A Pilgrimage to Guadalupe

Swami Kriyananda

Description

As he seeks answers to life's deepest questions, a pilgrim experiences seemingly chance meetings with an atheist, a social activist, Catholic monks, and others. While accompanying the pilgrim on his journey, the reader finds his own mind expanding, and discovers a universal and liberating life philosophy.

Sujets

• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Religión
• Body (disambiguation)
• New Thought
• Swami Kriyananda
• Eastern philosophy
• General officer
• General
• Body
• Paramahansa Yogananda
• Fiction
• Saints

Informations

• Publié par: Crystal Clarity Publishers
• Date de parution: 13 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781565895140
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Pilgrimage to Guadalupe
A Pilgrimage to Guadalupe
THE FINAL JOURNEY OF THE SOUL
A New Platonic Dialogue
Swami Kriyananda
Crystal Clarity Publishers
Nevada City, California
Crystal Clarity Publishers, Nevada City, CA Copyright © 2013 by Hansa Trust All rights reserved.
Printed in China
ISBN 978-1-56589-269-9 ePub ISBN 978-1-56589-514-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kriyananda, Swami A pilgrimage to Guadalupe : the soul’s final journey / by Swami Kriyananda. FIRST EDITION p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-56589-269-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-56589-514-0 (epub : alk. paper) 1. Pilgrims and pilgrimages--Fiction. 2. Guadalupe, Our Lady of--Fiction. 3. Conduct of life--Fiction. 4. Imaginary conversations--Fiction. 5. Religious fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Soul’s final journey.
PS3611.R59P55 2011 813’.6--dc22
2012002116
www.crystalclarity.com 800-424-1055 [e-mail]
COVER AND INTERIOR DESIGN BY MOLLY HERON
THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED TO
Cliff and Willow Kushler
with gratitude for their friendship, and for making it possible for me to publish it while I am still in the body to read it.
Foreword
H AVE YOU EVER HAD WHAT SEEMED TO BE A CHANCE encounter with someone who uplifted and changed you?
In A Pilgrimage to Guadalupe the pilgrim experiences a series of just such seemingly chance meetings. As the pilgrim seeks answers to life’s deepest questions, those he encounters include—at different times—an atheist, believers, a social activist, Catholic monks, a materialist, and two saintly women.
The author, Swami Kriyananda, a man of remarkable insight and love for humanity, creates compassionate dialogue between the pilgrim and those he meets (whose views of life often differ radically from his own). These conversations are respectful, good-humored, and at times challenging and thought-provoking. Because of the pilgrim’s deep respect for each person, each encounter is one of true and open communication; in the process, lives are changed.
People often have beliefs that limit their joyful experience of life. I’ve read that 71% of Americans believe God is angry, judgmental, or distant. Only 23% of Americans believe in a benevolent God. The pilgrim’s first encounter is with “believers” who tell him Jesus Christ came to save us from God’s vengeance. The pilgrim replies to his friends, “I don’t think Jesus wanted to protect us from God’s wrath. He wanted to open us to God’s love.” He goes on to remind them that Jesus scolded only the hypocrites; he showed compassion for those who sincerely wanted to change. How could God—the father of Jesus—be so radically different from His son?
As you, the reader, accompany the pilgrim on his journey, you will find your own mind expanding. In A Pilgrimage to Guadalupe you’ll discover a universal, loving, and liberating life philosophy that thrills the soul.
Because Swami Kriyananda’s own life, since childhood, has been a pilgrimage, he is well qualified to guide others on the path of truth and awakening. Take up your staff, if you will, and travel with Kriyananda to new vistas of truth, inner joy, and freedom.
You’ll be very happy you did.
—J OSEPH C ORNELL (N AYASWAMI B HARAT ) Author of Sharing Nature with Children and AUM: The Melody of Love
A Pilgrimage to Guadalupe
ONE
At the Graveside
T HE MOURNERS HAD LEFT. THE COFFIN HAD BEEN lowered to its final resting place; it was now decently covered with dirt. I stood there alone in the darkening twilight, weeping.
“Why?!”
My anguished cry rang out into the gathering night, and in my own heart.
“My beloved wife! Only two days ago I saw your face: smiling, radiant, fresh! I held your hand; it was warm. Now it is cold—dark; beyond my despairing reach!
“Why?”
Intensely I felt her loss. But I wasn’t asking, “Why did I lose her?” I knew the answer to that question: The end of life is death. My anguish arose from the thought, rather, “Why do we have to live at all?”
We are born, I reflected, without our conscious consent.
We are driven helplessly onto a stage and forced to play our parts. Whether we play them well or badly seems equally pointless: their ending, in any case, is death. Why even play the game? We can never win it.
Role after role! Game after game! Fresh, exuberant life—then the final sinking into death! Is anything real?
