“The study of philosophy without a longing for liberation is like dressing up a corpse."— Tripura Rahasya
In earlier times, when esoteric knowledge was under jealous guard, a spir itual aspirant usually had to endure years of patient waiting before being taught. Now that information has become an article of commerce, all man ner of secrets would seem to have become available to anyone who has the price of a book or tape; however, simply because secret doctrines can now be purchased and thus easily possessed does not mean they can be easily comprehended. Though words can be bought and sold, that living wisdom which cannot be confined within words must still be earned.
Among the long-hidden arcana now being packaged for sale is the lore of Kundalini, the root from which all spiritual experiences sprout, and most of the writers who have tried to present to the world this living knowledge, which is the source of all knowledge, produce only dead words. As Heinrich Zimmer observed, “The best things can’t be told; the second best are mis understood.”
Carl Jung, who many decades ago delivered a series of lectures on Kun dalini, explains why:
Therefore the Yoga way or the Yoga philosophy has always been a secret, but not because people have kept it secret. For as soon as you keep a secret it is already an open secret: you know about it and other people
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know about it, and then it is no longer a secret. The real secrets are secrets because no one understands them. One cannot even talk about them, and of such a kind are the experiences of Kundalini Yoga. That ten dency to keep things secret is merely a natural consequence when the experience is of such a peculiar kind that you had better not talk about it, for you would expose yourself to the greatest misunderstanding and mis
interpretation. (Jung, p.20) The experiences of Kundalini Yoga are peculiar because Kundalini is the source of all your experiences. Kundalini is that in-dwelling energy which by self-identifying with your opinions and character traits accretes and pre serves your identity. In Jung’s words,
… according to the Tantric teaching, there is an urge to produce a per sonality, something that is centered, and divided from other beings…. It is what one would describe in Western philosophical terms as an urge or instinct toward individuation. The instinct of individuation is found everywhere in life, for there is no life on earth that is not individual. Indi viduation takes place only when you are conscious of it, but individuality
is always there from the beginning of your existence. (Jung, p. 2) So long as the urge toward individuation is mainly directed toward bene fiting your own limited temporary individual self it is called ahamkara, or egoism, the force which makes it possible for you to unquestioningly accept the world as it is on the surface. This same force is called Kundalini when it turns away from the mundane and toward the spiritual, the permanent and eternal. After Kundalini awakes it becomes impossible to continue believing that external reality is the sole reality. Ahamkara makes you who you are now; Kundalini makes you into what you will become.
Kundalini has remained secret for so long because, as Jung notes, it can not be understood; it can only be experienced. The process of spiritual evo lution cannot be objectified and separated from the subject who evolves, for Kundalini functions simultaneously as descriptive consciousness, as the thing described, and as its description. Since human language is made up of subjects and objects, descriptions of Kundalini tend to be skewed, either toward objective comment on the experience, which devitalizes it, or toward description of the raw subjective experience itself, which is usually distorted by the experiencer’s mental imbalances, stresses and fantasies.
Among the writers who have made valuable contributions to the literature on Kundalini are Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon), an Englishman who was initiated into Tantra while serving as a judge in India, and Gopi Krishna, a Kashmiri Pandit who suffered terrifying consequences when his own Kun
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dalini was awakened before he knew how to deal with it. While neither per fectly conveys Kundalini’s incomprehensible secrets, since their words get in their way, here and there in inspired passages Kundalini’s radiance flashes momentarily through, like lightning through a somber sky.
These accounts succeed, albeit partially, because their information has not been lifted out of context. Kundalini can be understood solely within the context of Indian culture. But ever since the time of the early Theoso phists most Westem interpreters of Kundalini, unfortunately, in order to import into their own systems of psychology concepts which they believe to be Tantric, have not hesitated to assign to Tantric words denotations which often vary significantly from their original meanings.
