The Resurrection of Sri Yukteswar

THE RESURRECTION OF SHRI YUKTESHVAR. by parahamsa yogananda the resurrection of shri yukteswar lord krishna the glorious form of the avatar appeared in a shimmering blaze as i sat in my room at the regent hotel in bombay building across the street, the ineffable vision had suddenly burst on my sight as I gazed out of my long open third-story window. The divine figure waved to me, smiling and nodding in greeting. When I could not understand the exact message of Lord Krishna, he departed with a gesture of blessing.

Wonderously uplifted, I felt that some spiritual event was presaged. My western voyage had, for the time being, been cancelled. I was scheduled for several public addresses in Bombay before leaving on a return visit to Bengal. Sitting on my bed in the Bombay Hotel at three o'clock in the afternoon of June 1936, one week after the vision of Krishna, I was roused from my meditation by a beatific light. Before my open and astonished eyes the whole room was transformed into a strange world, the sunlight transmuted into supernal splendour.

Waves of rapture engulfed me, as I beheld the flesh and blood form of Sri Yukteswar. My son, master spoke tenderly, on his face an angel-bewitching smile. For the first time in my life I did not kneel at his feet in greeting, but instantly advanced to gather him hungrily in my arms. Moment of moments moments the anguish of past months was toll i have blamed myself for leaving you i did not want to interfere with your happy anticipation met Babaji. I left you only for a little while.

Am I not with you again? But is it you, master, the same lion of God? Are you wearing a body like the one I buried beneath the cruel Puri sands? Yes, my child, I am the same. This is a flesh-and-blood body, though i see it as ethereal to your sight it is physical from the cosmic atoms i created an entirely new body the dream sands at Puri in your dream world. I am in truth resurrected, not on earth, but on an astral planet. Its inhabitants are better able than earthly humanity to meet my lofty standards.

There you and your exalted loved ones shall some day come to be with me deathless guru tell me more master give a quick mirthful chuckle please dear one he said won't you relax your hold a little only a little embracing him with an octopus grip i could detect the same faint fragrant natural odor which had been characteristic of his body before the thrilling touch of his divine flesh still persists around the inner sides of my arms and in my palms whenever I recall those glorious hours.

As prophets are sent on earth to help men work out their physical karma, so I have been directed by God to serve on an astral planet as a saviour. Sri Yukteswar explained, it is called Hiranyaloka, or Illuminated Astral Planet. There I am aiding advanced beings to rid themselves of astral karma, and thus attain liberation from astral rebirths. The dwellers on Hiranyaloka are highly developed spiritually. All of them had acquired in their last earth incarnation the meditation-given power of consciously leaving their physical bodies at death. No one can enter Hiranyaloka unless he has passed on earth beyond the state of Savikalpa Samadhi into the higher state of Nirbikalpa Samadhi.

The Hiranyaloka inhabitants have already passed through the ordinary astral spheres, where nearly all beings from earth must go at death. There they worked out many seeds of their past actions in the astral worlds. None but advanced beings can perform such redemptive work effectually in the astral worlds. Then, in order to free their souls more fully from the cocoon of karmic traces lodged in their astral bodies, these higher beings are drawn by cosmic law to be reborn with new astral bodies in Hiranyaloka, the astral sun or heaven where I have resurrected to help them.

There are also highly advanced beings on Hiranyaloka who have come from the superior, subtler, causal world. My mind was now in such perfect attunement with my gurus that he was conveying his word-pictures to me partly by speech and partly by thought-transference. I was thus quickly receiving his idea-tabloids. You have read in the Scriptures, Master went on, that God encased the human soul successively in three bodies, the idea, or causal body, the subtle, astral body, seat of man's mental and emotional natures, and the gross physical body.

On earth a man is equipped with his physical senses. An astral being works with his consciousness and feelings and a body made of lifetrons a causal bodied being remains in the blissful realm of ideas my work is with those astral beings who are preparing to enter the causal world adorable master please tell me more about the astral cosmos. Though I had slightly relaxed my embrace at Sri Yukteswar's request, my arms were still around him. Treasure beyond all treasures, my guru who had laughed at death to reach me.

