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All right, welcome, everyone. I’m so glad you guys could join us for our first virtual field trip of the semester. Today, we’re very lucky to be talking to Brother Monongah, who is a monk at the Self Realisation Fellowship in San Diego. So I know for many of you, it may be the first time you’re hearing about this tradition or learning about it. And I mentioned in the email and Marilyn said she’s also driven by it or she’s seen it before. So a lot of you may have seen the Self Realisation Fellowship campus up in Encinitas, but you might not have known about it before then. So really excited that we all get to learn more about this tradition. So welcome, everyone. Welcome, Brother Padma Ananda. And he’s going to tell us a little bit about the Self Realisation Fellowship. OK, I’m really happy to be meeting with you all.

I’ve been a monk and self realisation fellowship for about thirty one years, and I’m the minister in charge of our San Diego temple, which is on 1st Street, about a mile from University Avenue, maybe five minutes from Balboa Park. And I’m living right now at an ashram we have out in the country near Valley Center, which is near Lake Wellford. Some of you may be familiar with the area, and it’s our one country ashram. And every day I see deer and wild turkeys and rabbits and all kinds of wildlife and coyotes, and it’s very, very beautiful and peaceful out here. Our other options are more of a city environment. And has anyone been to the neatest gardens summarization fellowship or to the OK?

I want to talk with you about the teachings of our founder and our guru, paramountcy Yogananda, and we’ll have a question and answer afterwards. I’ll probably answer some of your questions as I’m talking. So I’ll give a maybe a 10 or 15 minute introduction and then we can have some question and answer. Is my audio good? Yeah. OK, so a little bit about myself. In nineteen seventy six, I was going to college at Southern Illinois University and I read Yogananda book, Autobiography of the Yogi and I was living a typical student college student life, you know, doing stuff that weren’t really healthy for me. And I just somehow knew that. Meditation was a way that could help me at that time. Meditation wasn’t very well known. And so I read The Autobiography of a Yogi, which is Yogananda autobiography, and I had the summer free. And so I went to California and I learned the meditation techniques that Yogananda taught and. I was I had incredible experiences during meditation, Yogananda teaches us that. That our nature and God’s nature is joy, love, peace, light and all these divine qualities, and when we meditate, we can have experiences of those that are much greater than miraculous experiences because we’re actually tapping into who we really are. So when I was practicing meditation techniques that summer, it was unbelievable the joy that I would feel at the end of my meditation, just sitting perfectly still with my eyes closed, not moving. And it was an overwhelming joy. And I wasn’t expecting that. And when I started meditating, I mean, I didn’t have a concept of God. It wasn’t what I was interested in. Yogananda says that God is joy. This light is love. And I’ll talk about that more in a minute. But when I had these experiences at one point, I remember thinking, OK, when I go back to college, if I try to tell my friends what I’ve been experiencing, they’re probably going to think I’m crazy. And then I thought, you know, maybe I am going crazy. And then I thought, I don’t care. It just feels so good and so right that I’m just going to keep doing it. And the meditation practice. We have to be very grounded and it’s also ancient yogic mystic discipline, so there is that balance between being grounded and really terrorizing and trying to go beyond the body and the mind. So Yogananda teaches us that our nature is joy, love, light, that’s God’s nature, and that’s why I was having those experiences. And centuries ago, the yogis discovered that there’s a link between our state of consciousness and our breathing. And when the mind is very restless, when we’re very emotional, the breath tends to get faster. And when the mind becomes very calm, when the body is very still, the breath becomes very quiet. And so they came up with meditation and concentration techniques whose purpose was to slow down the breath and to slow down the thoughts. And we can get to a point where everything becomes very, very still. The breath can even stop for periods of time during meditation. But during those still moments, we have an experience of our own self. And again, that’s why a person can experience the states of of love and joy when we practice meditation, because that’s who we are. I mean, we are human beings. We are these bodies. And so that’s really our nature. And anyone can do this. How many have tried some kind of meditation?

