There was a significant difference between the respect given our Guru by his early disciples, and that which we gave who came to him closer to the end of his life.
During his early years, he had done his best to make people understand that whatever he had accomplished, they too could accomplish. He played down his own spiritual greatness in order to help them accept their own high potential. In his last years, he spoke more frankly—as Jesus Christ often did—of his own state of oneness with God. His early disciples saw him as a great man, but for all that still a man, and fallible. We who came later—those of us, anyway, who tuned in deeply to what he was saying—saw him as a window onto Infinity.
To me, Daya’s closeness to him appeared to be centered above all in the thought of him as a human being. It was also centered in organizational matters, and in personal exchanges with him. Where his actual teachings were concerned, and certainly in their more abstract aspects, she was astonishingly deficient. Once she explained to me the meaning of Christ Consciousness, for example, as being “when you see everyone in the world as your own brother and sister.” How completely different, her explanation, from the cosmic explanation our Master gave!
Master, quoting the words of Jesus, often said to us, “The last shall be the first.” The number of years Daya was with him must be balanced against what she herself was capable of absorbing, with her human understanding. Physical proximity is not enough. Seniority is not enough.
The Master often referred quite casually to a former incarnation of his own: as William the Conqueror. For me, this news came as something of a shock. My early education had been in the English system, which had conditioned me to view William I as one of history’s great villains! This revelation of Master’s made me ponder, and study, the Conqueror’s life more deeply.
Many years later, I gave to Catherine Kairavi, a member of Ananda, the job of researching William’s life, as well as that of his fourth son, Henry I, whom history depicts as William’s spiritual heir. Catherine’s book, published in 2010 under the title, Two Souls: Four Lives, shows William to have been a deeply spiritual man, blessed with a difficult but distinctly spiritual mission. Among many other things, she points out that William’s body was found incorrupt—as happens only in the case of great saints—430 years after his death.
Her book also makes a very strong case for something no doubt surprising: for my having actually been his son Henry. The similarities are compelling.
But much more importantly, Catherine’s book shows that the reason Master shared with us the memory of that incarnation was to help us understand that his role in the present lifetime, too, is destined to have a great impact on the world. Indeed, I believe it will be instrumental in changing the course of civilization itself—as in fact William’s life did. Such, indeed, is the final message of Catherine Kairavi’s excellent book.
Daya told me, in substantially the following words: “I was William’s daughter Agatha.[1] William sent me to Spain to be the wife of the heir to the king of that country (Castile-Leon). But I had a deep desire to dedicate my life to God, and prayed to be spared the destiny my father wanted for me. When the ship arrived in port, I was found kneeling by my bed in an attitude of prayer, dead.”
Daya related this story to me as evidence of her own deep devotion to God (a quality she certainly did possess). To me, however, it has always seemed that Agatha’s posture in death may also have been less praiseworthy, indicating as it did a rejection of her own guru’s will for her, and a failure to recognize the true greatness of her father/guru in either life. Had she become the queen of Spain, she might have gained an understanding of leadership qualities which, in this life, have been lacking. Maybe her Guru was even then aware of today’s realities. Had she been a queen in that life, that experience might have made her a better SRF president in this one.
She also said to me, “In this life, I have had trouble with my knees.” Had she died on her knees in accordance with God’s will, would not her knees have been, if anything, blessed in this lifetime, instead of giving her trouble?
Yogananda himself, in a letter to Rajarshi Janakananda (the Master’s most advanced disciple), once lamented “Poor Faye’s” deficiency in leadership qualities. As he wrote: “Faye through my incapacity does not know to do things any way as I did, money or no money she has none to guide her. As a result the work has started going back.” He concluded, “Everyone in the work is terrified about the work’s future.”
In her present lifetime also, Daya has repeatedly equated Yogananda’s will with her own wishes. A case in point is her declaration that his primary reason for coming to the West was to create a monastery. Obviously, her indifference to his fervor for starting “world brotherhood colonies” is another case in point.
[1]Agatha is not listed in many English-language histories of William’s life, perhaps because she died at a young age. There are records, however, especially in Spain, that Agatha was one of William’s daughters, affianced, as Daya told me, to the heir to the throne.
I appreciate your writing about William, who was a self-confessed cruel murderer and repented on his death-bed for the carnage he caused. Was this a holy war, or a jealous, ruthless ruler seeking power? Faced with death and when the Ego is losing its strength of power, the truth can suddenly change an evil heart in a very short space of time. History clearly reveals the many righteous and holy wars that have devastated lives, but contributing to God’s plan of salvation too throughout the Ages! The Book of Daniel tells of future world kingdoms to come and the wars that have also created them, but Daniel was a righteous prophet who knew of the sins of his people that brought them into captivity. Was he a villain before he was chosen? No!
I am shattered at this news of Paramahansa Yogananda’s confession to a former incarnation of William and continue to pray to our Divine Father. to reveal the truth to me. Blessings to you.