Jung himself borrowed concepts from Kundalini Yoga, including the very concept of Kundalini, which he called the anima, and so he bears some of the blame for this situation. At least he was more forthright than are most distorters of Kundalini:
One needs a great deal of psychology in order to make these matters palatable to the Western mind, and unless we try hard and dare to com mit many errors in assimilating it to our Western mentality, we simply get poisoned. For these symbols have a terribly clinging tendency. They catch the unconscious somehow and cling to us. But they are a foreign body in our system-corpus alienum-and chey inihibit the natural growth and development of our own psychology. It is like a secondary growth or poi son. Therefore one has to make really heroic attempts to master these things, to stand up against these symbols, in order to deprive them of their influence. Perhaps you cannot fully realize what I say, but take it as a hypothesis–though it is more than a hypothesis. It is a truth. I have seen
too often how dangerous their influence may be. (Jung, p. 9) Rejecting those concepts that we do not need” for a systematic psycho logical description of Western experiences with the unconscious, Jung ratio nalized:
We can only understand their picture of the world in as much as we try to understand it in our own terms. Therefore I make the attempt to approach it from the psychological point of view. I am sorry to have bewildered you, but you will be more bewildered if you take these things literally (you had better not). If you chink in these terms, you will build up an apparent Hindu system with the psychology of the Western mind,
and you cannot do that. You simply poison yourself! (Jung, p. 13) Possibly those who try hard and dare to commit many errors in order to assimilate concepts from Kundalini Yoga into popular psychology do avoid the fate of the many Westerners who have poisoned themselves by dressing
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their minds in Indian vestments. But while replicas of Kundalini Yoga may function well enough in the external world of consensus reality to be useful psychological tools, they cannot substitute for the real thing when it comes to spiritual development. This is particularly true for those people who, by design or by accident, have broken through some of the barriers which sep arate objective from subjective reality and live lives in which waking reality and symbolic reality compete with one another for attention. Such individ uals risk being trapped on an unknown ocean in a leaky conceptual boat if they try to rely on psychology alone to carry them safely to shore.
An awakening into the reality of the nonphysical in a person who lacks adequate prior preparation usually precipitates a personal crisis; such peo ple may seem crazy, are often thought to be crazy, and sometimes believe themselves to be going crazy, all because they can no longer unquestion ingly accept our “standard” reality. Most of those who lose touch with everyday reality are actually insane, of course, but in a sizable number of cases the cause is a spiritual crisis.
The prophet Ezekiel once heard a divine voice command him to sleep on his right side for 390 nights and then to switch to his left side for 40 more. (Ezekiel 4:4-6) Unless you know, as yogis do, that the position in which you sleep exerts a profound effect on your physiology, and so your con sciousness, you will agree with Time magazine that Ezekiel and St. Teresa of Avila who like Ezekiel heard voices, were schizophrenic. When in fact they were most likely inspired by a reality of which the unawakened know noth ing
A spiritual awakening alters forever the way in which an individual experi ences the world, for after the initial crisis abates one discovers that there is no way to return to one’s previously comfortable mindset. Once aroused and unboxed Kundalini is not “derousable”; the genie will not fit back into the bottle. “After the awakening, the devotee lives always at the mercy of Kundalini,” says Pandit Gopi Krishna, who experienced several crises during which the speed, insouciance and authority of the power he had unleashed terrified him. That power which caused his terror, which he had to face without the help of any guide, can terrify or incapacitate anyone who awak ens Kundalini without proper guidance.
So long as Kundalini remains within the realm of psychology, our relative objectivity can shield us from the influence of symbolic existence. Once we enter subjective reality, however, that realm in which symbols “cling," we are at their mercy unless we have been taught how to deal with them. Those who ride Kundalini without knowing their destination risk losing their way.
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The result may be “ego inflation," which occurs when one’s limited person ality survives the crisis intact and the individual then “claims the lustre of the archetypal world for his or her own person," or “ego deflation,” if the awakening thoroughly disrupts one’s self-integration and garbles one’s self image.
The savants of India have for thousands of years worked to perfect user friendly methods of spiritual advancement that when properly implemented prepare individuals for and guide them through the process of individuation without terrorizing them. Each of these methods arouses the evolutionary power inherent in every individual, but this power appears as Kundalini in one system alone: the Tantric tradition. Anyone who wants to understand Kundalini as Kundalini must first come to grips with Tantra.