There are many astral planets, teeming with astral beings, Master began. The inhabitants use astral planes, or masses of light, to travel from one planet to another, faster than electricity and radioactive energies. The astral universe, made of various subtle vibrations of light and color, is hundreds of times larger than the material cosmos. The entire physical creation hangs like a little solid basket under the huge luminous balloon of the astral sphere. Just as many physical suns and stars roam in space, so there are also countless astral solar and stellar systems.

Their planets have astral suns and moons more beautiful than the physical ones. The astral luminaries resemble the aurora borealis the sunny astral aurora being more dazzling than the mild-rayed moon aurora the astral day and night are longer than those of earth beautiful, clean, pure, and orderly. There are no dead planets or barren lands. The terrestrial blemishes—weeds, bacteria, insects, snakes—are absent. Unlike the variable climates and seasons of the earth, the astral planets maintain the even temperature of an eternal spring, with occasional luminous white snow and rain of many coloured lights.

Astral planets abound in opal lakes and bright seas and rainbow rivers. The ordinary astral universe, not the subtler astral heaven of Hiranyaloka, is peopled with millions of astral beings who have come, more or less recently, from the earth, and also with myriads of fairies, mermaids, fishes, animals, goblins, gnomes, demigods, and spirits, all residing on different astral planets in accordance with karmic qualifications. Various spheric mansions or vibratory regions are provided for good and evil spirits. Good ones can travel freely, but the evil spirits are confined to limited zones in the same way that human beings live on the surface of the earth worms inside the soil fish in water and birds in air suitable vibratory quarters.

Among the fallen dark angels expelled from other worlds, friction and war take place with lifetronic bombs or mental mantric vibratory rays. These beings dwell in the gloom-drenched regions of the lower astral cosmos, working out their evil karma. In the vast realms above the dark astral prison, all is shining and beautiful. The astral cosmos is more naturally attuned than the earth to the divine will and plan of perfection. Every astral object is manifested primarily by the will of God, and partially by the will-call of astral beings.

They possess the power of modifying or enhancing the grace and form of anything already created by the Lord. He has given his astral children the freedom and privilege of changing or improving at will the astral cosmos. On earth a solid must be transformed into liquid or other form through natural or chemical processes, but astral solids are changed into astral liquids, gases, or energy solely and instantly by the will of the inhabitants. The earth is dark with warfare and murder in the sea, land, and air, my guru continued, but the astral realms know a happy harmony and equality.

Astral beings dematerialize or materialize their forms at will. Flowers or fish or animals can metamorphose themselves for a time into astral men. All astral beings are free to assume any form, and can easily commune together. No fixed definite natural law hems them round any astral tree, for example example can be successfully asked to produce an astral mango or other desired fruit flower or indeed any other object certain karmic restrictions are present but there are no distinctions in the astral world about desirability of various forms. Everything is vibrant with God's creative light.

No one is born of woman. Offspring are materialized by astral beings through the help of their cosmic will into specially patterned, astrally condensed forms. The recently physically disembodied being arrives in an astral family through invitation, drawn by similar mental and spiritual tendencies. The astral body is not subject to cold or heat or other natural conditions. The anatomy includes an astral brain or the thousand petaled lotus of light and six awakened centres in the shushumna the astral brain and pumps it to the astral nerves and body cells, or lifetrons.

Astral beings can affect their bodies by lifetronic force or by mantric vibrations. The astral body is an exact counterpart of the last physical form. Astral beings retain the same appearance which they possessed in youth in their previous earthly sojourn. Occasionally, an astral being chooses, like myself, to retain his old age appearance, master, emanating the very essence of youth, chuckled merrily. Unlike the spatial, three-dimensional physical world cognized only by the five senses, the astral spheres are visible to the all-inclusive sixth sense intuition, Sriukteswar went on by sheer intuition feeling all astral eye, vertically placed on the forehead, is open.

Astral beings have all the outer sensory organs, ears, eyes, nose, tongue, and skin, but they employ the intuitional sense to experience sensations through any part of the body. They can see through the ear or nose or skin, they are able to hear through the eyes or tongue, and can taste through the ears or skin and so forth. Man's physical body is exposed to countless dangers, and is easily hurt or maimed. The ethereal astral body may occasionally be cut or bruised, but is healed at once by mere willing.

