Awaken to Superconsciousness by Swami Kriyananda (J. Donald Walters)

Author:Swami Kriyananda (J. Donald Walters)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crystal Clarity Publishers

Footnotes

* I’ve mentioned the Bhagavad Gita (Lord’s Song) before. The popularity of this scripture is well justified, for no other text so clearly and beautifully expresses the essence of the far more ancient scriptures, the Vedas. The language of the Vedas, owing to their extreme antiquity, is often so abstruse that few scholars, even, have been able to penetrate its mysteries. Many of the words have changed so greatly in meaning that the significance of whole passages has been lost. To have faith in the authority of the Vedas today requires faith, first, in the testimonial of great masters, particularly those who lived close to those times and who were familiar with the ancient modes of expression. One such teacher was the adhi (first) Swami Shankaracharya. His praise of those scriptures goes a long way toward refuting modern scholars who see in the Vedas only rustic hymns depicting a tribal way of life.

Swami Bharati Krishna Tirtha, the Jagadguru Shankaracharya (a spiritual descendant of adhi Shankaracharya) of Gowardhan Math, a man accepted by many as the supreme authority within Hindu orthodoxy, stated that it was only after a prolonged study of ancient lexicons that he was able to unravel the meaning of certain texts in the Vedas relating to mathematics. The swami himself was also a mathematician, and was deeply interested in what the Vedas had to say on the subject. Yet the text before him posed seemingly insurmountable difficulties.

“In the reign of King Kamsa,” it said, “there was famine, pestilence, and bloodshed.” (This is an approximation of the quote; I do not recall it exactly.) What on earth, he wondered, could these words have to do with mathematics? Then he discovered archaic meanings that clarified the passage and showed it actually to be a highly sophisticated mathematical formula.

Sri Aurobindo, a saint of modern India, discovered during a similar study that the word “cow” in the Vedas didn’t refer to cows at all, but to the spiritual light. “Horses,” similarly, was a reference to spiritual power. Both words had acquired secondary meanings, and subsequently had lost their first meanings.

A story is told in the Vedas of a certain young man (thus the story reads in modern editions) who was instructed by his guru, to whom he’d gone for initiation, to go off by himself with a small herd of cattle. When the size of the herd had increased sufficiently, he was to return and receive enlightenment.

The actual meaning of the story is that when the young man went to his guru, the guru initiated him into the inner light. He then told the disciple to go off by himself and increase the strength of that light by deepening meditation until he was ready for full initiation and enlightenment. At that time, he was to return to the guru for the touch of ecstasy.

* The word zen has its roots in yoga tradition. It evolved out of the Sanskrit word dhyan, which means “meditation.” Dhyan is the seventh stage of Patanjali’s eight stages to enlightenment.

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