YOGA

Our institutions in today's bustling modern world tell us that the way forward to a better quality of life lies in the further development and forward march of technology- especially now in this regards, to things like genetic engineering, psychoactive drugs, electronic implants to improve brain function and so on and so forth. Personally it's been my experience that the things that can really give us a much better quality of life are simple, cheap, and have been available to us for a long long time. One such thing is Yoga.
I first got interested in Yoga in the early '70s when I read THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI by Yogananda. It was a most fascinating book and I must have read it about 15 times. Then I met an old high school friend whom I hadn't seen in a couple of years. He had been doing yoga from
correspondence lessons that he got from Yogananda's Self Realization Fellowship and he was much transformed for the better. There was a glow in his face and a light in his eyes that had never been there before.
Instead of being the same old idiot kid saying idiot things like all the other idiot kids that I had gone to high school with, he now had wise and intelligent things to say. I figured I had to get into this Yoga also. But I didn't send for the SRF correspondence lessons. I was living in Toronto at that time and a lot of traveling gurus visited the city and a poster for one particularly caught my interest. This was for a 90 year old guru called Swami Janardan and he was teaching something called Ajapa Yoga. I went to his lecture and was very impressed by him. He was a tiny little old man, not much more than skin and bones, but he had more energy than any teenager I knew and his presence dominated the lecture hall. I was impressed by his answers to questions, which were always simple and practical, he was obviously a man of action and not just a philosopher who'd spin his wheels without going anywhere. For instance, one man asked him if his teaching could lead to the experience of samadhi. Swami Janardan answered, "there are 3 kinds of samadhi, which one do you want?''
So I went for the initiation in Ajapa, which he was offering for $20. Now Swami Janardan himself didn't speak English, so he had a young disciple named Romesh travelling with him and translating for him. When I went for the initiation, Romesh told me that when they first left India to go to
Europe and America, they offered initiation for free. Very few people came. So they decided to charge $2. More people came. So they raised it to $10 and still more came. By the time they hit Toronto they were up to $20 and hundreds of people in each city came to them for initiation. So much for the law of supply and demand, eh? I found out later however, that of the hundreds in each city who took initiation, very few ever actually practiced the technique. In Toronto, 200 took initiation and I found out several months later, having volunteered to call them all and see how they were
doing and see if they wanted the second half of the initiation, that I was the only one still practicing regularly, one other man practiced occasionally when he went out to the country, and most of the people had paid their 20 bucks and never even tried doing the technique to see what it would do for them. Ajapa is a breathing technique to retain energy that is normally exhaled. I began practicing it as I walked the 2 miles home from where I got the initiation, and was all of a sudden amazed to feel
light as a feather as if I was walking on air, more full of energy and joy of life than I had ever imagined possible before. Which was a nice experience for me because I had up to then always been very depressed and full of anxiety and worry with not much get up and go at all, it was a struggle to push myself to do anything. Ajapa gave me the energy to start doing something with
my life.
I practiced Ajapa as much as I could for about a year and then got very interested in the teaching of Guru Maharaj Ji, who at that time had become quite famous throughout the world as the "13 year old Perfect Master" with a following probably in the hundreds of thousands, maybe even a few
million. He was offering to show you God. He said quite seriously and straightforwardly that he could reveal God to you, and urged people to take his Knowledge and prove to their own satisfaction whether what he said was true or not. I got initiated in this Knowledge in January of 1973. Maharaj Ji's Knowledge was a set of 4 meditation techniques, the primary one being
concentration on the inner sound current which you can learn to feel in the spine. When you practiced this technique you would become full of a wonderful energy that gave you joy of life, love, clear reason, and a drive to do useful worthwhile work that would be good for yourself and others. And you intuitively knew that this was the energy of God, this was divine energy, the spirit of the Creator. Atheists take note, it is entirely possible to know God, God is not just something to believe or disbelieve in. Actually though the techniques were quite different, both Ajapa and the
Knowledge produced the same sort of result. I practiced the Knowledge all through the rest of the '70s. It really helped me get my life moving in a good direction. I learned sign painting and went into business for myself. I got interested in other things I could do to improve my life and discovered
raw food diet, which has helped me immensely to avoid illness and maintain youthful energy as I have gotten a lot older, as we all do if we live long enough. I had always been quite interested in politics, having come from a family where my father had been a Young Communist League and labor union organizer, and my mother likewise had been a labor union organizer and later became a history teacher who did all she could do indoctrinate her students in Marxism. So I was raised to believe in all the left wing and progressive stuff and when I got into meditating regularly on the Knowledge I saw what utter nonsense all my left wing beliefs were. Meditating on the inner sound
current is like washing your mind with the spirit of the Creator and you generally see what a fool you've been all your life and now see much more clearly what the truth about everything is. And you want to repent of your misguided ways and follow the guidance of the Creator on the true path to
