I was desperate. I had been born into a well-to-do home, and was accustomed to Western conveniences, the American way of life, Western social and moral values. I had no reason to doubt that I could have a successful life by those standards. All my friends expected to achieve material success, to have good marriages, happy homes, a comfortable lifestyle in a well-to-do suburb. I lived in Scarsdale, New York, one of the wealthiest suburbs in America. I was miserable!
"What is it all for?" I kept asking myself. What is money but a burden, forcing one to earn more and more simply to keep afloat? What is marriage but bondage to ego fulfillment? What is a nice home but a glorified chicken coop where people wait for the butcher, death, to chop off their heads, pluck them clean, and put them in the oven? What can this world give me of happiness itself?
I looked about me and saw no one really happy. Worse still, I saw no one willing to face that all-important question: What is life's purpose? What is it all about?
In these pages I aim to show how a spiritual mission, regardless of its name and tenets, can be made to relate to the needs of all humanity.
Paramhansa Yogananda prophesied that some day the purpose of all religions would be accepted as being one and the same: Self-realization. Included in that understanding would be a sense of the nonsectarian fellow-ship of all truth seekers. His own mission, as he stated it, was above all to teach "the original teachings of Jesus Christ, and the original yoga teachings of Krishna." He stated, further, that he had come to unite all religions in an understanding of their sublime and high purpose. His mission, to show the underlying oneness of two great religions particularly, may therefore be seen as symbolic also, being meant to demonstrate the underlying oneness of all religions, for humanity everywhere seeks the same eventual fulfillment: bliss in God. Self-realization-the realization of God as the indwelling, blissful Self of all beings is then, in the broadest sense, the true goal of all religions, and is also the deepest desire in every human heart.
The great master in his teachings also drew to a focus countless truths that have been expressed diversely through the ages. He showed that the highest wisdom has always contained the same essential truths, the first of which is that all men are rays of the one Divine Light, and the second, that man's ultimate destiny is, of his own free will, to merge back into that Light.
For this reason, in my book Revelations of Christ, Proclaimed by Paramhansa Yogananda, I proposed that this highest truth be called "Sanaatan Dharma, the Eternal Religion," for in all the universe this cannot fail to be one, supreme truth: union with God, the fundamental reality of all existence.
Yogananda presented a way of life that was unitive-one that would make spiritually relevant every aspect of human life: business and the art of self support generally; marriage; education; the fine arts; self expansion through service to others; and the supreme art of how to live happily in this body.
Finally, he proposed a lifestyle designed to enable people everywhere to incorporate their varied pursuits into a harmonious, God-centered existence. Through the years that he taught in the West, he urged his audiences to adopt this life-style by gathering together and forming what he called "world brotherhood colonies." I was blessed by him to be able to found the first Ananda World-Brotherhood community, in 1968, on what are today some 1,000 acres of land near Nevada City, California. At present there are seven functioning examples of this ideal, all bearing the name, Ananda, in various parts of the world.
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