The Ocean and the Wave

Around three thousand years ago, India already had a great body of sacred hymns, the Vedas, chanted by priests at fire sacrifices. But some people began to feel that the rituals were not the whole answer. They went into the forests, sat near a teacher, and asked harder questions. Not "Which god do I offer to?" but "Who is it that is offering? What am I, really?"

Their conversations were gathered into the Upanishads. The word is often explained as "sitting down near", as a pupil sits close to a teacher to hear something too precious to shout. There are more than two hundred of them, but a dozen or so of the oldest, composed roughly between 800 BCE and the start of the common era, are the heart of the tradition.

They are not dry books of rules. They are full of stories: kings who turn out to be wiser than priests, a woman philosopher, Gargi, who presses the greatest sage of the court with questions, a boy who walks into the house of Death and refuses to leave without an answer.

Their great discovery can be put in two words. Brahman is the one reality behind everything, the ocean. Atman is your own deepest Self, the part of you that is aware, beneath your thoughts, moods and memories. And the Upanishads' astonishing claim is that the two are the same. The wave is the ocean.

The most famous way of saying it comes from a father teaching his son. Uddalaka tells young Shvetaketu to drop a lump of salt into a cup of water and come back in the morning. "Bring me the salt," says his father. The boy looks, but it has vanished. "Sip from the top. How does it taste?" "Salty." "From the middle?" "Salty." "From the bottom?" "Salty." "So it is," says Uddalaka. "You cannot see it, but it is everywhere in the water. That finest essence is the Self of the whole world. That is the truth. You are that, Shvetaketu." In Sanskrit, tat tvam asi.

The Aitareya Upanishad tells a creation story that is really a story about you. In the beginning, it says, there was only the Self. It made the worlds, and then a person, and gave it senses: fire became speech and entered the mouth, the sun became sight and entered the eyes, the wind became breath. The senses worked. But there was no one there to know them.

So the Self asked: How can this exist without me? It split open the crown of the head and entered the body itself. Only then did the person look around and realise what it was seeing. The Upanishad ends its search with a short, startling sentence, one of the "great sayings" of Indian thought: prajnanam brahma, consciousness is Brahman. The awareness reading these words is not a small private thing. It is the light by which everything is seen.

The Mandukya Upanishad, probably later than the others and only twelve verses long, explores that awareness through the sacred syllable Om. It notices that we pass through three states every day: waking, dreaming, and deep dreamless sleep. Beneath all three is a fourth, simply called "the fourth", later known as turiya: pure awareness, which was there all along, watching the other three come and go. The three sounds of A-U-M stand for the three states, and the silence after the sound for the fourth.

Fools dwelling in darkness, wise in their own conceit, and puffed up with vain knowledge, go round and round, staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the blind.

Katha Upanishad 1.2.5, tr. F. Max Müller

And then there is the Katha Upanishad, and the boy Nachiketa. His father, making a show of a great sacrifice, gives away only old, worn-out cows. The boy keeps asking, "Father, to whom will you give me?" until the angry father snaps: "To Death!" So Nachiketa goes to the house of Yama, Lord of Death, who is away. He waits three days without food. Ashamed at his poor hospitality, Death offers him three wishes.

For the third, Nachiketa asks the one question Death does not want to answer: What happens to us when we die? Death offers him anything else: long life, gold, horses, kingdoms, music. "Keep them," says the boy. "I want the answer." Death, impressed, tells him: the Self is not born and does not die. It is not killed when the body is killed.

The Upanishads also distinguish two kinds of knowing. In one common reading, avidya is knowledge of the world: useful, necessary, but on its own it leaves you lost. Vidya is knowledge of the Self. The Isha Upanishad warns that whoever follows only one of them goes into darkness. We need both.

Jump forward more than two thousand years, to the India of the British Raj, and to a story told in Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi.

Shyama Charan Lahiri (1828 to 1895) was a family man, a government accountant in the Military Engineering Department. In 1861 he was posted to Ranikhet, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Walking in the hills, the story goes, he heard someone call his name. A young-looking holy man led him to a cave and told him they had known each other in a former life. This was Babaji, called Mahavatar Babaji, whom Yogananda describes as an ageless master who has lived in the Himalayas for centuries.

