Introduction
Oftentimes over the years I have been taught by the spiritual masters from their books and their spirits. This has often been with masters who are in Spirit at the time of reading. They are great spiritual masters whose power of love can overcome the barriers of time and dimension. They connect with me through my heart.
I have often felt that these understandings and experiences are beyond my pay grade. They have furthered and deepened my understandings, but perhaps also I can bring some of what they teach into modern awareness. This is my goal here. So, I attempt to pass on some of what I have been taught in case it is helpful to anyone else.
The most notable examples have been with Paramahansa Yogananda, Sri Yukeswar, Sri Ramakrishna. You will notice that each of these great masters were born in India. This is no coincidence. India has provided the world with a priceless contribution. They moved the world from the idea of God as a theological concept, to an actual personal experience of God.
In the words of Yogananda
India’s priceless contribution to the world, discovered anciently by her rishis, is the science of religion -yoga, “divine union” -by which God can be known, not as a theological concept but as an actual personal experience. Of all scientific knowledge, the yoga science of God realization is of the highest value to man, for it strikes at the root-cause of all human maladies:
What is the Aum/Om Vibration?
Chanting intoning the Aum sound can be a powerful way to reconnect oneself with one’s spiritual essence. I am told the pitch of it is 108Hz. Yet it is so much more than this.
Experiencing the aum vibration
It happened on an ordinary day, I had just dropped the children off at school and returned home. My husband was meditating so I went quietly upstairs to our bedroom and sat down on the side of the bed. I took a breath. I felt relaxed and comfortable.
My mind drifted to the subject of the book I was reading by Paramahansa Yogananda about the life of Jesus. I was reflecting on the time Jesus spent in India. I remembered that his disciple John had set up an ashram on the West coast of India after Jesus’s death. For some reason I felt a strong connection to the energy of this place, I imagined the sea and felt the sun, a beach. I felt deeply connected to it and was enjoying a moment of tranquility and peace. My mind was relaxed as I sat there.
After a few moments I noticed a white mist in the air in front of me, just to my right. This was barely conscious as it had no significance to me, and I paid no attention to it. However, I fell into a deep state of consciousness. Something in me must have opened up and I could literally hear the aum vibration fully and clearly all around me, through me and resonating through all the hearts of every living person on the planet.
Is the Aum/Om Vibration a sound?
My brother asked me some time afterwards whether it was a sound, and that is a good question. I would say it is indeed a sound, or at least that was my experience of it, but not a sound that we hear with our physical ears as these are tuned to receive the vibrations of the material world around us. I experienced it as like a sound as it was vibrating through my whole body. It was centered around my heart. It was a sound vibration that was coming from all our hearts, I could feel clearly that every human heart on this dear planet makes this sound. We are making it all the time. This is the primordial sound, the sound of creation.
The feeling was exquisite, incredible, beautiful as I felt every heart making this sound and I could see it reaching from every heart even far, far away. It is truly who we are, our connection to spirit. It emanates from our hearts as this is our connection to God/Spirit. We exist mostly on the higher dimensions of time and space, but the part of us that is here in this play of light and sound, harks back to our essential Soul essence, our true self which we are connected to through our heart chakra.
Sharing the Aum Vibration
I sat in this grace for a long time until I wanted to share it with my husband, to get him to feel it too. I wasn’t sure if I moved whether it would disappear, but I found I could move my arms and stand up and it stayed with me, ringing in my heart and ears and whole body. I went downstairs to find my husband finished meditating. I took his hands so that he would feel it too, but he could not. Tears flowed from my eyes freely as I wanted to share this feeling. He could see and feel different aura around me. I bent down to hug him where he sat, feeling my whole energy body sparkling with peace and gentleness. He hugged me and as he did so it was the hug of darshan. I could feel God/spirit in him. It felt different. But it was of course me who had changed, now able to feel the God in him. We are all the same in spirit, even as the masters when we learn to access our true being.
Yogananda Explains the Aum Vibration
Later that night, when I picked up my book to read, I came to the next chapter- the aum vibration. According to Yogananda this sound comes from our hearts, it is the base note, our creation note, the tone we all make as we are here in this dimension. It is the sound of Spirit, the song that comes from our hearts at every moment unconsciously for most of us. It comes from our heart as this is our connection to creation, to our life here, our connection to Spirit, the part of us that remains there always. The eternal spirit within us all makes this sound, it is the sound of our creation here in this material reality.
In this book Yogananda explains the connection between his spiritual traditions and the teachings of Christ. He explained that the white mist that I had seen is the sign of the Holy Spirit. It was the holy spirit that had entered me for a short while so that I could feel/hear the aum vibration and understand.
The Aum Vibration in the Bible
The aum vibration unites us all, it is what Jesus was referring to when he spoke of the ‘the Word, and the word was with God’. ‘The word’ is the sound of the creative force, the primordial sound, the sound created by all our hearts all the time. It is the sound our eternal self/God self makes whilst we are in this material reality. It is this god self that creates our lives and all that is in them. Aum is the word and the word is with God.
When I gave a copy of the book to a family member the following Christmas, Yogananda made an appearance in the room. Tall and powerful and beautiful, gentle and strong, blessing all of us. Thank you Yogananda!
Further Reading:
Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952) came from long lineage of great spiritual masters. Matavatar Babaji was his spiritual ancestor through Lahiri Maharishi. Maharishi was the guru of Swami Sri Yukteswar, and Sri Yukteswar was the guru of Yogananda. Yagananda says of his guru that he was often to be found floating several feet above the ground*.
It was Yogananda’s mission to bring the spiritual traditions of the East to the West where he lived for the second half of his life. The true meaning of Yoga is ‘divine union’. Yogananda is recognized as ‘the father of Yoga’ in the West.
The book referred to in this passage is ‘The yoga of Jesus’, a compilation of Yogananda’s writings about the life of Jesus.
In his book Autobiography of a Yogi he gives a touching insight into his inner life and early experiences. This book became popular in the 1960s accompanying a burgeoning of spiritual interest in the west, however it is as relevant now as it ever was as more and more of us are opening up to the Spirit within.
There is a beautiful movie called ‘Awake – The Life of Yogananda’.
He has written many books, most notably the series ‘The Second Coming of Christ – The Resurrection of the Christ Within You’.
