Yoga = "union" Ananda = "bliss"

                                                                      Yogananda

As a seventeen year-old high school student, I would frequently browse the biography section in our local library. Already, due to my reading of "Daybreak", the autobiography of Joan Baez, had read something of the Indian sage and liberator, Mahatma Gandhi, so I was interested in all things India. It was at this exact moment in time that I happened upon The Autobiography of a Yogi... hmm, I thought as I pulled it from the shelf...

My "hmm" turned out to be a life-long interest and, one might say, a life-long passion as well. Mahatma Gandhi wrote and spoke and lived as if there was no doubt that God was real... And having been raised on Billy Graham sermons and summons on broadcast television, God was an easy assent for me. But this Hindu stuff was wild! The Saint With Two Bodies, A "Perfume Saint", The Tiger Swami, The Levitating Saint, and the Blissful Devotee and His Cosmic Romance, colored the first eighty-two pages of the Autobiography... and then on into Yogananda's years in his Master's hermitage, experiences in cosmic consciousness, an outline of Kriya Yoga, and Yogananda's years of teaching in the West and his eventual founding of the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles, California... Autobiography of a Yogi has been on my bookshelf for all these many years: I keep multiple copies in case someone who visits might have an interest...

And just two days ago, another African-American man was murdered on the street just forty-five minutes from my home here in River Falls... perhaps you've seen the video of the killing? It is stunning and difficult to comprehend: the utter and complete opposite of either "union" or of "bliss"... When he became a monk of the ancient Swami Order, Yogananda chose that exact name as his own: with the intention of promoting and of teaching the genuine possibility of reaching that condition of being: a living union which facilitates bliss...

​Of course, African-Americans arrived on these shores in the cargo holds of slave ships: those first slaves and their descendants built the economic wealth of the Southern States and contributed mightily to the over-all wealth and advancement of the entire United States: but, obviously, we are not yet united... Racism continues to raise its ugly head everywhere in this country: now even encouraged by a racist President: as if this is normal! As if centuries of injustice and oppression are the natural order of things! The police "officer" who killed his victim, in photographs of him in his spare time, wore a hat stating matter-of-factly Make Whites Great Again...

What has Yogananda have to do with murder on the streets of Minneapolis? Factually, a lot! Yogananda visited in Minneapolis and established a small church community in the City... One could also say that the murder also involved St. Francis, St. Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesus Christ as well... and, of course, our nation's founders like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and other Presidents like Lincoln and Roosevelt: in fact, we are all involved in this latest killing in Minneapolis! Yeah. You read that right!

We are all involved precisely because we have failed to hold each other accountable to our national and faith ideals! Collectively, we shit on the very idea of America and the Face of Jesus Christ by our absolute refusal to create the conditions necessary for "union" and "bliss" to became fact instead of "religion" and "politics". WE elect a white nationalist idiot to the White House. WE segregate whenever we pray. WE lock up children in cages. WE rape and pillage the environment solely for profit. WE have more guns on our shores than people. WE sell billions of dollars of weapons to scoundrels all over the world. And WE give vapid lip-service to whichever interpretation of the Divine that pleases us...

On the other hand: it is not yet too late! It is not yet too late for a change of heart and mind! We can change! We can open our hearts and our hands to become lovers and givers rather than deceivers and takers. We can build, with intention and imagination, new communities of sacred activists to help with facilitating, however bizarre it might sound, a loving-one-another revolution... We need to really realize that mothers caring for their children is the norm. That fathers playing ball with their kids is the norm. That uniting in faith and service is the norm. That empathy is what we have been wired for. That equality is a happy thing. That diversity is reason for celebration. That kindness matters above all else. That justice and peace is everyone's moral imperative. That regenerating the Planet is our sacred obligation. It is not yet too late for this Love rEvolution!

Dear Yogananda, Francis, Rumi, Siddhartha, Hildegard, Dorothy, and Saints of all Religions, pray for us! And may all the artists, singers, musicians, dancers, film makers, lovers, doubters, bohemians, scientists, doctors, teachers, daily-grind workers, and imagineers light up our minds with a daily passion for possibilities as yet unimagined!