When you think back on your life, there are milestones. These are events that might have been important to more than yourself, or they might be special things only you thought were important.
For instance, every time you advance into another grade in
school. For me, that wasn’t such a big thing. I went where I was pointed. It
did mean something to me to be in high school, though all of the attendant
things that were supposed to happen during high school years never happened to
me. As it was, I went to five high schools in four years. There were other
things that were important to me. Things no one else knew about.
One thing that happened, I am still in awe about. A book
fell at my feet in the school library. It was in the spiritual section, down
where the Dewey Decimal numbers are in the 200s. Nobody went there. In fact,
nobody would have been caught dead there. I was using that particular aisle as
a shortcut to get to where other students were gathered. As I said, a book fell
at my feet. Not from up high. It was on the lowest shelf. It was a fat book, so
if it had fallen and hit me from a higher shelf, it would have hurt. Right as
my foot trod next to the book, it fell out onto the carpet.
I stopped. I marveled that such a thing should happen. I
asked myself, “Did somebody push it through while trying to shelve a book on
the other side of the stack? I walked around to see, and nobody was there. I
really didn’t know anybody well enough for them to pull a prank on me, so that
didn’t even cross my mind.
I went back to the book to see what it was. I might have
been young, but I knew enough to recognize something odd had happened. I was
going to pay attention.
It was Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. It
changed the course of my life. If it changed my life, well, it might just
change yours. Eventually, when I was a senior in high school, with my mother’s
permission, I signed up for a correspondence course from the Self-Realization
Fellowship, which Paramahansa organized in the 1920s when he traveled to a
religious conference in Boston.
Paramahansa was born in 1893 in Gorakhpur, India. He
established The Self-Realization Fellowship
on a trip to a religious conference in Boston in 1920. The idea was to introduce Kriya yoga to the West
and to show people that there are many ways to seek God’s love.
Kriya yoga is a system where spirituality doesn’t just drift
in — you seek it through meditation, breath, energy, and love. Prior to that,
my own spiritual instruction had become somewhat difficult for me to
understand. Yes, I understood God’s love, but I didn’t feel worthy of it. It
made me sad, and it made me feel lonely, and I honestly couldn’t see a way out
of it. I realize now that was not what people were supposed to feel, but it was
how I felt.
The instruction I took from SRF — and the book that first
showed me a kinder way to seek God — has stayed with me to this day.
This is one of the breadcrumbs I leave behind. If you pick
it up, I hope it leads you somewhere gentle.
Thanks for reading.
Pauline Evanosky
Where I Am
Comments
Post a Comment