So most people. So it’s not anything new. For some years, I was stationed at our temple in Phoenix, Arizona. I was there for eight years and I remember newcomers there was sometimes come into the temple and all our centers and temples have pictures of Christ and Krishna and our line of masters on the altar and at our services. We talk often about quotes from the Bible and Yogananda, interpretation of them and also from the Bhagavad Gita. And they originally thought the same thing. They taught meditation when you really look deeply at it. And so people would come into the temple and they would ask me, OK, what are you? I mean, they would see a picture of Christ, a picture of Christ, not Krishna. And they ask, are you Christians or Hindus? And I would tell them, we’re yogis. We practice yoga, meditation, yoga means union. And so we practice a form of meditation whose goal is to unite us with our own self, with our own soul, with the infinite spirit. And we don’t practice the yoga postures so much. Almost all of us have practiced hatha yoga at some point, but we emphasize more of the meditation practice practice. And so if you go to one of our temples or centers, there’s always a period of meditation incorporated into the service. The talk is about meditation, but also how to apply spiritual teachings in our daily lives. And also one of the things that Yogananda brought was the idea of devotional chanting where? We sing together a very simple chat that’s meant to terrorize us. It’s not like traditional church singing where people are singing more as a performance and it’s more of a meditative practice joint. If you know what a harmonium is, it’s a it’s like a hand pump to read the instrument. You pump the bellows. It’s it’s portable. And they’re very common in India. They’ve become more common in the West. Has anybody heard of Christian Abess? OK, Christian. Does he really made popular the idea of chanting with our harmonium and hundreds of people will come together and chant very simple devotional chants and you can get into very deep meditative state just from chanting at our temples. You’ll see us leading chanting during covid. We haven’t been doing the chanting together just for safety. And we do meditate together. So Yogananda, he came to the US in 1920 and he started in Boston. He lived in Boston for about five years and then he moved to California and that’s where his work really took off and he bought centers or acquired centers in Los Angeles. Our headquarters is on Mount Washington in Los Angeles, and he acquired this beautiful property in Pacific Palisades that some of you can buy. And it’s called the Lake Shrine and also the Encinitas property, which is on the bluff there, and also the San Diego temple. He acquired the San Diego temple in the 30s and gave many services there. And because he was there and gave so many talks there and meditated there, those of us who follow this path, we we feel a vibration there. And we believe that we’re a great master has been and meditated and prayed that they leave a vibration that you can tap into later. So that’s for me, one of the great blessings of being the minister in charge at our San Diego temple. You something that just I started just a few months ago. And it’s a it’s a beautiful place with a beautiful view of the bay. So if you’re ever interested in coming by, you’re more than welcome. So after Yogananda passed in 1952, Assaraf continued to grow, which is unusual for a work like this to to keep growing once the founder has passed away. And we now have centers really all over the world. Most states I think there’s only one or two states in the US that don’t have centers and maybe like Wyoming and South Dakota or something like that. Very small states and our biggest centers are in the US, India, South America and Europe are where our biggest centers are. And for many years I was responsible for our centers in Brazil. So I visited Brazil about five times. And the culture there is as perfect for yoga and devotion. And they’ve really taken to yoga the people in Brazil. And I actually feel more at home in Brazil than I do here for some reason, just the culture. So it’s so sweet and devotional and warm. So.

I’m a monk, but most of our members, of course, aren’t they live in the world, they practice meditation. You don’t need to live in an ashram to practice these teachings. We have many thousands of people with families. They have jobs. They have children who meditate for about eight or 10 years. I helped coordinate a summer camp that we had in the mountains in Northern California and we would get one hundred and forty boys for the week, you know, ages 10 to 17. And we would all come together for meditation twice a day. And you’d see these 10 year olds sitting on a chair like their legs weren’t even touching the store. And there are sitting up and meditating. And at the beginning of the week, it was hard for them. But by the end of the week, they were just able to sit still and do fine with it. And when their parents would pick them up at the end of the week, their parents were like amazed. They would say, I don’t even recognize my my son because they haven’t changed so much. And we would have traditional camp activities, too, and spiritual classes and so on.