Thank you for your comment, Margaret. Have you the facts in hand? Recommend you read “Two Souls, Four Lives” before finally deciding whether William was the villain you describe. History is replete with highly prejudiced revisions of the lives of great saints. Would you believe that St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross were caught in flagrante delicto in a village square when the sides of the wagon in which they were riding “miraculously” fell away, simply because their enemies in the church invented the story? Would you believe that the early Christians were guilty of child murders, blasphemous orgies, and other excesses, simply because the “good” Roman authorities made these claims? Would you believe that Yogananda had the nuns living on the same floor as he at Mt. Washington, simply because a traitorous, jealous former monk stated this to bloodthirsty reporters? Really, you do need to inform yourself of the other side of the story of William’s very holy life, before you believe what the conquered, highly prejudiced people of the island wrote into the “historical” record.
William was very evil guy. Certainly not living by spiritual values. It is very disconcerting to hear this. How he could go from noble Arjuna, to murderer in chief, then back to Yogananda is disheartening.
Swami Kriyananda cited evidence many times that refutes the notion that William was one of history’s great villain. For example, in these words from his book Conversations With Yogananda:
The subject of that power deserves a commentary of its own. For he told us that, in a former incarnation, he had been William the Conqueror.
What an irony for me, personally! I’d been raised until the age of thirteen within the English school system, where little good was said about William. Indeed, I considered him one of the great villains of history. And here suddenly, to my self-admitted dismay, I found that this “villain” was my own guru!
Naturally, on first receiving this news I made it a point to read up on William’s life. From that reading I learned that what people had found “villainous” about him was above all – apart from the obvious fact that he frustrated many people’s selfish ambitions – his aura of enormous power. Baron after baron pitted himself futilely against him. Even while William was a boy, he had to fight for his birthright. Later in life, his own oldest son Robert (nicknamed “Curthose”) fought against him, motivated by fierce envy.
William had an important role to play in history. His vigor was not due, as historians generally suppose, to personal ambition. He acted in obedience to God’s command, inwardly.
His was a hard life. So also were the times he lived in. He had no alternative but to respond appropriately to the countless challenges he faced. Had he been more acquiescing, he would have failed in his task. It must be remembered that God sends not only nourishing rain upon the earth, but also lightning, drought, and raging floods. William was a divine instrument in an important destiny. He forged into a single nation a patchwork of loosely knit, warring fiefdoms. England, too, had a divine destiny: to unite East and West, and thereby gradually to help mankind in its struggle to enter a new and higher age: Dwapara Yuga.
William was, in fact, a deeply spiritual man. It is said of him that he never for a day missed receiving the Eucharist. He built and strengthened monasteries. His closest friends were saintly men: Archbishop Lanfranc (who in the present life, Yogananda told us, was his guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar), and also Anselm. In an age notorious for its promiscuity, it is said of William that he was completely faithful to his wife.
The purpose of this book, obviously, is not to analyze the life of William the Conqueror. I mention it here to underscore an important aspect of Yogananda’s character: his extraordinary power. This was evident to all who knew him personally. It was an aspect of his nature that many people have overlooked, or else have known little about. Again, as I said, that widespread lack of awareness may be due to the fact that, apart from Dr. Lewis, hardly any man seems ever to have spoken or written much about the Master. Even Dr. Lewis, though a deeply devoted disciple, saw his Guru only in terms of his own personal love for him. He never showed a deep understanding of the universality of the Master’s mission, nor of the universal love he bore everyone. Sananda Lal Ghosh, a brother of the Master’s, years later wrote a book about the Master’s early life called Mejda, but Sananda wasn’t a disciple, and never did anything actually to serve the Master’s mission. His book is completely personal, though also fascinating.
Many people have commented, in fact, how surprised (not to say shocked) they were when they first heard the Master’s voice on a recording. Resounding clearly in that voice is no ba-a-a of a gentle lamb, but the mighty roar of a spiritual warrior.
~ 160 ~
I asked the Master once, after I’d pondered his life as William, “Is it possible, Sir, for a liberated master not to live in a state of samadhi [the highest state of ecstasy]?” He replied: “One never loses the awareness that he is inwardly free.”
Indeed, when I reflect on avatars like Lahiri Mahasaya, I see that, in order to fulfill their earthly roles – in Lahiri Mahasaya’s case it was to marry, to work like other householders, and to raise a family, and at the same time to be, inwardly, an exalted yogi – they had to accept a certain veil of delusion. It was only when Lahiri Mahasaya met Babaji in the Himalayas that he fully recalled his true spiritual stature.
A liberated master, however, though assigned even the task of walking among worldly people as a worldly person himself, never loses his awareness that nothing in this world can touch him, inwardly.
~ 161 ~
“History,” Napoleon Bonaparte is reputed to have said, “is a lie agreed upon.” Among such lies, certainly, are many of the legends surrounding William the Conqueror. A disciple of the Master’s was reading William’s life once, and came upon a passage where William was described as courting Matilda by knocking her down and dragging her about the room by the hair. Amused, the disciple read this section aloud to the Master. He replied in amazement, “How they distort history! What happened wasn’t like that at all.”