Gururaj Ananda Yogi and the Path of Unfoldment

Who was Gururaj Ananda Yogi?

In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of spiritual teachers brought the ancient spiritual traditions of India to the West.

In those days, yoga centers were an anomaly, and the terms meditation and spiritual enlightenment still sounded strange and exotic to many people. Since then, the many physical and psychological benefits of meditation have become very widely known, with even Western medicine embracing and promoting these results. Meditation and spiritual practice have become a respected and accepted part of our lives, due in large part to the pioneering gurus from the east.

The teachers and gurus of India brought two principal approaches to spirituality. The first is devotional, and centers on the worship of God or a divine figure such as Krishna, Buddha, or Christ.

In the Indian devotional traditions, God is worshipped as Krishna, Rama, Kali, or multiple other Hindu deities. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), with its orange-robed devotees singing in praise of Krishna, is a well-known example of this devotional attitude. Here, God is worshipped in the form of Krishna and his companion or consort, Radha. In devotional worship, God is experienced as being separate from humanity, and human beings worship and supplicate the deity. This is familiar to us because Christianity utilizes this approach. The average Christian worships God through Jesus, with Mary, the mother of God, interceding on our behalf. This devotional attitude is a familiar and accessible approach to spirituality, and is the basis of most of the world’s religions. 

The other approach accepts that these devotional deities are not actual beings, but symbols or metaphors for an all-inclusive and universal reality, identified as Brahman in the Indian traditions.

The idea of God in this tradition is not as a divine being separate from the world, but instead is the universal reality behind the changing appearances of the world and of ourselves.   What distinguishes this approach to spirituality from a devotional approach is that human beings are not considered to be separate from divinity or God. We and God are essentially One, although we are ignorant or unaware of this reality. This approach is summed up in the Indian philosophy of Advaita, which means ‘Not Two.’  Advaita, or non-dualism, is the spiritual outlook that proposes that we and the Brahman are not separate from the other. We are more than a simply a part of something larger than us; we ARE that universal reality, and our separateness is an illusion. What we experience as our individual identity is simply another expression of that universal reality. As two famous phrases from Advaita philosophy put it, Tat Tvam Asi or Thou Art That, and, Aham Brahma Asmi, or You Are Divine.

This can sound contradictory or preposterous to our ordinary way of thinking.

It may seem obvious that we as individuals are separate from other people and distinct from the world around us. Approaching this premise from a scientific viewpoint, it can make sense. If we accept non-duality using the language of science, we can understand that we are all one, in the sense that everything consists of atoms and molecules, or matter and energy. We might also think of ourselves as being a part of nature, or that we and all of life are based on DNA and biology. However, this doesn’t explain how the physical, natural world and society could be the same as our inner world of ideas, emotions, feelings, and experience. What the physicists call the hard problem of consciousness remains unanswered. How is the inner world each of us experiences related to the outer world of people, society, and nature?  It’s the familiar, oppositional dilemma of matter and spirit, or mind and matter. Are we merely an amalgam of biological chemicals that can somehow think and feel?  Or are we composed of some unknown “spirit” or energy that is mysteriously embodied or contained within a physical body?  This issue has been debated for centuries, and Advaita, or non-duality, has an answer.

Whatever our opinions and beliefs might be, we are still bound by our dualistic thinking.

Feeling separate from the world around us, we constantly seek security and happiness from people, events, and situations that are external to us. We base our happiness on getting our physical, emotional, and psychological needs met, which can make us anxious and manipulative. We are constantly angling to get a better job, make more money, have fun and entertainment, and better manage our personal relationships in order to experience more pleasure and avoid pain. Moreover, we experience conflicting thoughts and emotions internally, causing us unhappiness. We live in hope and fear, and this can make us feel fearful, anxious, and needy. Our ordinary consciousness is dominated by the contrasting opposites of good and evil, right and wrong, happiness and unhappiness, human beings and Nature, man and god, mind and matter, and so on. All of these opposites arise out of the fundamental belief that there is ‘me’ with everything else being ‘not me.’  We experience this ‘me’ as the I-self, or the ego-self which becomes identified with our personalities, our roles in life, our prejudices, beliefs, and our anxieties. It is this ego-self that constantly plays the game of win/lose, pleasure/pain, more/less, and me/you. The ego-self is what causes all the problems. Our identification with this ego-self creates a fundamental dualism and anxiety. There is a spiritual saying that pain may come and go, but suffering is optional. How many times have we observed someone who has the ordinary comforts of life, good friends, good health, and reasonably good conditions in his or her life, and yet is constantly miserable or discontented?  How many times have you yourself been like that?