A couple of things that I really love about yoga, nahles teachings that I want to mention. He has a very positive concept of God. I mentioned that he defines God as. Really, it’s in its spirit, but the spirit can be perceived as having certain qualities, joy, love, light, and that because we’re human beings and we’ve been in human form for so long. We can also it’s helpful to conceive of God as having human qualities. And in India, it’s common to think of God, not just in one way. So Yogananda encouraged people to form their own concept of God, father, mother, your best friend, your beloved. You can think of God as Jesus or Krishna. And to me, this is one thing that that I always loved. To me, it’s like the ultimate freedom of religion, where even within a church, we’re not told that, OK, God is this white guy with a beard. And that when you pray to God that you have to pray to that for one person, that may be the perfect way for them to pray to God, for another person. They may think of God as the cosmic mother or as formless love or peace or joy. I mean, my preference is. To think of God as my divine mother and also its foremost love, and that’s a very common way to to think of God in India, but all these ways of conceiving of God are really just windows to the formless spirit, because we can’t really limit God or spirits and put it in a little box and say, it’s only this.

One of the positive aspects, too, of the path of yoga, which is what our path is, is based on photographies Eightfold Path in the first two steps are the Yamas and then Yamas, which are the doing the dance. The basic moral codes that virtually all religions have done still be kind to people, the meditative control, the senses and so on. And in yoga, the teaching is that. We follow these codes and these behaviors because then we were set to practice meditation. Our inner sort of vibration is in harmony with the universe over when we’re unkind to people, when we’re stealing from people. It creates a disharmony in us to makes it harder to meditate. You sit down and try to meditate, but there are these in harmonious vibrations inside of us. And so the teachings of yoga art that you follow these moral codes, because if you don’t, you’ll get punished or you’ll be damned. It’s more because. There’s positive things that happen when you live right and when you behave in a certain way, and I think it’s similar to how the Buddhists teach about right behavior and right and so on.

When we practice meditation. We have these ancient yoga meditation techniques, let’s tell the mind in the breath, and then after practicing them for a period of time and we’ll do this together, we’re going to have a guided meditation together. After we practice the meditation techniques, we sit very still, perfectly still physically. No thoughts, no no words, no concept of God, just pure awareness. And we never blink the mind in meditation. We always have an awareness on something. It could be on the breath. It could be on just the pure being and then the pure joy of being. And after spending time in that stillness, then we. Can pray, we may take a simple prayer or affirmation, talk to God in the language of our hearts, however we conceive of God and practice this together at the end. But again, to me, it’s so personal that. And so wonderful that we’re not told that God is a certain thing and that we have to pray to God in a certain way, and to me, this is one of the the beautiful things about the teachings of India. And one of the misunderstood things about Hinduism is that. Many people think that they have all these different gods that they worship and they’re actually worshipping different aspects of the one spirit, and even a simple villager knows on some level that. They’re not worshipping different gods, that it’s just a different aspect of that. That one went into the spirit of the praying to.

So the last thing, the basis of our teaching is that we’re not these bodies, we’re not men, we’re not women, we’re not the role that we’re playing in this life. We’re not old or young. Someone asked me once if I believe that we have a soul. And my answer was that, no, we don’t have a soul. We are a soul. We have a body. We are the soul. And to me, that’s a much better way of thinking of it than for this something like a body or a person that has a soul. No, we are the soul much greater than the body and the emotions and the personality. And that’s why we practice meditation, because. We’ve been in this party so long and dealing with the thoughts and the emotions, we’ve become identified with that and we the party and with you where this person and it’s a habit that meditation tries to break, and that’s why we try to stay very still and calm the mind, because it’s in the calmness that we can have an actual experience of that. That being that we really are, that isn’t the body and that isn’t the mind and the emotions.

