolution of their gross physical bodies. This has opened the eyes of the rank-materialists of the West and the atheists.”
He does however also warn of the apparent dangers of mediumship because he says our focus is on the Spirit world and not, as it should be, on the quest to find divine awareness. “No one should allow himself to become a medium,” writes Sivananda Saraswati. “The mediums have lost the power of self-control. Their vital energy, life-force and intellectual powers are used by the spirits which control them. The mediums do not gain any higher divine knowledge.”
He has a point and I too feel that many mediums forget that the goal in life is not the spirit world but awareness of our oneness with God. Perhaps Sivananda Saraswati never met mediums with spiritual aspirations? |
We visited the shrine in his ashram where mantras are still being chanted twenty four hours a day for the last fifty odd years. The monks take it in shifts. We had done a twenty four hour shift at the Yoga Centre in Southampton and this took quite an effort. When the India yogis say they’re going to do something, boy, do they deliver!
In the temple itself I became immersed in watching the auras of the monks and people worshiping. I have been able to see the aura all of my life and I still find it hard to understand why everyone cannot see it for to me it is self evident. Most people in the temple had normal auras but my eye was drawn to one monk who was immersed in meditation. Around his crown chakra, at the top of his head, I could see a red circle of light slowly turning. I had the felt he was visualising the dance of Shiva and was practicing an energy moving Kriya of some kind.
Unfortunately circumstances did not allow me to talk to the monk and find out but during our stay we were able to meet two interesting people. One was the sitar player Hari Khrishna Sha who played for us during the night in our dining area on the banks of the Ganges. He explained how to listen to the ragas and how the musical scale of Indian music corresponds to the sounds of the chakras. (Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha and Ni.) As we listened to his exquisite music we allowed the music to literally dance up and down our spine.
Continue The Pilgrimage ...
NEXT: Mataji Vanamali |