This is precisely what the teachings of Gururaj Ananda Yogi offer to us, a solution to our feelings of isolation, dualism, and anxiety.

In hundreds of satsangs, or spiritual talks, his message was essentially this:  that you are divine, and all of your troubles are the result of your inability to feel this reality in every moment, in every relationship, in every activity of your life. He taught that the goal of life is Self-Realization, in which the individual ego-identity is transformed into a total identification with the universal reality or truth of Brahman, often referred to as the Universal Self. What is Brahman?  To use a more common term, we can say that everything that exists is an expression of a universal mind or Consciousness. Our individual or personal consciousness is simply that Universal Consciousness or Brahman once it has become patterned, conditioned, and limited into the sense of an individual self or an embodied consciousness. This is not difficult to understand intellectually; but it is much harder to fully integrate this into our actual sense of ourselves. If this insight could be understood by a simple explanation, we wouldn’t need the long and difficult path to Self-Realization. But since it is at the heart of Gururaj’s teaching, it must be addressed.

What did Gururaj teach?

Gururaj did not like to focus on philosophical speculations.

In fact, he made fun of philosophers and a merely intellectual understanding. He taught that a philosophic or intellectual understanding  means very little. In fact, they usually just get in the way. The whole point is to directly experience non-duality, to feel the divine reality in every breath and in every activity. Therefore, he rarely used the philosophic term Brahman. Instead, he liked the term Self-Realization, in which the individual self recognizes its identity with the Universal Self. 

In Indian philosophy, this Brahman or Universal Self somehow forgets its true nature, and becomes totally identified with our individual embodied self, or what is called jiva.

The individual sense of self, the jiva, is bound by what is known as karma, or action. This can be understood as something similar to our DNA; an inherited set of tendencies that influence the development of our bodies, our mental character, and even our situations in life. The jiva is also bound by what are called samskaras, which can be understood as our mental conditionings, habits, and addictions that are formed by our experiences in this and in other lives. 

Our karma and our samskaras form the basis of our personality and instincts, and lead us to identify with particular roles and activities in life.

We come to identify with our social and gender roles, our personal beliefs and opinions, and our hopes and fears. We are dominated by our thoughts, which are often fearful, unrealistic, or self-defeating. In other words, we have a conditioned ego-self, and this causes us all kinds of misunderstandings and miseries. Because of our karma and our samskaras, we confuse our divine real nature with an invented self. We invent this imagined ego-self out of our personal histories, our habits, addictions, personality quirks, family and social histories, our deeds good and bad, and the whole host of other mental phenomena. We take our beliefs, attitudes, and even our memories as things that are perfectly real and solid, when in fact, they are only mental creations. Because of this ego-identity that is falsely identified with our real or divine nature, we are said to reincarnate or take birth again and again in countless bodies in countless circumstances until we very slowly discover that the duality that we experience between ourselves and the universal Self is not at all real. The only reality is that of Brahman or what Gururaj called Divinity.

But Gururaj made it very clear that to realize our true nature as Divinity does not mean we lose our personalities or our daily lives.