Life. You might say it's like being born again. The Christians make some good points, though I don't think they have a monopoly on God like they think they do. Anyway, I saw that politically, the best way to go is Constitutionalism, the way of the US Founders like Patrick Henry and Tom
Jefferson and George Washington. The US founders had quite good insight into what the right relationship of the people and the government ought to be and they wrote a Constitution for this country to really try to put this into practice and they did the best job anyone in the modern world has done so far. The United States has never been perfect of course but so long as the
Constitution was more-or-less adhered to, it did become the creative dynamo of the world, virtually all the inventions that define the modern world, for better and worse, originated in the USA, and America also became a dynamic leader in art, music, literature and just about every field of human
endeavor, this because of the Bill of Rights which for a couple of hundred years did a pretty good job of safeguarding the freedom and private property rights of the average person. In pretty much all the other countries throughout history the creativity of the average person has been stifled
because of the control of the nobility or aristocrats or dictator or whoever it was that controlled the country, and because the rulers owned all the property and the average person didn't have enough wealth or space to exercise their creative direction with. As the current government increasingly tramples on the freedom of the average person and sucks up all their money and puts more and more restrictions on the use of land and property, America will cease to be the great dynamo of creativity that it has been. As an artist I don't like this one bit, but hardly anyone else seems to give a damn so there doesn't look like much realistic hope of turning things around. I suggest anyone who wants to help turn things around consider, amongst other things, vote for the Libertarian or
Constitutional parties, they come closest to wanting to restore the relationship of people and government to the way God intended it to be. The Greens have some good points but they're too left wing and socialistic. The Republicans and Democrats are both very close to 100% luciferean, they are doing their best to turn everything around so the country works exactly the opposite of
what is good right and true, so a vote for either one of them is a wasted vote.
In 1980 I moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I am at present still. And that year I met a very interesting fellow who called himself Pan who persuaded me to take initiation in Kundalini Mahayoga. This was taught by another 90 year old guru called Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas. When you did meditation as he taught, your kundalini energy would rise up your spine and into your higher chakras. After a few weeks of practice of this, I found my energy considerably increased and many new interests and attitudes toward life developing as a result of this awakening of my higher chakras. I became more altruistic and more interested in the big picture, not just in my own
personal life and personal success. Instead of being only interested in the success of my own business, I became interested in national and world economics. Instead of being only interested in how much money I could make from whatever skills in commercial art I had developed, I got
interested in fine art and art history and began to set aside a couple of hours every day to draw and paint just for development and expression, whether I got paid for it or not. I know a lot of activists who lament the fact that the average person doesn't seem to give a damn about the good of the
country, all they care about is their own job and their own sex life, and they wonder why these people can't see the big picture, and how horrendous things are, and get motivated to do something about it. Well, I learned the answer. These people aren't interested in the big picture, don't care about the good of the country, and won't get off the couch and do something because they have no kundalini in their higher chakras.
I practiced Kundalini Mahayoga diligently for several years, and then in 1987 found out about the Tibetan Rejuvenation Rites. These are a set of 5 simple exercises that, according to the story, were brought out of Tibet by a British colonel who had gone to live in a lamasery in the Himalayas
because he had heard stories that they seemed to have a fountain of youth there, men of over 100 years old still had the appearance, strength and vigor of healthy men in their 40s. I got the Rites from a book published by Harbor Press called ANCIENT SECRET OF THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH.
There's another version of this book published by Borderland Sciences called THE EYE OF REVELATION. After 3 weeks daily practice of the Rites I was amazed at how much more energy I had and how much younger I felt. And they only took about 7 minutes a day to do. They gave me the best bang for the buck of any form of Yoga that I had tried so far so I practiced them daily and did not practice the others so much anymore. I had a lot of work to do and only had so much time for Yoga.
After practicing the 5 Tibetan Rites for 15 years, a woman in France whom I had got into correspondence with urged me to try Hatha Yoga as taught by Bikram Choudhury, in the book BEGINNING YOGA CLASS by Bikram Choudhury. Reluctantly, I bought the book and began trying a few of the exercises. I was pretty stiff and didn't bend all that much and the exercises were very
difficult and painful for me. Besides, I had heard the practicioners of the more meditative sorts of yoga say that hatha yoga was just for the body, they sort of looked down on it as a lower form of yoga. But, after a week of doing a few of the beginning exercises in the book, I was amazed to
feel about 20 years younger and much more energy than ever before. So I started doing all the exercises as best I could and have done so ever since. It's truly wonderful the energy, youthfulness and feeling of strength that hatha yoga gives you. In my 50s now I have a lot more energy than when I was a teenager and feel a lot more like doing hard manual work than ever before, and actually do more than ever. For instance I cut all my firewood in winter with an axe, sledgehammer and wedges, no chain saws or power splitters.
So- if you want something to really give you a higher and finer quality of life, my advice is, don't wait for the scientists to invent some sort of magic pill for you to take- try Yoga!