Guru Deva, are all astral persons beautiful? Beauty in the astral world is known to be a spiritual quality and not an outward conformation, Sri Yukteswar replied. Astral beings, therefore, attach little importance to facial features. They have the privilege, however, of costuming themselves at will with new, colourful, astrally materialised bodies, just as worldly men don new arrayful gala events. So, astral beings find occasions to bedeck themselves in specially designed forms. Joyous astral festivities on the higher astral planets, like Hiranyaloka, take place when a being is liberated from the astral world through spiritual advancement, and is therefore ready to enter the heaven of the causal world.

On such occasions, the invisible heavenly Father and the saints who are merged in him materialize themselves into bodies of their own choice, and join the astral celebration. In order to please his beloved devotee, the Lord takes any desired form. If the devotee worshipped through devotion, he sees God as the Divine Mother to Jesus. The father aspect of the Infinite One was appealing beyond other conceptions. The individuality with which the Creator has endowed each of His creatures makes every conceivable and inconceivable demand on the Lord's versatility.

My guru and I laughed happily together. Friends of other lives easily recognize one another in the astral world, Sri Yukteswar went on, in his beautiful flute-like voice. Rejoicing at the immortality of friendship, they realize the indestructibility of love, often doubted at the time of the sad delusive partings of earthly life. The intuition of astral beings pierces through the veil and observes human activities on earth. But man cannot view the astral world unless his sixth sense is somewhat developed. Thousands of earth-dwellers have momentarily glimpsed an astral being or an astral world.

The advanced beings on Hiranyaloka remain mostly awake in ecstasy during the long astral day and night, helping to work out intricate problems of cosmic government and the redemption of prodigal sons, earth-bound souls. When the Hiranyaloka beings sleep, they have occasional dreamlike astral visions. Their minds are usually engrossed in the conscious state of the highest nirvikalpa bliss. Inhabitants in all parts of the astral worlds are still subject to mental agonies. The sensitive minds of the higher beings on planets like Hiranyaloka, feel keen pain if any mistake is made in conduct or perception of truth.

These advanced beings endeavour to attune their every act and thought with the perfection of spiritual law. Communication among the astral inhabitants is held entirely by astral telepathy and television. There is none of the confusion and misunderstanding of the written and spoken word which earth-dwellers must endure. Just as persons on the cinema screen appear to move and act through a series of light pictures, and do not actually breathe. So the astral beings walk and work as intelligently guided and coordinated images of light, without the necessity of drawing power from oxygen.

Man depends upon solids liquids gases and energy for sustenance astral beings sustain themselves principally by cosmic light master mine do astral beings eat anything i was drinking in his marvellous elucidations with the receptivities of all my faculty's mind heart soul super-conscious perceptions of truth are permanently real and changeless while fleeting sense experiences and impressions or relatively true, and soon lose in memory all their vividness. My guru's words were so penetratingly imprinted on the parchment of my being, that at any time, by transferring my mind to the superconscious state, I can clearly relive the divine experience.

Luminous, ray-like vegetables abound in the astral soils, he answered. The astral beings consume vegetables and drink a nectar flowing from glorious fountains of light and from astral brooks and rivers, just as invisible images of persons on the earth can be dug out of the ether and made visible by a television apparatus, later being dismissed again into space, so the God-created unseen astral blueprints of vegetables and plants floating in the ether are precipitated on an astral planet by the will of its inhabitants. In the same way, from the wildest fancy of these beings, whole gardens of fragrant flowers are materialized, returning later to the etheric invisibility.

Although dwellers on the heavenly planets, like Hiranyaloka, are almost freed from any necessity of eating, still higher is the unconditioned existence of almost completely liberated souls in the causal world, who eat nothing save the manna of bliss. The earth-liberated astral being meets a multitude of relatives, fathers, mothers, wives, husbands, and friends, acquired during different incarnations on earth, as they appear from time to time in various parts of the astral realms. He is therefore at a loss to understand whom to love especially. He learns in this way to give a divine and equal love to all, as children and individualized expressions of god though the outward appearance of loved ones may have changed more or less according to the development of new qualities in the latest life of any particular soul the astral being employs his unerring intuition to recognize all those once dear to him in other planes of existence, and to welcome them to their new astral home.

