Two Souls: Four Lives

Catherine Kairavi

Description

Is it possible that two of the greatest men of the Norman Conquest—William the Conqueror and his son, Henry I of England—have recently reincarnated as Paramhansa Yogananda (spiritual master and author of the classic Autobiography of a Yogi) and his close disciple, Swami Kriyananda-and if so, what are the subtle connections between the Norman Conquest and modern times? How will these past lives influence our future?

In Two Souls: Four Lives, Catherine Kairavi describes a society much more primitive than our own in both knowledge and consciousness, she depicts the days of William and Henry as having been far more brutal than our own, despite the much greater capacity for destruction of modern weaponry.

Historians will inevitably object that mankind was the same in William’s day as it is today. For they are intellectual scholars, and there is no aspect of human consciousness more disposed to argument than the intellect. It is kept vital and alive, after all, by argument. It will probably be other historians who grow up with this new and broader perspective on their subject.

Catherine Kairavi devoted ten years carefully researching for this book. For the rest, maybe Paramhansa Yogananda’s statement that he himself was William could outweigh, for many readers, any doubts and challenges that may be presented to disprove certain statements in this book. It is a completely new take on present and future trends in modern society.

Sujets

• reincarnation
• afterlife
• Body (disambiguation)
• Swami Kriyananda
• Eastern philosophy
• Spirituality
• Paramahansa Yogananda

Informations

• Publié par: Crystal Clarity Publishers
• Date de parution: 16 octobre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781565895195
• Langue: English

Extrait

Two Souls: Four Lives
Two Souls: Four Lives

The Lives and Former Lives of Paramhansa Yogananda and His Disciple, Swami Kriyananda


Catherine Kairavi



Crystal Clarity Publishers
Nevada City, California
Crystal Clarity Publishers, Nevada City, CA 95959
Copyright © 2010 Catherine Kairavi
All rights reserved. Published 2010
Printed in China
ISBN: 978-1-56589-244-6

Cover design and layout by Renée Glenn Designs
Interior design and layout by Crystal Clarity Publishers
Special thanks to the many photographers who have given their contributions to this work. Photographs are used with permission from the individual photographers. Individual credits are listed under each photograph.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kairavi, Catherine.
Two Souls : Four Lives / by Catherine Kairavi.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56589-244-6 (tradepaper)
1. Yogananda, Paramhansa, 1893-1952. 2. Yogis—India—Biography. 3. William I, King of England, 1027 or 8-1087—Miscellanea. 4. Kriyananda, Swami. 5. Gurus—United States—Biography. 6. Henry I, King of England, 1068-1135—Miscellanea. I. Title.

