The Mission and Dharma of Realised Masters

Each one of us comes with a mission. We come with past karma: we have things that we need to complete; and we come with a dharma: which is a pathway to our growth. When we arrive, we are at a particular point in our evolution, from ignorance and unawareness to complete awareness. When we are awake and ready especially in this incarnation because we are very much favored to have these avatars as our spiritual guide, we come to know what our dharma is and what Karma we have come to complete.

If we don’t know what those things are, we should think about it, meditate on it, ask our higher self, ask the Masters what is the karma that I’ve come to complete and what is the mission that I have.

Some people ask how can I choose my Guru? That is an interesting question. It’s a strange question, it’s the wrong question because we don’t choose the guru like we do someone to be our cook or someone to work in our business where we’re looking for the highest qualifications. Sometimes people say I want the highest possible Guru for myself so I’m going to choose Babaji because he’s a Mahavatar and these other ones they’re just Avatars so I’m going to go for the top.

 We don’t choose who our Guru is, we are in fact chosen. One of our gurus, Jesus Christ made this very clear to his disciples when he spoke to them for the last time on this physical plane, he summed up his whole mission, his dharma and told them about how they should proceed after his passing. This particular moment is called The Last Supper in the Bible.

What he said is beautiful and inspiring and it’s in chapter 15 of The Gospel of St John. One of the many things that Jesus said to them was: ”You have not chosen me but I have chosen you because you have been given to me by my Father.”

To get a better insight into the working of mysterious cosmic algorithm of how a Master and his disciples come together we look at Bhagavad Gita verse 4.7-8 where Krishna tells Arjuna :

“Whenever virtue, dharma declines and vice, adharma is in the ascendant, I incarnate myself on Earth as an avatar appearing from age to age in visible form; I come to destroy evil and to reestablish virtue”.

 The Avatars have a dharma. They don’t have any karma but they have a dharma to fulfill.

In Gita verse 4.5, Krishna, as an expression of Lord Vishnu said- “Many have been my births and many yours also, I remember all of mine though you remember yours not”. How many times has God incarnated on Earth From the Vaishnava scriptures we know there have been nine incarnations of Vishnu. From the dwarf and the fish and so forth up until Krishna and we’re all waiting for Kalki Avatar. It’s just like the Jewish people are still waiting for the Messiah. Nine does not qualify as many, I think he was talking about many, many births.

In India and also in the Christian world the common belief is that the Avatar is a direct descent, a special creation of God. God just molded this perfect figure and endowed this figure with divine powers. But what Swami Kriyananda and Master explained to us is that these individuals whether it be Krishna or Buddha or Jesus Christ or the avatars of Kriya yoga – they have had many births as human beings. They have progressed, they have evolved to the point where they have become completely free: jivanmukta, parammukta, avatar;, or jagatguru – an avatar for the whole world.

In these past incarnations of the avatars, I think that we have been in relationship with them. The reason being that when we look at the disciples of Jesus, there’s a curious fact – many of them were his relatives. Some of the apostles were his cousins. Some of the 14 were related to him in one way or another. Lazarus, Mary and Martha were all relatives of Jesus.

Similarly, Krishna was also related by blood to the Pandavas, Uddhava and many others. So, for me, this is symbolic. Krishna stands in different relationships to his disciples. To Yashoda: he’s her foster child, to the gopis: their playmate, to Radha: he is the beloved, to the citizens of Dwarka: he is their King, to many of the Pandavas and the Kauravas: he is their counselor.

This tells us that we have been related to our Guru in many past lifetimes. And who knows how long ago it started. But we have had loving and growing relationships with them. And these gurus have galloped ahead to their liberation to become great avatars and they have brought us along, their relatives, their friends. So that mysterious algorithm somewhere up in the causal world perhaps, it’s not so mysterious. Because I think that we are brought together with great souls whom we have known in the past, with whom we have grown, with whom we have had loving relationships and possibly also difficult relationships. We already belong to them.

Now, I’d like to say a few things to give us perhaps, a deeper understanding of who our gurus are. We love them ,they love us, we accept them, we try our best to do what they ask of us .

Jesus said to his disciples ”if you are my disciples you will do what I ask you to do”. This is part of being a disciple. In fact Master said once, ”if you do even 1% of what I ask you, you will find God”, maybe not in this life but you will progress on the spiritual path.

What is their mission? An avatar comes not just simply and importantly to help his disciples to grow and progress and to give darshan but an avatar comes to uplift humanity. They have the power not just to help their disciples and take on some of the karma of their disciples but to uplift the entire world. And this is what our masters have done starting with Babaji.

These Masters come with messages and they set into motion things that will help a vast amount of people not just now but into the future. What did the Master do that is going to go into the future and not be limited to us, their disciples?  Master came to bring kriya yoga as the technique for self-realization. Will the world receive kriya yoga just through Yogananda and his descendants?  No, there’s a vast line of kriya yoga and there are others. Through Master, Babaji put it into motion in the western world.

 Master came to be a bridge between East and West. He said he wanted to bring the western material efficiency together with the Eastern spiritual efficiency. And going into the future he said that it would be America and India that would join and lead the world into a new age.

Master came as a bridge between science and spirituality.  His first talk in the United States was on ‘The science of religion’. His Guru wrote the book ‘The Holy Science’. So from Master’s time the science is coming closer and closer to the eternal truth of Sanatan Dharma.

Master came to set into motion the need for spiritual cooperative communities. Saying they would be the form, the model for the civilization of the future. So there are things that Master came to do that reach far beyond us, their disciples.

Swami Kriyananda developed spiritual communities: the satsangas, where we live, where we take our inspiration, where we are nourished, where we serve. Swami Kriyananda also had a dharma to set into motion some things for the world. Education for life is going to go and spread and go into future generations and transform the educational systems of many countries.

Master started the idea, Swami Kriyananda moved it forward and now it’s in our hands. Swami started in 2009 the Nayaswami order: the new age renunciate order that is not limited to Ananda. There are thousands of people following different paths, following no paths, there are Buddhists, Catholics, Christians, even agnostics who belong to this order who declare themselves to be pilgrims or brahmacharis or tyagis or nayaswamis. These are seeds that go far beyond the dharma of helping the disciples.

What is our role? What can we do? Every great Master, every great avatar who has great dharma, great mission, they come with helpers. Jesus came with his Apostles; Buddha came with his few disciples ; Master came with his; and Swami came with his. We are here for our own growth certainly and that is our priority. But, we have been chosen by our Masters: these avatars – to help them in their world mission and that’s part of our growth, our blessing that we have the opportunity so close to Master’s life, to Swami Kriyananda’s life to be the channels: to be the hands, the feet, the inspiration, the energy, the worker bees in the hive of self-realization. So, let’s have deep appreciation and reverence for what our Masters and especially Yoganandaji came to do as his dharma – his mission given to him by God.

Let’s do our part, let’s do our sadhana so that we have the spiritual strength and the intuition and the capacities to help these avatars uplift the world. They came, they went and they left to us the responsibility, the possibility to help them in their great mission. And it’s not just in this incarnation. We have been doing it before and if we have to incarnate, wherever we incarnate, we’ll probably be doing it again. So, let’s be deeply grateful to these Masters that they have chosen us, that they have chosen to come to this planet and that they continue from where they are in that divine mission. It didn’t stop when they left the physical planet. They actually are more capable now that they don’t have a body, of carrying forth their God given mission and they are inspiring each one of us every day of how we can help them.

All praise and thanks to our great Gurus.