Though it has for centuries been maligned by the orthodox and puritani cal among Indians, Tantra is not a religion of sensory indulgence which teaches the instant gratification of one’s cravings. A good Tantric believes in truth and reality, and in the facing of facts, the first of which is the fact that all of us are part of the manifested universe, subject to its laws until we develop the power to redefine ourselves in other terms. A Tantric aims to become sva-tantra (“self-functioning”), to be free of all limitations, including especially the limitations of his or her own personality.
Tantra is not a subject one can learn in school, nor are Tantric texts “how to” books, because Tantra is not bookish knowledge; it is living wisdom which must be obtained directly from an experienced practitioner. A good guide, a guru who has already followed the path and knows all its pitfalls, is absolutely essential if one hopes to follow the Tantric path and arouse Kun dalini without calamity; a powerless or ignorant guru is far worse than none at all.
One such expert, the Aghori Vimalananda, taught me what I know of Kundalini. His uniquely original way of perceiving the world developed thanks to the awakening of his own Kundalini through a midnight ritual on a corpse. When Kundalini awakened for him, she took the form of the Tan tric goddess Smashan Tara, the goddess of the burning grounds who enables one to cross over from the reality of life to the reality of death. Smas han Tara, the “Savioress of the Cemetery,” enabled Vimalananda to cross over from his ordinary consciousness into states in which he could perceive reality from a different vantage. His experiences at the time of this awaken ing and thereafter are recounted in my book Aghora: At the Left Hand of God.
Aghora summarized the paths an Aghori follows in his or her odyssey from the darkness of unexamined mundane existence into the light of the celes
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tial realms, all the while maintaining consciousness of both. Aghora is a sort of super-Tantra, a Tantra in which all sense of limitation is removed. Aghora is the Path of the Shadow, the “shadow” being all those aspects of our lives that permit us to exist as individuals at the expense of other beings. We can know the light of altruism only because we have known the darkness of self ishness; only after passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death do we learn how to live. Aghoris are psyche explorers who go down into the black ness of their individual conceits to find their way to true freedom. Their spiritual path is no anemic “sweetness and light” experience; an Aghori must be “as hard as diamond and as soft as wax" as the situation demands. Only after the grapes of your ego-attachments have been thoroughly trod den into juice can you vint the sweet wine of spiritual wisdom.
Aghoris play the game of life with the utmost sobriety, fully aware of the wagers staked. No means to awakening is too disgusting or frightening for them, for they worship death, the Great Transformer. Aghora literally means “non-terrifying”; an Aghori takes the most terrifying experiences possible and transmutes them into devotion to Reality. Tradition sends Aghoris to seek God in the cremation grounds, where death is ever-present, but a good Aghori sees the entire world as one vast ongoing cremation. Aghoris person ify and deify death, selecting one face of this Universal Reality as their Beloved and worshipping this deity with an intense and all-consuming love. Every day for Vimalananda was a day of play with the cosmos, his Lover, and he never tired of playing the games that lovers play, for those games brought him ever closer to his sweetheart.
Because when the goddess Kundalini awoke in him, She had a form and a personality that he could interact with, Kundalini spared Vimalananda the sort of anguish that She awarded Pandit Gopi Krishna. Had Panditji perhaps concentrated on a god or goddess instead of a lotus he too might have found a haven in which to rest when the tempest tossed him. To Vimalananda Kundalini was not a wild unapproachable force that batted him about according to Her whim; She was instead his Beloved Mother, in whose lap he sat, allowing Her to protect him from all dangers with Her irre sistible clout.
Vimalananda always preferred the path of worship of God-with-form to that of worship of the Impersonal Absolute. To him, the highest expression of divinity is the Motherhood of God, the God who protects and loves Her children no matter what errors they may make. This attitude was to him the best of all possible actitudes when dealing with Kundalini, because once you enter into such a mother-child relationship all fear of damage by the energy
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disappears. Also, as he liked to say, “Bhakti is Shakti”: the energy (shakti) that you put into devotion (bhakti) to your chosen form of God is returned to you manyfold, benevolently amplified by the universe. As your devotion grows, so does your own personal power, which you are less likely to misuse since all you can think about is the one you love.