BP605.S43Y675 2009
133.901’350922—dc22
[B] 2009034137

www.crystalclarity.com
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Foreword
Acknowledgements
Part I: William: Conqueror or Reformer?
1. The Past Revealed
2. A Righteous Warrior, and a Noble Cause
3. “A Lie Agreed Upon”
4. “A Flowering Youth”—Intimations of Greatness
5. The Testing Ground of Normandy
6. The Strength to Mold His Times
7. Rebuilding the Moral Authority of the Church
8. A Tangled Web—The English Kings Preceding William
9. The Rightful Heir to the Throne
10. Signs and Portents
11. His Divine Birthright
12. Establishing His Rule: “A Gracious Liege Lord”
13. 1069: A Kingdom Hangs in the Balance
14. The New Forest: A Vision for the Future
15. Archbishop Lanfranc and King William: A Harmony of Church and State
16. Domesday Book—What Manner of Land and Men Has England?
17. The Problem of Succession: Who Will Provide the Vision?
18. William’s Death, Henry I, and the Birth of the English Nation
Part II: The Life of Henry: His Princehood
19. The Winding Path of Reincarnation
20. The Treacherous Road to the Throne of England
21. 1089: Henry’s Imprisonment
22. The Saving of Rouen: The Players Show Their Hands
23. A Brother’s Jealousy
24. An Unexpected Haven
25. The Shifting Balance of Power
26. Robert Curthose and William Rufus
27. The Death of Rufus
Part III: The Life of King Henry I of England
28. A New King
29. Fulfilling a Father’s Prediction
30. Bishops, Queens, and Pawns
31. Battles and Alliances
32. The Divine Role of Kings
33. Henry’s “New Men”
34. Invasion of Normandy: Reuniting His Father’s Kingdom
35. Peace Through Justice
36. Losses and Betrayals
37. The White Ship Tragedy
38. Holding the Reins During Rebellion
39. Three Decades of Peace
40. The Passing of King Henry I
Part IV: Their Reincarnations
41. “I Come to Destroy Evil and Establish Virtue”
42. Yogananda’s Mission in the Present Age
43. The Spiritual “Invasion” of America
44. Yogananda’s Contribution
45. Past Karma and Present Challenges
46. A Guru-Given Destiny
47. After Yogananda’s Passing
48. The Storm Breaks
49. Intentional Communities
50. King Henry and Swami Kriyananda: Similarities
Appendix
Dramatis Personae
Genealogical Charts
Glossary
Bibliography
About the Author
Paramhansa Yogananda
Swami Kriyananda
Further Explorations with Crystal Clarity Publishers
Ananda World Brotherhood Village
Two Souls: Four Lives
Foreword
By Swami Kriyananda
H istorians see the advance of civilization in terms of progressive sophistication from primitive “hunter-gatherers” to farmers, to city dwellers, to our own age of unprecedented scientific achievement. Their teaching is that basic human nature has remained more or less the same throughout history. They quite naturally dismiss the possibility that man, though he lives in a cosmic environment, is affected by cosmic influences.
Paramhansa Yogananda’s guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar, gave us a very different view of history, based on the reality of those influences. He said the earth passes repeatedly through great cycles of increasing and diminishing awareness—from deep ignorance to steadily greater enlightenment, then back again to its former depths. Relying on ancient tradition as well as on his own intuition, Sri Yukteswar attributed these cycles to the sun’s movement around a dual, a revolution which brings our solar system alternately closer to and farther away from a cosmic center of highly conscious energy, or Vishnunabhi.
Interestingly, numerous ancient peoples throughout the world believed in these cycles of time. They even divided each of them into four ages, which Greek tradition symbolized with the words gold, silver, copper, and iron. Orthodox historians today, of course, don’t admit the possibility that such cycles exist. Yet it is from history itself that we get the first glimpses of those cycles’ reality.
These great cycles of time, as Sri Yukteswar explained them, reached their nadir, or lowest point, in the year 500 AD. Indeed, one discerns in the centuries prior to that year a gradual decrease of knowledge, awareness, and sensitivity, amounting to a steady decline in human awareness. Since 500 AD, moreover, there has clearly been a steady increase in that awareness, resulting in ever-greater clarity.
The possibility of the earth’s going through a cycle of ascending and descending ages gives credence to the evidence, rapidly accumulating in our own day, that high civilizations existed in the past. Many books today make a case for some of those civilizations, at least, having reached far higher heights than our own. As for there being cycles of time due to the movement within the galaxy of our sun, at least two books so far address this subject in depth: Lost Star of Myth and Timer , by Walter Cruttenden, and The Yugas [1] , by Joseph Selbie and Byasa Steinmetz.
Consider one simple, known reality which points to the general debasement of consciousness approaching 500 AD: the Roman “games,” in which gladiators ferociously slaughtered one another in the Colosseum, to the applause and delight of many thousands. Today it seems hardly credible, but even Saint Augustine, in his youth, was addicted to those games.
Consider also the widespread poverty and squalor of those times; the general illiteracy; the violence and insensitivity; the brevity of life combined with the prevalence of disease. These and many other symptoms of emotional and intellectual darkness prevailed everywhere.
Since 500 AD, there has been a general rise in human consciousness. Sri Yukteswar corrected old Kali Yuga reckonings as to the correct length of each age, which assigned to Kali Yuga a duration of 432,000 years. Sri Yukteswar said that, in fact, a whole cycle lasts only 24,000 years, and the darkest age lasts only 1,200 descending, and 1,200 ascending years.
The present age, Dwapara Yuga , will, he said, endure a total of 2,400 years. A sandhya , or bridge, occurs between each yuga and the next: 100 years at the end of ascending Kali Yuga , followed by a 200-year bridge into ascending Dwapara .
Thus, the bridge leading out of Kali Yuga , which brought the first hints of approaching Dwapara , occurred from 1600–1700 AD. This century was followed by two more, from 1700–1900 AD, that led into Dwapara proper. There were “rumblings” of the end of deepest Kali Yuga as early as the Italian Renaissance, but the sixteen hundreds saw the true dawn of a new understanding with those pioneers of modern physics: Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and many others. These men introduced the scientific method, which was a completely new way of thinking based not on a priori assumptions, but on demonstrated facts.
During the next two-hundred-year bridge, or sandhya , into Dwapara proper, we see the Industrial Revolution; the acceptance and increasing use of electricity; social upheaval to affirm the natural dignity of man; the Michelson-Morley experiment (in 1887), which revealed that light is both a particle and a wave; and the dawning realization that the universe is not a giant mechanism, as scientists had believed, but is a manifestation of far subtler realities. Matter itself was seen to be a manifestation of energy. These were but a few of the radical changes human understanding underwent during the sandhya into Dwapara Yuga proper.
Today (2009) man is well into the second century of ascending Dwapara Yuga . Conflict is increasing between old, Kali Yuga ways of thinking and those of Dwapara : between self-aggrandizement and a more generous wish for universal upliftment; between the wish to control situations, things, and people and an impulse to flow with wholesome change in one’s own life, and in the lives of others; between the tendency to close one’s mind to anything new, and an opposite tendency to be open to improvement. The conflict is bringing increasing tension to the human spirit, one that may well soon explode into widespread and major social upheavals: a deep economic depression; global warfare; perhaps even earth cataclysms. After the “dust” has settled, however, I believe that things will simmer down peaceably, and this new Age of Energy will begin in earnest with its more fluid view of life, of human existence, and of objective reality.
The age of William the Conqueror was much darker than our own. Historians, unaware of these great cycles of time, have no choice but to believe that human consciousness itself hasn’t changed much over the centuries. From the knowledge they possess, they cannot but believe that what people did in the past they would do as readily today, if society had not advanced to levels that have made such behavior unacceptable. Naturally, too, people without special knowledge of the yugas believe that what