Babaji taught Lahiri an ancient technique he called Kriya Yoga, a method of meditation centred on the breath and the spine, and told him to share it with sincere seekers. Then, rather than making him a hermit, he sent him home.

That was the remarkable part. Lahiri Mahasaya, as he became known, did not renounce the world. He went back to his post at Danapur and to his family, later settled in Benares, and quietly taught Kriya to anyone ready for it: princes and labourers, Hindus, Muslims and Christians. He showed that a person could reach the highest spiritual states while doing an ordinary job and raising a family.

Kriya Yoga itself is taught only by initiation, so its details are not printed here. Yogananda described its aim as speeding up the soul's natural growth, by calming the breath and withdrawing the life force from the restless senses towards the spine and brain.

If you imagine a guru as soft and dreamy, Sri Yukteswar will cure you of it. Priya Nath Karar, a disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya, ran a quiet ashram in Serampore near Calcutta. He was tall, upright, scientific, and famously strict. He studied astronomy and astrology, and in 1894 wrote The Holy Science, comparing Hindu and Christian scriptures to show they taught the same truths.

In 1910 a seventeen-year-old called Mukunda Lal Ghosh was walking through a lane in Benares when he saw, standing in the doorway, a face he had seen again and again in his visions. He ran towards him. The master's first words, as Yogananda remembered them, were: "O my own, you have come to me!"

Then came ten years of training that was anything but gentle. Sri Yukteswar corrected his students sharply, in front of others, for the smallest faults. Yogananda admitted it stung. But he came to see that the discipline was love: a sculptor's chisel, removing everything that was not the real person underneath.

O my own, you have come to me!

Sri Yukteswar to the young Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi, 1946

His teaching was practical. Self-mastery first: govern your moods, your appetites and your reactions, or they will govern you. Learn the spiritual laws as carefully as a scientist learns the laws of nature, because they work as reliably. And seek samadhi, the meditative state in which the wave remembers it is the ocean, not as an escape from life but as the ground of a balanced one.

Sri Yukteswar died in 1936. In one of the most extraordinary chapters of the Autobiography, Yogananda describes his master appearing to him in a Bombay hotel room three months later, in a body of flesh, to tell him about the worlds beyond death. Readers have believed it, doubted it, or simply wondered. The book asks only that you read it with an open mind.

Mukunda Lal Ghosh was born in Gorakhpur in 1893, the son of a railway official. As a boy he was restless for God: he ran away to the Himalayas at least once and was brought home by his older brother. After he met Sri Yukteswar he finished a degree at Calcutta University, as his guru insisted, and in 1915 took the vows of a monk and the name Yogananda, "bliss through union".

In 1917 he founded a school for boys, soon moved to Ranchi, that taught yoga alongside ordinary lessons. Then, in 1920, came an invitation to speak at the International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston. He sailed in August 1920, nervous about lecturing in English for the first time, and stayed for most of the rest of his life.

He founded the Self-Realization Fellowship, gave lectures that filled the largest halls in America, and taught Kriya Yoga to thousands of people who had never heard of the Upanishads. In 1925 he set up a headquarters on Mount Washington in Los Angeles. In 1935, on a visit home, he spent time with Mahatma Gandhi, who asked to learn Kriya.

His message to the West was simple and very old. Religion is not mainly about belief, he said, but about experience. Every person can find God within, through meditation, in this life. And the truths taught by Jesus and by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita are, underneath, the same truths.

In 1946 he published Autobiography of a Yogi. It is a strange, warm, funny book, full of saints who levitate, a "perfume saint", a "tiger swami" who wrestled tigers, and a woman who lived for decades without eating. Some readers take every word literally; others read the wonders as signposts pointing beyond themselves. It has been read by millions, and it helped bring yoga and meditation into Western life.

Yogananda died in Los Angeles on 7 March 1952, moments after finishing a speech at a dinner for India's ambassador. He had travelled about as far from Lahiri Mahasaya's home in Benares as it is possible to go, and carried the forest teachers' question with him all the way: Who are you, really?