Instead, our personalities and our relationships with the world and with each other become transformed by Self-Realization. What would this look like?  We saw this directly in Gururaj himself. Gururaj was fully Self-Realized. He once said, I don’t believe in God; I KNOW God. He was amazingly unselfconscious and unashamed. He was completely loving and accepting of others and himself. He radiated love and joy. He was completely spontaneous. At the same time, he was very precise, focused and aware. He was full of laughter, but he could change in a moment. You never got the sense that he was completely identified with the role he was playing at any particular moment. Sometimes he was like your best friend. Sometimes he was the wise and austere spiritual master. Sometimes he was a joker or even a fool, and sometimes he acted like a child. He was enjoying himself like an artist would enjoy painting a picture. He made life an artform. He laughed and joked constantly. He could easily and without any seeming effort produce paintings, songs, poetry, satsangs, endless laughter, and amazingly personal and intimate teachings. He was a free soul, a jivanmukti or liberated being. For his students, the point was not to imitate Gururaj, or to somehow try to become like him. As he told us over and over again, the whole aim of life was to become fully and completely yourself. Self-Realization is about becoming more free and expressive as our own individual selves, not to become some stereotype of a holy or enlightened being. Gururaj demonstrated to us that to become totally identified with divinity is to become more fully expressive as our unique, individual selves. Gururaj was a living example of what an enlightened person is like. He was a perfect example of what he taught. In other words, he was a guru.

What is a guru? 

The term guru has a bad reputation these days. Gurus are associated with many scandals involving the familiar temptations of money, power, status, and sex.

Many self-styled gurus over the past so many years have become embroiled in these controversies, and have severely compromised the ancient tradition of the guru-disciple relationship. At the same time, the relationship between a disciple, or chela as it is called in the Indian tradition, and a guru or spiritual guide, is an essential part of the journey to Self-Realization. The word guru derives from the words meaning from darkness to light. Without a guru, our habits, beliefs, unconscious conditionings, cultural assumptions, and our negative habits of greed, anger, fear, lust, and the rest of it can make it next to impossible to wake up to our own divine reality. Over and over again, we strive with our conditioned, ego-identities to match a self-generated image of imagined perfection, and so become caught once again in our familiar hopes and self-delusions. The true guru works like a master therapist to break us out of ourselves into that infinitely larger frame of reference that is Self-Realization. But as Gururaj himself emphasized over and over again, the Guru by him or herself cannot do this without our complete participation. The role of the Guru, says Gururaj, is to shine a light on the path. It is up to us to walk that path, and to make our way slowly and sometimes painfully, to an awakening to our true nature, and from awakening, to full Self-Realization. Self-Realization is when we no longer have any identification with our ordinary, conditioned states of ego consciousness or with this individual body; we experience these passing and changing states of mind as no more real than a dream. Instead, we live in complete awareness of the divine reality that Gururaj called Divinity, which is Universal Consciousness.

Self Realization, The Path of Unfoldment

So how do we do this?  How do we attain Self-Realization?  

It has already been stressed that a guru is necessary. A guru serves three functions. The first is that the Guru introduces and explains the teachings themselves. From the Guru and from genuine spiritual traditions, we learn the basic spiritual knowledge that clarifies the spiritual search. The satsangs in this book are full of these teachings. You are strongly encouraged to look up unfamiliar terms or usages on the internet. Explore other traditions of genuine spiritual teachings. Don’t think you can understand these things right away; many spiritual truths take a lifetime even to begin to fully master. Second, the function of the guru is to be a counselor, a friend, a guide, a lover, an inspiration, a goad, an irritant, and someone who challenges your most basic beliefs and assumptions about who you are and what the world is. Third, the guru is ultimately your own true Self, beyond all the delusions and mistaken ideas that you have about yourself. When awakening happens, you realize that you and your guru are essentially the same. In fact, the divine reality that is your own true nature is exactly the same for everyone. You and your Guru and everyone else in the world is essentially divine. And the divine is One. You, the Guru and everything and everyone in the universe, are simply the endless manifestations of Consciousness. As the traditional saying goes, Thou art That. In reality, you and the Brahman are One.

As Gururaj taught, the outer guru is necessary until the Inner Guru is realized.

The Inner Guru is that aspect of ourselves that is pushing and pulling us towards our own recognition of who and what we really are. This is awakening. As the Inner Guru is awakened, we become more and more aware of the activity of Grace in our lives. We will find that books appear, or we have meaningful encounters, or we have other powerful experiences that reveal deeper spiritual truths. Events and people in our lives may take on a mysterious significance and relevance that we might not have noticed before. We find ourselves becoming less anxious, less obsessed with our own worries and desires. Slowly, the world becomes filled with joy, peace, and a beauty that we had never before realized could be possible. We become more and more aware of the overwhelming reality of love, and of our profound interrelationships with everyone and everything. We find that we are happy for no reason at all; we are just happy being alive. Our lives become much easier. Our actual circumstances may not change significantly, but our whole attitude towards life and living changes. We forgive and learn to let live. As Gururaj once put it, we learn that when life brings us lemons, we just make lemonade.