OK, I’m open to questions. Thank you so much for that, that introduction to it. We had all agreed Moreas question and that if anybody else has a question, you guys are free. I forgot to mention this the beginning, but as we’re going through the presentation, if you want to write a question in the chat, you’re more than welcome to and I’ll keep an eye on those and make sure that those get asked. And of course, you’re also welcome to meet yourself and to ask your question. So Mary asked she she posted this when you were talking about the vibrations left by Paul Humza Yogananda in the San Diego location. She said, Do you mean when you when you say vibrations, do you mean literally or like a form of energy? Oh, that’s a really good question. And I would say it’s a form of energy. And when you’re very sensitive. You can feel these more subtle vibrations and energy. Sometimes when you’re with someone that you’re close to, you might feel that they’re in a certain mood or that they need some help or they’re not doing very well, even though they didn’t they’re not showing any outward signs of it. And so when we become very sensitive and develop our intuitive sense through becoming calm and practicing meditation, we can feel these vibrations. And it’s like an uplifting vibration that. It makes it easier to meditate on places like this. It makes it easier to go inside. Different people will experience in different ways. So, yeah, it’s not something that a scientist can measure with an instrument, but someone who’s sensitive can feel it. Thank you. And then, OK, you haven’t got a couple of big questions here that just came in. So Maria asked, are there different types of meditation? So, yeah, that’s a good question. There’s many different types of meditation, Buddhist meditation. Even the Buddhists have many different types. And yoga meditation even has just.

It was. Concentrating on the breath is one of the best ones, and that’s one that we’ll do together.

There are ones where we concentrate on the subtle currents in the spine. Most of you have probably heard of the chakras in the spine. And there are subtle sort of vortexes of energy that every person has that’s part of their body of energy. And in meditation, as we become calm, the energy from the body starts pulling into that inner self, into the spine, and we can have experiences of love in the heart. For centuries, poets and and lovers have talked about love being in the heart. And there’s an actual chakra or energy center near the heart in the spine that is the center of love. And when we practice love and devotion, we can actually at times feel that energy in the heart center, in the spine. So there’s many different kinds of meditation. I’m not aware of all of them. My recommendation to people and it’s what I did in the beginning. If you’re interested in meditating, find just some simple meditation practice that suits you and practice for a while. And then over time you become calm enough that you start learning what may be best for you and you get drawn to a meditation path that is more yours. When I first started, I did transcendental meditation for about six months. At the time, it was the only meditation I knew about and it was funny. I knew it wasn’t my kind of like my final destination or my final test, but I also knew that, OK, I have to start somewhere. I have this and I’ll practice this for a while. And after doing that for a while, then I was drawn to the Yogananda path.

Thank you. Let’s see. OK, I want to go back to the questions. So Gabriela asked, did you have a religion before becoming a month before you were introduced to SARS? Yeah, I was raised Catholic and it did absolutely nothing for me. I mean, I remember a few moments where I felt something at church and it just it just didn’t do anything. The strange thing is that after I got on this path and really developed a love for God and appreciation for saints, Yogananda, he really had a reverence for four sets of all religions. I mean, he really revered Saint Francis, for example. And once I got on this path, you know, I love going into a Catholic church and practicing meditation because I can feel love or devotion there. And I spent a couple of months near Assisi and was able to spend a lot of time in some of the places where Saint Francis was. And again, you feel a vibration there and it just as easy to practice meditation in places like that. So you had a greater appreciation for Catholicism? Absolutely, yeah. And for other religions, too. Yeah. That’s really interesting. That’s what you see. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. OK, we had two questions that are kind of kind of related to each other. Melissa asks, what are the teachings about the afterlife? And Sherene ask, what are the guru’s teachings on reincarnation? Now our guru teaches that reincarnation is is a fact and.

There are incredible stories of people remembering their past lives. And our guru also says that there is a veil thrown over us because for most people it won’t be helpful knowing what they were in the past life. Most of our past lives were pretty mundane. There’s probably a lot of suffering. We probably did things that we’re not proud of and we don’t want to know all of that. And it would just hold us back. I mean, our our past actions draw us to this incarnation. The people that were with the family that we’re born into and. This life is the one that we need to focus on. But Yogananda says that life here is like a school and we keep coming back until we learn the lesson. And, you know, there’s one passage where Jesus says something about becoming perfect and going no more out in. Our guru says what Jesus meant there was in reincarnating and again and again and learning the lessons until we perfect our love and perfect ourselves. And then we don’t have to go out anymore and reincarnate. So, yeah, reincarnation is like a school and we keep coming back. In my opinion, the main lesson here to learn is to love and to love the creator, to love each other. So then does Self Realisation Fellowship has a similar teaching to the other Hinduism in that there is there is an eventual return to the infinite spirit. Yes. And that’s also a really good question, that the goal is to unite with the spirit. And yoga means union. And that’s really the goal of our yoga and meditation path, is to merge into that love and joy. We can merge somewhat, you know, when we practice meditation and it absolutely changes our consciousness and changes who we are. It changes how we relate to people. And over time, we we do become more loving, kind person and I doing these practices. So in a way, SRF it’s kind of a combination of the Rogo, the path and Oberti, you know, it is literature, yoga, it means the royal yoga and it includes all the other facets of yoga, some of which are more are very arcane and Yabaki yoga of devotion is is part of our path and. Are teaching, really is meditation, plus love and meditation, plus devotion in a number of places, Yogananda Ashry says that the career path is one of meditation and love. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry, I threw in my own questions, there was no one. OK, so then we got a couple more questions about meditation. Maryland asked, do you teach meditation at the temple in Encinitas? I tried doing it by myself and I can only do it for a minute and then my brain starts to wander. Nabeel asked a kind of a connected question. He said, Is there a perfect age to practice meditation? Yoga? Yeah, those are good questions.