An Aghori’s ache for a vision of the Beloved is so fierce that no means to achieve it is too extreme. This divine fury, a sort of cosmic thrill-seeking, is Aghora’s hallmark. “Aghoris always overdo a thing," as Vimalananda liked to say, and Aghora documents how he frequently overdid things in his life. Overcome by his craving for his Beloved he worshipped with every element and substance and hobnobbed with every sort of ethereal being, all his ritu als becoming, by Tantric transmutation, offerings to the divine.
Aghora’s field of activity is not limited to enthralling or repugnant prac tices. The path of Aghora is the path of spontaneity; every action must be performed at the moment most appropriate for its performance, and it must be appropriate to the context in which it is performed. Worship is worship to an Aghori, be it in a temple or in a cemetery; with the surrender of all self interest except that single-minded quest to achieve the Beloved, an Aghori can accept with love and thankfulness everything that God offers, bliss and misery alike, and transmute every experience, even a trip to the toilet, into an act of worship of the Absolute. Everything an Aghori touches, desired and despised, clean and unclean, he drags from the periphery of his experi ence into the purity of his center to help develop the “critical mass” needed to ignite and sustain a “spiritual chain reaction."
Vimalananda was a man of action, both “right-handed” and “left handed," and cared little for scholarly views on what might or might not be classifiable as Aghora. He embraced accepted doctrine when it suited his purposes, while always retaining the right to innovate at any moment when necessity demanded. Philosophical systems have come and gone in India over the ages, but the spiritual springs from which they have sprung have continued to overflow. Indian spiritual tradition, Tantra particularly, has always ebbed and flowed between the twin shores of theory and practice. Theory perpetually regulates practice, and practice inexorably modifies the ory. As fast as theologians erect and legitimize mountains of dogma, icono clasts weather them down with their own individual interpretations; the heresies of yesterday are the orthodoxies of today.
Contemporary India is filled with individuals and sects working to legiti mize their own unique aggregate of philosophy, cosmology and technique by assimilating their systems to the mainstream of “Vedic tradition” or
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“Kashmir Shaivism" or whatever, while other individuals and sects–often paradoxically the same ones—move away from such standardized defini tions of religion, calling them convenient fictions that limit and mislead. Maintaining that modern circumstances (time, place, people) are too differ ent to permit precise recovery or revival of the ancient ways, they assert that what must be revived within a system is the flame which gives it life, not its
external form.
For his part Vimalananda cheerfully combined many seemingly contradic tory theories and practices into “his” Aghora, quoting in his support the ancient text which taught that only bewildered people dispute about truth, for “what proposition is there that the learned cannot defend?” Though highly educated Vimalananda’s knowledge of Sanskrit texts was modest, and he neither knew nor cared to know much of the Tantric literature in Gujarati, Hindi or English translation, languages in which he was fluent. His textbook was life itself, and he could read from it meanings which are acces sible only to those who know the secret language of spirituality.
While he called himself an Aghori, Vimalananda’s disdain for organized religion distanced him from all recognized Aghori lineages, nor did he refer to his own mentors as Aghoris (and it is doubtful that they would describe themselves thus). He preferred to follow his own path:
“I have never believed in religion. Religions are all limited because they concentrate only on one aspect of truth. That is why they are always fighting amongst one another, because they all think they are in sole possession of the truth. But I say there is no end to knowledge, so there is no use in trying to confine it to one scripture or one holy book or one experience. This is why I say, when people ask what religion I follow, ‘I don’t believe in Sampra daya (sect), I believe in Sampradaha (incineration). ‘Burn down everything which is getting in the way of your perception of truth.” (Aghora, p. 167)
In this at least he agreed with Jung, who once observed that “the function of religion is to protect us from an experience of God.” The Aghori Vimalananda was too much the iconoclast and too determined to perceive reality to be imprisoned within dogma; his Aghora is a religion of conscious ness, its precepts engraved not on tablets of stone but on the heart of the individual practitioner who must use them to create an individual system, thereby carving out his or her own spiritual niche.