Because every atom in creation is inextinguishably dowered with individuality, an astral friend will be recognized no matter what costume he may don, even as on earth an actor's identity is discoverable by close observation despite any disguise. The span of life in the astral world is much longer than on earth. A normal advanced astral being's average life period is from five hundred to one thousand years measured in accordance with earthly standards of time as certain redwood trees outlive most trees by millenniums or as some yogis live several hundred years though most men die before the age of sixty, so some astral beings live much longer than the usual span of astral existence.

Visitors to the astral world dwell there for a longer or shorter period in accordance with the weight of their physical karma, which draws them back to earth within a specified time. The astral being does not have to contend painfully with death at the time of shedding his luminous body. Many of these beings nevertheless feel slightly nervous at the thought of dropping their astral form for the subtler causal one. The astral world is free from unwilling death, disease, and old age. These three dreads are the curse of earth, where man has allowed his consciousness to identify itself almost wholly with a frail physical body requiring constant aid from air, food and sleep in order to exist at all.

Physical death is attended by the disappearance of breath and the disintegration of fleshy cells. Astral death consists of the disbursement of lifetrons, those manifest units of energy which constitute the life of astral beings. At physical death a being loses his consciousness of flesh and becomes aware of his subtle body in the astral world. Experiencing astral death in due time, a being thus passes from the consciousness of astral birth and death to that of physical birth and death. These recurrents of astral and physical encasement are the inelictable destiny of all unenlightened beings.

Scriptural definitions of heaven and hell sometimes stir man's deeper than subconscious memories of his long series of experiences in the blithesome astral and disappointing terrestrial worlds. Beloved Master, I asked, will you please describe more in detail the difference between rebirth on the earth and in the astral and causal spheres? Man, as an individualized soul, is essentially causal-bodied, my guru explained. That body is a matrix of the thirty-five ideas required by God as the basic or causal thought-forces from which He later formed the subtle astral body of nineteen elements and the gross physical body of sixteen elements.

The nineteen elements of the astral body are mental, emotional, and lifetronic. The nineteen components are intelligence, ego, feeling, mind, sense-consciousness, five instruments of knowledge, the subtle counterparts of the senses of sight, smell taste touch five instruments of action the mental correspondence whose empowered to perform the crystallizing, assimilating, eliminating, metabolizing, and circulating functions of the body. This subtle astral encasement of nineteen elements survives the death of the physical body, which is made of sixteen gross metallic and non-metallic elements. God thought out different ideas within himself, and projected them into dreams.

Lady Cosmic Dream thus sprang out decorated in all her colossal endless ornaments of relativity. In thirty-five thought categories of the causal body, God elaborated all the complexities of man's nineteen astral and sixteen physical counterparts. By condensation of vibratory forces, first subtle, then gross, he produced man's astral body, and finally his physical form. According to the law of relativity, by which the prime simplicity has become the bewildering manifold, the causal cosmos and causal body are different from the astral cosmos and astral body. The physical cosmos and physical body are likewise characteristically at variance with the other forms of creation.

The fleshy body is made of the fixed, objectified dreams of the Creator. The dualities are ever present on earth—disease and health, pain and pleasure, loss and gain. Human beings find limitation and resistance in three-dimensional matter. When man's desire to live is severely shaken by disease or other causes, death arrives. The heavy overcoat of the flesh is temporarily shed. The soul, however, remains encased in the astral and causal bodies. The adhesive force by which all three bodies are held together is desire. The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man's slavery.

Physical desires are rooted in egotism and sense pleasures. The compulsion or temptation of sensory experience is more powerful than the desire force connected with astral attachments or causal perceptions. Astral desires centre around enjoyment in terms of vibration. Astral beings enjoy the ethereal music of the spheres and are entranced by the sight of all creation as exhaustless expressions of changing light. The astral beings also smell, taste, and touch light. Astral desires are thus connected with an astral being's power to precipitate all objects and experiences as forms of light or as condensed thoughts or dreams.