The main meditation teachings Assaraf teaches are in a home study course called the SRF Lessons, and it’s it’s not like a real expense. Of course, we don’t charge a lot for our teachings. Sometimes I’ll see, you know, places where they have to pay an arm and a leg to learn their practice is very affordable for a simple meditation practice. You could attend any one of our temples and the minister leading the meditation will give some simple pointers. And in fact, we’ll practice a simple meditation technique that’s very effective before we’re done here.

If you go to the Civilisations Fellowship website, there are a number of guided meditations also that I think if you want a simple meditation technique, go to the website and learn one of those. What was the second question? Is there a perfect age to practice? And it’s harder when you’re younger than like five or six years old. But I’ve seen five, six, seven year olds practice meditation and and get a lot out of it. And it has to be they can’t meditate for very long and it has to be presented to them in an age appropriate way. I’ve seen many teenagers who practice meditation daily. There’s really no best age or best time. I mean, any time is a good time to practice meditation. Thank you. OK, we have a couple more and then we’ll get to our because we’re excited to do our practice meditation. I’m sorry to ask you, this is a very good basic questions. Then why? Why do you wear orange? Why do you wear that color? OK, I’m in the West. I would I’m known as Brother Padman and I’m a monk and I’m a Gnostic order follows the traditions of India. And so in India I would be Swami Tognum Nanda. And so I took Swami Vows a few years ago and Swami’s were orange. And so I almost always wear an orange shirt all the time. I’ll wear an orange robe is when I’m conducting one of our services that yeah. In India Swami’s traditionally wear orange and so that’s why I wear orange. If they have anything to do with the.

It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the chakras. But Orange is.

It’s like the final stage where you’ve renounced the world and you’re letting go of the world and think of trees in the fall when the leaves because the leaves drop, they turn orange. And it’s almost like they’re going through that process of their departing the world or leaving the world and they’ve turned orange. And I’m sure there’s some deeper reasons for it. But I’m not aware of I’ve never heard that one. Thank you. No.

All right. Paul asked a really good question. He said, Is there any question you think should be asked more or are there any common misconceptions that you hear about SRS?

I mean, in my introduction, I covered what I thought would be the main things that someone asking us would want to know about, and

the main thing I encourage people is to find your own way and. You know, one of the things about starting a meditation practice is that you become calmer and more intuitive and you start getting a sense of what direction is best for you to go on, whether spirituality or even in your personal life know you start becoming more intuitive even about the people you meet through becoming more calm and sometimes knowing when you meet someone. Yeah, this is this would be a good person for me to spend time with. Sometimes you meet someone that I know wouldn’t be a good person for me to to hang out with. And, you know, meditation is very it helps us a lot in our practical lives. I mean, we’ve had college students who testified that their practice of meditation helped them to pass the test because it helps them to concentrate. Some of our basic techniques are actually concentration techniques that help you to really focus the mind. I can’t think of a question that I wish I would want people to ask more so. I think, you know, I was going to ask a follow up question to that, actually, because you said you think it’s important for everyone to find their own path and then just SRF kind of echo Hinduism and that they would tell people to, you know, if if another tradition or another path is meaningful to you to stay in that path or is there an encouragement or conversion to SRF or to add the teachings of SRF, another traditional religion? Yeah, that’s a good question. For those who are fully committed to this path, it becomes their life. And yet we have people who follow this path and still go to Catholic Church and we have Catholic monks and nuns who have learned the meditation techniques that Yogananda taught and have even taken a kind of final initiation into the most advanced practices. And yet they remain Catholic monks and nuns. And so, again, it is very personal.

