SWAMI KRIYANANDA TURNS 86
At a time when youth seems more glorified than ever in our culture, it’s comforting to know that deep, meaningful connections to our past are still in our midst in such venerable individuals as Swami Kriyananda. A renowned spiritual leader in his own right for the last 60 years, Swamiji, who just turned 86 last month, is one of the last living direct disciples of Paramhansa Yogananda, the legendary spiritual luminary who brought yoga to the West in the 1920s. Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, originally published in 1946, is one of the biggest selling spiritual books in the Western world. It has sold more than five million copies worldwide.
In 1948, Swami Kriyananda (then known as J. Donald Walters) read Autobiography of a Yogi, at his home in New York. “The book changed my life,” recalls Swamiji. “After reading it, I took virtually the first bus to California. My first words on meeting him [in Los Angeles], were, ‘I want to be your disciple.’ He accepted me, and I’ve been following him ever since.”
J. Donald Walters was born in Romania to American parents and spent the first 15 years of his life in Europe. Walters attended school in Switzerland and England but home was still Romania. The family returned to the US in 1941, and in 1948, his father, an oil geologist for Esso, was sent to Egypt to explore for oil.
That was the year that Walters met Yogananda. He’d had no background whatsoever in spiritual studies. “My search had been mental,” Kriyananda recalled in a recent interview. “I had been intensely seeking Truth, which I finally came to identify as God. I wanted to go to some jungle, perhaps in South America, and live there in seclusion as a hermit.” However, Autobiography of a Yogi found its way into his hands in a Fifth Avenue bookstore the very day he put his mother on a ship to join his father in Egypt, leaving him plenty of time to pursue his own interests.
Walters had come to realize that he needed help, but he’d never met anyone whose help he wanted. As soon as he read Autobiography, he knew, “This is the man!”
In Los Angeles, Walters moved into Yogananda’s ashram on Mt. Washington, where it still houses present-day disciples. Days were filled with meditation, exercise, work, meals … and then more meditation, exercise, work and meals. He describes his earliest experiences with Yogananda as “fantastic! He was extremely charismatic, loving, blissful, dynamic.”
Twenty-two years old at the time, Walters was studying to become a playwright and had no outside job. In the ashram, however, he was initially kept busy with jobs such as gardening, plastering and the like. Soon, though, “Yogananda put me into doing office work: answering letters, writing articles. Within a year, he put me in charge of the monks. He told me my life work would be lecturing, editing and writing. His instructions to me were mostly geared to what I was to do in the future, after he left the body.”
What was the yogic practice that Yogananda taught his disciples? According to Swamiji, “The whole thrust of yoga practice is to cooperate with divine grace.
For example, superconsciousness comes when the mind is completely centered in the forehead. Yoga teaches, therefore, to direct one’s energy consciously there. The main thing in spiritual practice is devotion—to awaken the heart’s natural love. Yoga teaches also, therefore, the importance of focusing the energy in the heart, which is the center of feeling in the body.”
Kriyananda believes that the Master’s impact on the world has only just begun, 60 years after his death. “He offered an entirely new approach to life,” he notes, “compatible with this new age of energy. He showed the basic oneness of all religions, with particular emphasis on Christ’s teachings and the teaching of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita.”
Swami Kriyananda has just published his own biography of Yogananda, Paramhansa Yogananda: A Biography—With Personal Reflections & Reminiscences, and it’s already been awarded the 2012 International Book Award for Best New Spirituality Book. The book features more than 60 stories about Yogananda’s life that have not been told until now—many of them stories that could only be told by someone who’d lived with the Master for the last three and a half years of his life.
“I have a very clear memory,” Kriyananda states. “I wrote the book in three weeks. It just flowed out.” Among these stories are revelations of Yogananda’s greatness. “He couldn’t write about his own greatness,” says Kriyananda. “I could.” Kriyananda was most impressed by his guru’s “love, his complete absence of ego, his deep wisdom and his bliss.”
Among the revelations in Swamiji’s new biography of Yogananda are some of the Master’s predictions for our time. “His predictions are not rosy,” says Kriyananda. “A great depression; world war; great suffering and deprivation, before a shining future in the New Age. One time in Hollywood Church he paused while talking of the need to get out into the country and create communities, and shouted, ‘You don’t know what a terrible cataclysm is coming!
Before leaving the body, Yogananda told his disciple, “'[You] have a great work to do.’ He made it very clear to me that he relied heavily on me to get his mission on the road.” As a result, Swami Kriyananda has indeed gotten out into the country and created communities. In 1969, he founded the Ananda Sangha, currently with a thousand members in nine live-in communities worldwide, and many thousands participating around the globe.
“We teach people how to meditate, and how to live,” he says. “Peace of mind; happiness; brotherhood; a spirit of cooperation.” Compared to 50 years ago, Swami Kriyananda finds today’s seekers “more earnest in their search for meaning in life.” … and the times we live in “exciting!”
“There is only one purpose in life,” says Swamiji: “to love God. Toward this end, we should love Him in all, serve Him in all, and cooperate always with His will.”
Swami Kriyananda will celebrate publication of his new biography of Yogananda at a free live event the evening of June 24 at the Ford Amphitheater in Los Angeles. He will be introduced by bestselling author and spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson. Read an excerpt from the new biography.
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