Causal desires are fulfilled by perception only. The nearly free beings who are encased only in the causal body see the whole universe as realizations of the dream ideas of God. They can materialize anything and everything in sheer thought. Causal beings therefore consider the enjoyment of physical sensations or astral delights as gross and suffocating to the soul's fine sensibilities. Causal beings work out their desires by materializing them instantly. Those who find themselves covered only by the delicate veil of the causal body can bring universes into manifestation even as the creator.

Because all creation is made of the cosmic dream texture, the soul thinly clothed in the causal has vast realizations of power. A soul, being invisible by nature, can be distinguished only by the presence of its body or bodies. The mere presence of a body signifies that its existence is made possible by unfulfilled desires. So long as the soul of man is encased in one, two, or three body containers, sealed tightly with the corks of ignorance and desires, he cannot merge with the sea of spirit. When the gross physical receptacle is destroyed by the hammer of death, the other two coverings, astral and causal, still remain to prevent the soul from consciously joining the omnipresent life.

When desirelessness is attained through wisdom, its power disintegrates the two remaining vessels. The tiny human soul emerges, free at last. It is one with the measureless amplitude. I asked my divine guru to shed further light on the high and mysterious causal world. The causal world is indescribably subtle, he replied. In order to understand it, one would have to possess such tremendous powers of concentration that he could close his eyes and visualize the astral cosmos and the physical cosmos in all their vastness the luminous balloon with the solid basket as existing in ideas only if by this superhuman concentration one succeeded in converting or resolving the two cosmoses with all their complexities into sheer ideas he would then reach the causal world and stand on the border-line of fusion between mind and matter electricity, energy, all beings, gods, men, animals, plants, bacteria, as forms of consciousness.

Just as a man can close his eyes and realize that he exists, even though his body is invisible to his physical eyes and is present only as an idea, Whatever a human being can do in fancy, a causal being can do in reality. The most colossal imaginative human intelligence is able, in mind only, to range from one extreme of thought to another, to skip mentally from planet to planet, or tumble endlessly down a pit of eternity, or soar rocket-like into the galaxied canopy, or scintillate like a searchlight over milky ways and the starry spaces.

But beings in the causal world have a much greater freedom and can effortlessly manifest their thoughts into instant objectivity without any is the astral cosmos basically composed of lifetrons. Both, in reality, are created from the minutest particles of God-thought, chopped and divided by Maya, the law of relativity which intervenes to apparently separate the noumenon from his phenomena. Souls in the causal world recognize one another as individualized points of joyous spirit. Their thought-things are the only objects which surround them. Causal beings see the difference between their bodies and thoughts to be merely ideas As a man closing his eyes can visualize a dazzling white light or faint blue haze So causal beings by thought alone are able to see, hear, feel, taste and touch They create anything or dissolve it by the power of cosmic mind.

Both death and rebirth in the causal world are in thought. Causal-bodied beings feast only on the ambrosia of eternally new knowledge. They drink from the springs of peace, roam on the trackless soil of perceptions, swim in the ocean endlessness of bliss. Lo, see their bright thought-bodies zoom past trillions of spirit-created planets, fresh bubbles of universes, wisdom stars, spectral dreams of golden nebulae all over the sky-blue bosom of infinity. Many beings remain for thousands of years in the causal cosmos. By deeper ecstasies the freed soul then withdraws itself from the little causal body and puts on the vastness of the causal cosmos.

All the separate eddies of ideas, particularized waves of power, love, will, joy, peace, intuition, calmness, self-control, and concentration melt into the ever-joyous sea of bliss. No longer does the soul have to experience its joy as an individualized wave of consciousness, but is merged into the one cosmic ocean, with all its waves eternal laughter thrills throbs when a soul is out of the cocoon of the three bodies it escapes forever from the law of relativity and becomesence, its wings etched with stars and moons and suns, the soul expanded into spirit remains alone in the region of lightless light, darkless dark, thoughtless thought, intoxicated with the ecstasy of joy in God's dream of cosmic creation.

A free soul I ejaculated in awe. When a soul finally gets out of the three jars of bodily delusions, Master continued, it becomes one with the infinite without any loss of individuality. Christ had won this final freedom even before he was born as Jesus. In three stages of his past, symbolized in his earth-life as the three days of his experience of death and resurrection, he had attained the power to fully arise in spirit. The undeveloped man must undergo countless earthly and astral and causal incarnations in order to emerge from his three bodies.

