Road Rage, landslides and Spills: Saints of SRF

Book Review: Part Four

A Paramahansa Yogananda Trilogy of Divine Love

by: Durga Mata

While staying at the Encinitas hermitage, Rajasi would occasionally like to go for a drive. Rajasi preferred Oldsmobiles.

The car that has everything 

His chauffeur in Kansas City kept Rajasi's car clean and in immaculate order at all times. "Rajasi expected the same from us and became rather impatient if the car was not just right." (page 113).

ROAD RAGE

He liked a good rate of speed, traffic permitting. He was rather impatient on the road with other drivers who would not move over if he wanted to pass. He would lean on the horn until they did." (page 112)

Highly Advanced Yogi Practicing Tantrum Yoga

LANDSLIDE

In 1937 The "Golden Lotus Temple" in Encinitas was built on the bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, just 10 to 15 feet from the edge. Apparently even though Yogananda could see everything down to the tiniest atoms while in Samadhi, Divine Mother mischievously did not reveal to him the reality of groundwater and erosion.

Divine Mother sticking out her tongue

 In 1942 the temple slid down to the ocean. When it slid down the hill, the other Disciples ran down to tell Rajasi. Perhaps reasoning (correctly) that he couldn't push it back up the hill, he did not get upset and finished his swim before coming to take a look.

Karma or an act of God?

I don't know what the building permit process was back then.

Speaking of permits in 1981 in an "apparently misguided effort" (whose guidance?) SRF toppled the bluff while grading without a permit:

Workers suspended a bulldozer from a crane at the blufftop and ended up causing 3,500 square feet of bluff between J and K streets to topple under the weight of the heavy equipment, a San Diego Coast Regional Commission report stated.
The fellowship was fined $15,000, an unprecedented amount at the time, and ordered to plant vegetation on the bluff face. 

http://www.theleucadiablog.com/2007_04_01_archive.html 

On the positive side the vegetation was a great success and a model project for the area, so Hip Hip Hooray!

UGLINESS

"Rajasi did not like Ugliness in any form. For instance if he dropped something and it spilled it's contents, he disgustingly walked out of the room as fast as he could so he would not have to see it."

I guess someone less Spiritually Advanced would then have to clean it up?

"Master would not allow us to talk in a negative vein to Rajasi; the conversation or reports or talking to Rajasi had to be on a  constructive basis. I can well understand the reason as Rajasi was not able to take negativeness of any type. If the slightest negative element entered into the reports, he thereafter would not have anything to do with the project or person" (page 113)

If he saw anyone "step out of Character" he would then shun the person. If the person was someone he HAD to deal with he would then give that person no favors or special attention. Durga says though, that he could be merciful and forgive most of the time.

"Rajasi was especially naive towards anyone on the spiritual path" he felt they must all be saints and angels. If he ever saw them make a "Faulty move" he was very "critical". Durga states that over time he became a little more forgiving and accepting of others. Yogananda said that was why Rajasi had been matched with an invalid wife. To help teach him tolerance. (page 114)

Durga says Rajasi was very childlike. He had loved his Mother dearly and responded well to mothering. "Motherly praises for his good deeds toward the organization and to Master would give him the incentive to continue to do more."

(to be continued)

Katie

Eugenics and the all knowing

From the Hindus let us take their methods of Self-Realization through scientific psycho-physical meditation...  Let us take the pantheistic conception of God ...  Let us take [the] law of Karm or cause and effect which makes man responsible for his advancement or downfall, and explains why there are born failures, morons and other defectives, produced not by God but by the wrong actions of individuals in past lives. 

Paramahansa Yogananda

This is interesting. 

Of course Mr. Burbank and Yogananda could not have forseen how Hitler and the Nazi's would use this information. Lots of people were fooled by this. It is not like they were all knowing Saints or Avatars or anything like..oh..wait... they WERE all knowing Saints and Avatars...

YIKES!