For me, it’s like tomorrow afternoon myself into this, the more I’ve gotten out of it, and yet there are people we have many Indian followers of this path and I think they tend to. Stay with some of their traditions more than some of the Westerners do, even though this is their one hundred percent chance, they may stay with some of their traditions. More than that, I would it is very personal and individual. So there’s yeah, there’s kind of all some people may still identify or practice some of their traditional rituals or practices and and still learn from the past. And some are completely committed. And that’s really interesting. And when I was at our Phoenix temple, we would have people come for our Sunday services regularly who didn’t even follow this path at all. I mean, they were from other traditions and they really liked hearing the messages that we gave, the meditation and being in that environment. That’s sort of interesting. Thank you. OK, I think we have one more question and then we’ll do our we’ll do our practice meditation. Oh, sure. And that’s a really interesting question. She said, Do you think that it’s possible that this is our first life for some, but for some people this may be their first life? You know, that’s a really good question.

Yogananda says that we evolve through the animal kingdom or through the mineral kingdom, through the plant kingdom, through the animal kingdom before we become a human. And so we’ve been giraffes and elephants and plants and all these things. And the love evolution is greater awareness, greater understanding, greater refinement of awareness. And so eventually we reincarnate as a human being. And I recall him saying somewhere that the first your first incarnation as a human being. You’re less evolved and maybe more.

I’m not sure what the word is, but I don’t think you would be even introduced or interested in religious studies and have the refined awareness to go to college and so on. If this was your first incarnation. Yeah, although I’ve met people who I thought were from another planet, this had to have their first human incarnation after being an alien for so many lifetimes. Yeah. And that also I mean that it’s also supposed to be a teaching of gratitude or inspiration. Right. That if your you were lucky enough to be born as a human or you earned you know, there’s a reason that you were born in this life. So you should use the most of it. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Into the creation of this life. Yeah, absolutely. And Yogananda says it’s a it’s a blessing and a privileged to have a human incarnation because. Only humans have kind of the refined awareness and ability to perceive these higher and finer truths to perceive light and joy and love, and so, yeah, I appreciate this opportunity. We have to take advantage of that. Thank you. Well, before we do are we’re going to do our practice meditation, but does anybody have any other questions that that didn’t get answered or they thought of something else?

I have another question, yes. So I often hear about yoga being a science, and does that come from what you just said, like the minerals and the animal kingdom and so on and so forth, according to science come in? No, that’s a great question. I’ve heard that one before. And to me that when we talk about meditation being a science, to me, there’s there’s two parts of it. One is that it’s like running experiments in the laboratory. You know, when you do an experiment in a lab, you have to follow the experiment properly and follow the instructions. And if you follow the instructions properly, then you’ll get certain quantifiable results that are reproducible. And so when people practice debilitation techniques properly, along with following the animals in the animals and living right. The. There will be results and people will feel calmer and more peaceful and more joyful and so on. So to me, the saddest part is that, you know, it’s like an experiment. You follow the techniques the way they’re described. And if you do everything right, there will be some results, some good results.

I believe that, but I think I used to live next to SRF and bankruptcy for many years and I was a little intimidated, I think, with Krishna and Jesus and God and science. I never went

anywhere. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, my only answer to that is my approach to this path is to be like a child and to have like an inquisitiveness and, you know, how a child wouldn’t think that way or be intimidated or have too many very strange ideas about a child that would just have the sense of wonder and walk in and, OK, what’s this going to be like? And so I think it’s helpful to to maintain a little bit of a childlike attitude towards these things and hopefully serene one day in the future when the pandemic has come down, that I’ll be able to take students to places again. And I think it helps a lot of time to have that. Oh, well, I’m doing this for class or something. And then and then the pressure of the individual a lot of times and I’ve heard very similar stories like, oh, I always wanted to go to that. I alw

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