In addition to the Guru, and our willingness to engage with our guru, the other essential component of spiritual practice is self-help.

This includes self-discipline and ethical practice. Self-realization is possible without meditation and spiritual practice, but for the vast majority of us, meditation and spiritual practice are absolutely necessity for inner transformation. Gururaj insisted that meditation and spiritual practice was the medicine, and that he was the doctor. The doctor can prescribe the spiritual medicine, but it is up to each of us to take it. If we don’t do the recommended spiritual practices, not much is going to happen. As he liked to say about self-help and self-effort, you’ll get nothing for nothing and very little for five cents. 

Spiritual Practices

For each new chela or initiated student, Gururaj would individually prescribe a set of spiritual practices that were very specific to that person’s character and circumstances.

These individualized spiritual practices are now prescribed by several senior disciples  A person new to spiritual practice can take a preliminary course given by an experienced meditation instructor. In this course, the student is taught the basic meditation techniques of calming and steadying the mind. The new student is taught how our unconscious patterns or samskaras can influence our lives to make us unhappy and dissatisfied. The student is taught how these patterns can be managed, and how meditation and other spiritual techniques can make us happier, more calm and at peace with ourselves. The student is taught how to connect with the living power of our divine nature which is experienced as spiritual grace. Should the student choose to become initiated, the student works with a senior teacher who gives the student a personalized mantra and set of spiritual practices specifically geared to that student’s state of spiritual development. Initiation simply means that we accept the guidance of the divine in our lives. In this case, we can think of the divine as that aspect of our Higher Self or Universal Self towards which we aspire. A personalized mantra is an extraordinarily important tool for personal growth. The topic of mantra is covered in a number of satsangs in this book. In addition to the mantra, the student is expected to incorporate meditation into their lives as a daily practice. 

Gururaj’s teachings on other religious and spiritual traditions

While Gururaj did not emphasize any particular kind of deity worship or specific religious observance, he made no objection to it either.

He said he was a universalist; teaching spiritual truths common to all traditions and religions. He made very frequent references to the gospels, to Ramakrishna and Vedanta, to Buddhism and Hinduism, and to other devotional and non-dual traditions. He did not prescribe any kind of dietary or ritual requirements, nor any insistence on rules of behavior or vows. He did not approve of any kind of fanaticism or dogmatism. He said that monastic traditions involving celibacy, asceticism, and extreme forms of spiritual practice are for very few spiritual practitioners. Instead, he insisted that he was a teacher for householders, which in the Indian tradition means those of us with jobs, families, and the ordinary concerns of life. He encouraged sexuality and relationships, and enjoyment of life. He had a very high opinion of women. His only real requirement is that we do our spiritual practices regularly and as prescribed.

Satsangs

He encouraged all of us to gather together as often as possible on meditation retreats.

On these retreats, he would give satsangs several times a day. Satsang in the Indian tradition means a gathering in the presence of truth. These satsangs were recorded, and a number are now available on You Tube. A number of people made transcriptions of these recordings. A selection of these transcripts has been edited to form the content of this book.  

While this collection of satsangs by Gururaj Ananda Yogi is intended primarily for students of Gururaj, many spiritual seekers with other teachers and on other paths will enjoy them and find them useful.

I hope that this collection may be of help and inspiration to all seekers everywhere, of all faiths or none. When Gururaj was teaching, terms such as Self-realization, guru, yoga, etc. were relatively new in the west. Now there is a yoga studio on every corner and spiritual seeking is no longer considered to be confined to formal religion or any particular worship or practice. Gururaj encouraged this. He told us to follow the path best suited to our nature. There is an old saying: God is One, but It is called by many names. The essential, indispensable requirement is the deep yearning for the divine reality. If you hear the call, the mysterious inner voice calling you away to find the life of the spirit, do it. Open your heart to the living presence of the divine. As Gururaj reminded us many, many times, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven Within, and All Else Shall be Added Unto Thee.”