There are not now and there never have been large numbers of Aghoris abroad in the world, nor did Vimalananda create many. He was quick to tell most people, “Do as I say, not as I do," and never permitted anyone to slav ishly imitate him, because only those fit to dine on human brain will derive
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spiritual advantage from such a diet. He never devised any system of spiri tual practices for the world to admire and follow. After carefully evaluating each individual who came to him he would teach certain lessons, directly or obliquely, or he would teach nothing at all, depending on his perception of his karmic connection with that person and his or her fitness and aptitude for spiritual disciplines. He never hesitated to challenge anyone’s assump tions on spirituality and yogic discipline, and was not afraid to step on toes if he thought that he might arouse someone from their slumber by doing so.
Vimalananda wanted his views to be spread to anyone willing to listen because he felt acutely the anguish of the emptiness of the modern world, whose god is Mammon and whose predominant religion is an arrogantly emotionless science which seems bent on suppressing what humanity remains within us. As society disintegrates and meaning dissolves from life, people tend either to descend into despair or to return to their roots. We in the West have for years been cutting ourselves off from our roots, and now, nearly rootless, we are slowly dying from lack of cultural nourishment.
Some Westerners seek to live without roots, hydroponically, through futurism, while others try to reinvent the past via the “men’s movement," Goddess Worship, Afrocentrism and the like. Yet others search for roots in such still-living cultures as the Indian, Native American, Tibetan or Chinese, as if perhaps by donning their visages they can somehow assimilate their ways. We have, however, become so superficial that few of us know how to dive deep enough into the cultures we seek to emulate to tap into their roots, and so we usually, as Jung feared, poison ourselves.
Vimalananda had no more faith that mass spiritual movements can save us than he trusted in social programs, political activism or enforced morality to rescue us, since all such solutions are superficial; they change our cloth ing, not our inner beings. He believed that real change can come only through those individuals who are brave enough to examine all of their real ity assumptions and change those which must be changed. The numerous misconceptions about spirituality which permeate our modern world make his teachings on Kundalini valuable for everyone trying to follow a spiritual path. Before his death Vimalananda charged me with the responsibility of presenting his musings to those willing to listen, as much for the purpose of organizing my own knowledge, refining my understanding and manifesting my own creativity as for the purpose of instructing others. He also wanted me to have something solid to remember him by, so that whenever I want to be with him again I need only open the book.
Like other great teachers Vimalananda had a knack for being right, as well
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as an outstanding ability to impart his knowledge to those around him, usu ally when they least expected it, via an uncommon perspective, mixing the ory with anecdote or letting anecdote reveal theory. His urbanity and ready humor betrayed a virtuosity in his play with the world which often masked an extraordinary shrewdness. He was never shy to speak out, and at times he seems as arrogant, harsh, critical, opinionated, pretentious and ready with stereotypes as much as at others his words are filled with sweetness, compassion, love, devotion, farsightedness and attention to detail. In his opinions and often peculiar views he was unequivocal and unshakeable, which earned him both fear and respect, and a reputation variously as a genius, crank and man of wisdom and God. Whatever else he may have been, Vimalananda was always real, always true to himself and his vision of reality, and he encouraged anyone who couldn’t stand his heat to leave his kitchen.
Those who are convinced that the real is limited to that which our senses can perceive will ask, “Did all the events described by Vimalananda actually ‘occur’ in the outward sense of our consensus reality, or did they occur solely within his individual consciousness?” Better they should ask this question of themselves, for few people realize just how much of their reality is manipulated. Today’s mass media daily synthesize miraculous phenom ena for our amazement, that they may manipulate our emotions. Are these images “real” or not? With the rise of computer-generated “virtual reality" soon we will literally be unable to believe our eyes and ears; dare we rely on the “objective” truth of our sensory perceptions any longer?
One of the chief arguments against “subjective” reality is that since it has no physical substance it is ephemeral. This is certainly true, at least on the surface (which is where objective reality operates, after all). But below the surface it is objective reality which is found to be impermanent, while the reality of ideas, memories and reflections goes on and on. This truth is brought home to me regularly in India, where people when giving directions often refer to landmarks which were demolished years before. Clearly, a structure’s ethereal reality may persist long after its physical form has disap peared.