A master who achieves this final freedom may elect to return to earth as a prophet, to bring other human beings back to God, or, like myself, he may choose to reside in the astral cosmos. There a saviour assumes some of the burden of the inhabitants' karma, and thus helps them to terminate their cycle of reincarnation in the astral cosmos and go on permanently to the causal spheres or a freed soul may Enter the causal world to aid its beings to shorten their span in the causal body and thus attain the absolute freedom Resurrected one I want to know more about the karma which forces souls to return to the three worlds.

I could listen for ever, I thought, to my omniscient master. Never in his earth-life had I been able at one time to assimilate so much of his wisdom. Now, for the first time, I was receiving a clear, definite insight into the enigmatic interspaces on the checkerboard of life and death. The physical karma or desires of man must be completely worked out before his permanent stay in the astral worlds become possible my guru elucidated in be classified after physical death as temporary go to the high causal sphere of cosmic ideas, but must shuttle to and fro from the physical and astral worlds only, conscious successively of their physical body of sixteen gross elements, and of their astral body of nineteen subtle elements.

After each loss of his physical body, however, an undeveloped being from the earth remains for the most part in the deep stupor of the death-sleep, and is hardly conscious of the beautiful astral sphere. After the astral rest such a man returns to the material plane for further lessons, gradually accustoming himself through repeated journeys to the worlds of subtle astral texture. Normal or long-established residents of the astral universe, on the other hand, are those who, freed forever from all material longings, need return no more to the gross vibrations of earth.

Such beings have only astral and causal karma to work out. At astral death these beings pass to the infinitely finer and more delicate causal world. Shedding the thought form of the causal body at the end of a certain span, determined by cosmic law, these advanced beings then return to Hiranyaloka, or a similar high astral planet, reborn in a new astral body to work out their unredeemed astral karma. My son, you may now comprehend more fully that I am resurrected by divine decree, Sri Yukteswar continued, as a saviour of astrally reincarnating souls coming back from the causal sphere, in particular rather than of those astral beings who are coming up from the earth.

Those from the earth, if they still retain vestiges of material karma, do not rise to the very high astral planets like Hiranyaloka. Just as most people on earth have not learned through meditation, acquired vision, to appreciate the superior joys and advantages of astral life, and thus, after death, desire to return to the limited, imperfect pleasures of earth, so many astral beings, during the normal disintegration of their astral bodies, fail to picture the advanced state of spiritual joy in the causal world, and, dwelling on thoughts of the more gross and gaudy astral happiness, yearn to revisit the astral paradise.

Heavy astral karma must be redeemed by such beings before they can achieve their has no further desires for experiences in the pleasing-to-the-eye astral cosmos, and cannot be tempted to go back there, does he remain in the causal world. Completing there the work of redeeming all causal karma or seeds of past desires, the confined soul thrusts out the last of the three corks of ignorance and, emerging from the final jar of the causal body, commingles with the eternal. Now do you understand? Master smiled so enchantingly. Yes, through your grace I am speechless with joy and gratitude.

Never from song or story had I ever received such inspiring knowledge. Though the Hindu scriptures refer to the causal and astral worlds and to man's three bodies, how remote and meaningless those pages compared with the warm authenticity of my resurrected master. For him, indeed, existed not a single undiscovered country from whose born no traveller returns. The interpretation of man's three bodies is expressed in many ways through his threefold nature, my guru went on. In the wakeful state on earth a human being is conscious, more or less, of his three vehicles.

When he is sensuously intent on tasting, smelling, touching, listening or seeing, he is working principally through his physical body visualizing or willing he is working mainly through his astral body or diving deep into introspection or meditation, the cosmical thoughts of genius come to the man who habitually contacts his causal body. In this sense, an individual may be classified broadly as a material man, an energetic man, or an intellectual man. A man identifies himself about sixteen hours daily in his physical vehicle. When he sleeps, if he dreams, he remains in his astral body, effortlessly creating any object, even as do the astral beings.

If man's sleep be deep and dreamless, for several hours he is able to transfer his consciousness or sense of I-ness to the causal body. Such sleep is revivifying. A dreamer is contacting his astral and not his causal body his sleep is not fully refreshing i had been lovingly observing shri yukteswar while he gave his wondrous exposition angelic guru i said your body looks exactly as it did when last i wept over it in the puri as. Oh yes, my new body is a perfect copy of the old one.