Peace and Best Wishes,

Katie

------------------------

From Science and Civilization:
Will the growing intelligence of man (Science) forever tolerate the wholesale production of the ever-increasing proportion of idiots, morons, Mongoloids, insane, criminal, weak, destitute, nervous, diseased half-men and women ...who infest the earth to their own sorrow and disgrace and perhaps the ultimate destruction of our present state of civilization?
Science and Civilization by Luther Burbank
East West Magazine
Self realization Fellowship
November-December 1925
Volume 1

This article is interesting in light of Yogananda's praises of Adolph Hitler a few years later.
"uplifting guidance of Hitler"

Yogananda. "Christmas message". East-West Magazine, 1933


Luther Burbank belonged to a group of American Eugenicists who actually wrote the research and opinions that lead to Hitlers rational of creating a Master Aryan race.

Mr. Burbank does not say what the Final Solution to Idiots, mongoloids and morons is...but the Nazi's got the memo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EnthanasiePropaganda.jpg 

TRANSLATION OF ABOVE POSTER:

60000 RM this is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the Community of Germans during his lifetime Fellow Citizen, that is your money

From:

Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection

November 09, 2003|By Edwin Blac

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a so-called Master Race... The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little-known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race...In its extreme, racist form, this meant wiping away all human beings deemed "unfit," ...California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement.

Article Here

Saints of SRF: Durga Mata

Book Review: Part one

In the next series of posts, I will talk about Stories from Durga Matas (1903- 1992) autobiography My life and service to my Guru. This is a rare book (SRF did not want it published) but I have  a copy and I think it is an interesting account of SRF history.

Dobby Mata. House elf.

The Basics
Durga Mata (Florina Darling) was an SRF nun. She was born in 1903 to a French Canadian Catholic family. When she was 19 she married and later adopted one of her nephews. She met Yogananda in 1927 and went to Mount Washington to live in 1929 at age 26. Yogananda gave her the name Durga as she was his housekeeper, servant and cook in a former life and that was her name then. She says she would fast herself to extreme thinness so she may have had anerexia. She left her husband to become an SRF nun. Her adopted son came to live at the ashram for a time but he was a bad seed "this boy was unsuited to live in a spiritual home" so he was sent away. "Mr. Darling willingly gave me up...My adopted son was removed and my brother and his family removed themselves with their evil actions. see how the Lord takes care of his own"(page 12).

The "evil actions" of her brother
Her brother and his family came to live at the ashram after taking the SRF lessons with Durga. They worked around the grounds and did bookeeping. After a couple of years the brother came to have a different opinion of Yogananda. He spoke out against Yogananda and the lessons. There was a big argument at the ashram that included shouting, some violence, tactile hysteria, some kind of Pychotic episode that included burning sensations and lawn rolling and apparently blackmail, as the brother demanded $500.00 dollars from Yogananda and got it. The book isn't clear about what was behind it all except "Satan". The brother was ill before the whole event and may have suffered an illness induced pychotic episode.

Years later (in 1938) she was allowed to visit her brother. Yoganada sent her to the "best hotel" in Detroit with the "best of clothes" to show the brother that the life she had chosen was better than the one he chose. Her brother offered her a home with him but she said her home was with Master. The clothes part is interesting because there are several stories about clothes and Durga in the book.

What Durga did at the Ashram


Cook, clean, do laundry, housework, wait on Rajasi and Yogananda hand and foot, beg for funds, just to name a few. She lived in a room with crates for furnature. it was very cold, so cold she had to soak herself in a hot bath everyday to get enough mobility to work like an animal for them all day. According to her story there was some kind of hole in the wall that let drafts in. There are several stories interesting enough for their own separate telling and I want to include some of the information in the future with an entry about Rajasi. For the sake of this entry it is enough to say she was basically the House elf.

A Dress
Durga was paid a dollar a week for what amounted to slave labor. More on that later. The story I want to tell here is about her getting a $20.00 gift and buying a dress with the money. Durga was often sent by Yogananda to ask Rajasi for money. Rajasi gave each of the other disciples $5.00 a year for Christmas. Yogananda would not let him give them more though Yogananda often wanted lots more himself.
Durga helped a young SRF couple when they were sick and they gave her $20.00. She bought a dress with the money. When Yogananda saw the dress he said "I would have preferred you come see me in rags rather than accept money for services you rendered while you are in the service of God". She never wore the dress again nor did she ever accept any money from anyone save the dollar a week she earned as a nun.



(to be continued...)