Though all living beings eventually lose their physical existence, they con tinue to live on in the hearts of those who remember them. Some live on in memory for generations; a few, like Jesus, will live and continue to trans form human lives forever. Others, like the gods and goddesses of India, are remembered even though they may never have lived in physical bodies. Are they real? We in India believe that they are far more real than humans are,
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even though their existence may not be provable by methods acceptable to materialistic science.
Whether these acts that Vimalananda recounts actually “happened” in the physical world or not is impossible to say, for India is truly a mysterious country and strange things do happen there. Many people who knew Vimalananda experienced many unusual things when in his vicinity, and most of them attributed such occurrences to him, while he attributed them to the Great Goddess: “I am talking as if I do these things, but in fact it is beyond me to do anything. Only Ma can do it; She does it all. This is the foundation of all my confidence in my abilities. Do I have any capabilities? Ha! Everything is from Ma.” Vimalananda was an artist of consciousness, and it is enough to know that his experiences were intensely real and true to him, and that they can be real and true for anyone who is open to the possi bility of their being so. Every time I reread an incident from his life it sud denly becomes real for me again, no matter how long ago it transpired, and Vimalananda thus continues to live for me.
Vimalananda was convinced by his experiments, as some modern physi cists have become convinced by their experiments, that it is really impossi ble to speak of objective reality without taking the assistance of a subjective observer, a “knower" whose observation irrevocably alters the reality thus observed. That shift in perception which allows Aghoris to know that knower, known and the process of knowing are one and the same Reality allows them to perceive miraculous phenomena, whether obvious to others or not. Aghoris control their thoughts and emotions themselves that they may better enjoy the reality they so crave: the company of the Beloved.
Since human consciousness requires objects, this book speaks of Kun dalini as if she can be considered in isolation from the individual in whom She exists. Kundalini cannot be objectified, but until She is awakened in an individual She exists for him or her only as a concept, and so She can be rel atively objectified. As She awakens, this relative objectification is progres sively converted into relative subjectification, until when Kundalini has been completely aroused one moves wholly into subjective consciousness, and descriptions lose their utility.
This was one of the reasons that Vimalananda preferred to deal with peo ple individually, and never discoursed in public. When he met someone he would use words to express the objective portion of what he had to commu nicate, and would express the subjective part by other means. Since each individual’s consciousness is made up of a particular ratio of subjective to objective awareness, the targeted individual would often get the message
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while other people in the room might miss it entirely. I have tried to select from the many objective messages directed at me over the years those which are sufficiently general to be of use to readers who knew neither of us, and I have tried to compile them in such a way as to permit some of his subjective messages to come through as well.
Vimalananda insisted on anonymity in these books because the less peo ple know of the external details of his life the less they will be distracted from looking at what he wants them to see: the internal details. Anonymity protects his message–the subjective story of his life—from any scholarly nitpicking over its objective details. A consummate actor, he compiled his teachings in the book of his life, in actions rather than in words, his every action a well-thought-out statement in the chapters of his saga. Though he insisted on anonymity both for himself and for his mentors, the name Vimalananda is not wholly pseudonymous; he used it occasionally in his younger days. It means both “son of Vimala" (his mother’s name was Vimala) and “he whose bliss is stainless." Through all the ups and downs of his life, in days of anguish or exaltation, Vimalananda’s bliss was ever stain less, because he was a true Aghori, perpetually intoxicated with love for God.
As I struggled over Aghora I realized that no single angle provides a truly accurate view of Vimalananda, and so I decided to use three angles. In Aghora Vimalananda told his own story subjectively, presenting his life and work in his own words much as they were spoken to me, his scribe. In this book he appears much as I saw and objectified him, and in the third volume will appear the artist that was Vimalananda, constantly at work in the atelier of the world around him.
This book deals predominantly with Vimalananda’s approach to the details of Tantra, as outlined in the preface to Aghora, and has three protag onists: the teacher (Vimalananda), the taught (me), and the teaching. A majority of it is dialogue, or rather trialogue, since the teaching has its own voice. Living wisdom cannot be confined within words, but it can be hinted at through situations, much as a specific feature of an otherwise undistin guished landscape can often be discerned by following the path projected by a pointing finger. “Them that have ears, let them hear,” said Jesus; who ever “hears” the inner import of Vimalananda’s words will be able to “see" their inward meaning.
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