I materialise or dematerialise this form any time at will, much more frequently than I did while on earth. By quick dematerialisation I now travel instantly by light express from planet to planet or indeed from astral to causal or to physical cosmos my divine guru smiled days. I had no difficulty in finding you at Bombay. Oh, master, I was grieving so deeply about your death. Ah, wherein did I die? Isn't there some contradiction? Sri Yukteswar's eyes were twinkling with love and amusement. You were only dreaming on earth.

On that earth you saw my dream body, he went on. Later you buried that dream image. Now my finer, fleshy body, which you behold, and are even now embracing rather closely, is resurrected on another finer dream planet of God. Someday that finer dream body and finer dream planet will pass away. They too are not forever. All dream bubbles must eventually burst at a final wakeful touch. Differentiate, my son Yogananda, between dreams and reality. This idea of Vedantic resurrection struck me with wonder. I was ashamed that I had pitied Master when I had seen his lifeless body at Puri.

I comprehended at last that my Guru had always been fully awake in God, perceiving his own life and passing on earth, and his present resurrection, as nothing more than relatives of divine ideas in the cosmic dream. I have now told you, Yogananda, the truths of my life, death, and resurrection. Grieve not for me. Rather, broadcast everywhere the story of my resurrection, from the God-dreamed earth of men to another God-dreamed planet of astrally garbed souls. New hope will be infused into the hearts of misery-mad, death-fearing dreamers of the world.

Yes, Master, how willingly would I share with others my joy at his resurrection. On earth my standards were uncomfortably high, unsuited to the natures of most men. Often I scolded you more than I should have. You passed my test. Your love shone through the clouds of all reprimands, he added tenderly. I have also come to-day to tell you. Never again shall I wear the stern gaze of censure. I shall scold you no more. How much I had missed the chastisements of my great guru! Each one had been a guardian angel of protection.

Dearest master, rebuke me a million times. Do scold me now. I shall chide you no more his divine voice was grave yet with an undercurrent of laughter you and i shall smile together so long as our unified song of joy vibrating throughout eternity to be broadcast to god-tuned souls which I cannot reveal here. During the two hours that he spent with me in the Bombay hotel room, he answered my every question. A number of world prophecies uttered by him that June day in 1936 have already come to pass.

I leave you now, beloved one, at these words i felt master melting away within my encircling arms my child his voice rang out vibrating into my very soul permanent whenever you enter the door of nirvikalpa samadhi and call on me i shall come to you in flesh and blood even as to-day with this celestial promise shri yukteswar vanished from my sight the culpr realization that your earth is a dream of god can come to the finer dream-created planet of hiranyaloka and there for his death, long robber of my peace, now fled in stark shame.

Bliss poured forth like a fountain through endless, newly opened soul-pores, anciently clogged with disuse, they now widened in purity at the driving flood of ecstasy. Subconscious thoughts and feelings of my past incarnations shed their karmic taints, lustrously renewed by Sri Yukteswar's divine visit. In this chapter of my autobiography i have obeyed my guru's behest and spread the glad tiding though it confound once more an incurious generation is seldom alien yet these are perversities no part of man's true lot the day he wills he is set on the path to freedom too long has he hearkened to the dank pessimism of his counselors heedless of the unconquerable soul i was not the only one privileged to behold the resurrected guru one of sri yktishwa's chelas was an aged woman affectionately known as ma mother whose home was close to the pururi Hermitage.

Master had often stopped to chat with her during his morning walk. On the evening of March 16, 1936, Ma arrived at the ashram and asked to see her guru. Why, Master died a week ago, Swami Sevananda, now in charge of the puri hermitage looked at her sadly that's impossible she shook her head there is no grave for him this morning at ten o'clock he passed in his usual walk before my door i talked to him for several minutes bright outdoors. Come this evening to the ashram, he said.

I am here. Blessings pour on this old grey head. The deathless guru wanted me to understand in what transcendent body he had visited me this morning. The astounded Sabananda knelt before her ma he said what a weight of grief you lift from my heart he is risen chapter forty three