And yet—I thought again—life persists! Is life, and not the countless forms it assumes, the reality?
I thought of life rising up out of the ground, as if with eternal impulse. And then the further thought came: Surely that life contains intelligence, even if it is a different kind of knowing from our own. Is such an awareness possible?
Perhaps we come on earth as exiles from another reality. A higher one?
Ah! Suddenly I felt myself here on earth a stranger—a foreigner, and alone. What could I do? Where could I go? I raised my gaze questioningly above that lonely grave, and looked beyond it.
There, all of a sudden: Lo! I beheld before me a beautiful young girl.
“Why are you here at this lonely site?” I asked her. “Did you know my wife? Have you, too, come to mourn her death?”
She answered me with a smile, “I knew her. I still know her. And I know you!”
“But how is that possible? I have never seen you before! Surely you couldn’t know me!”
“My child,” she said—and she seemed hardly half my age!—“you have known Me in countless forms. You knew not that it was I, smiling at you behind every happy experience, and weeping with you behind every pain. It was I in the comfort of your mother’s arms, holding you when your friends turned away from you. It was I in them also, telling you silently through their disdain: ‘Not here will you find the balm you seek.’ It was I now, also, who took from you your beloved wife in order that you might know a higher love.”
“Then . . . ?” I queried, not daring to pursue the question further in words.
“Yes, I am that life for which you are longing. I am that ‘intelligence,’ which is much more than arid reasoning: I am absolute Knowledge. And I am absolute Peace, Love, and Bliss!”
My heart burst then, like a broken dam. Waters of pure love gushed out from it in a mighty torrent. “Then You must be that Being whom all men worship! You must be . . .”
“I am your Lady of Guadalupe,” She finished for me. It was an unexpected reply. Where was Guadalupe? Who was the Lady there? Why would She come to me?
“I am the Divine in its aspect of Mother,” She explained further. “In this form I particularly watch over God’s children in the Americas. I am your Divine Mother. And you are My divine child.”
“Oh, can I be with You always? Always!”
“My son, that is your destiny. But you must first undergo purification. If you would be with Me, you will have to travel. Go as a pilgrim to My shrine in Mexico. Go, as a penitent, by foot.”
“Gladly!” I cried. “Shall I then leave everything behind me?”
“Everything, My child. Has anything ever been yours, anyway? Your work, possessions, friends—all these, in the sense that they were yours at all, were yours only on loan. Lo! all things are but gossamer—blowing lightly on the wind.”
“Oh, I will leave today! I will leave at this very moment. The thought that You will be waiting there to receive me!”
“Go, then, by narrow roads, avoiding the congested high-ways. Solicit no rides, but if people offer you a ride, you may accept. Through them you will learn what you need to know.”
She smiled kindly, then vanished. I turned away from the grave.
And there before me lay the first stretch of my long journey.
TWO
I Set Forth on My Pilgrimage
I SET OUT WITH ONLY THE CLOTHES ON MY BACK. THE little money I had already on my person was all I took with me. I telephoned no one. My mood was simply to drop out of view, to be no one—to cease, in a sense, to exist. I suppose, for me, it was a kind of suicide. Tragic loss had made me want to erase my very identity. “Someday,” I thought, “I, too, must die, and those whom I knew best on earth will know me no longer. If someday, then why not now? My true home has never been here. Always, it has been eternity.”
Yet despite this thought I set out with hope in my heart. The past was now dead. The future beckoned me with hope of an unknown, but shining, fulfillment. I had leapt off a precipice, having been promised I’d be caught in the air, so to speak. What would happen now?
As I walked down the road, I sang under my breath, the song resounding in my own heart: “Night and day, night and day, dancing, Mother, in Thy joy!”
A car stopped beside me.
“Would you like a ride, friend?” A man in his middle fifties smiled at me as he called out from an open window. I opened the front door of his car and got in.
“Where are you headed?” he asked as soon as I’d got settled. He glanced at me briefly before returning his attention to the road.
“I’m on a search,” I replied.
“A search, eh? What are you seeking for?”
“I’m seeking understanding,” I said. (What else could I say? It was the simple truth.)
“‘In all thy getting,’” he quoted, “‘get understanding.’ That’s in the Bible, you know. Proverbs 4:7. Do you read the Bible?”
“Sometimes,” I replied. “I’m sort of familiar with it.”
“Friend, all the answers are written there. Say, what’s your name? Mine’s John, by the way.”
“For the moment, I have no name. You might call me Friend.”
“Friend, eh? Well that’s easy enough. But amnesia! That’s a pity. Maybe I can help you. Where are you coming from?”
“What I mean is, I’m trying to forget my past.”
“Voluntary amnesia, eh? I’ve never he