A Boy Encounters a World Guru

Friday nights were special times in our Paris apartment in those post war years. My parents belonged to the Paris Institut Métapsychique. Its lively Friday evening meetings there, hosted all manner of psychoanalysts, telepathy and psychokinesis researchers, astrologers, pendulum wielders and dowsing practitioners, séance enthusiasts, Tarot readers and clairvoyants, all discussing the latest paranormal currents and the hottest spiritual news from the Far East, all accompanied by café et petits gâteaux

How I looked forward to seeing Madame Giraud, the seasoned clairvoyant with her deep warm voice, who never failed to ask me to draw cards from her 78-card Marseilles Tarot deck’s 15th century enigmatic Italian designs, then proceeded to describe my future in such exciting narratives! Once I drew a card named “La Force.” It showed a young man opening a lion’s mouth. And the next card was “La Source,” depicting a naked woman drawing a pitcher of water from a magical stream. Madame Giraud became quite excited, “You will have a life full of adventures and you will one day meet a very high magician.”

At that time, the American parapsychologist J.B. Rhine kindled keen interest in extrasensory perception (ESP). Founding the Department of Parapsychology at Duke University, North Carolina, he generated excitement for his forays in the scientific exploration of thought transmission (Extrasensory Perception, 1940). The Paris group, for lack of resources, made their own ESP cards (Zener cards): line drawings of a circle, a square, three wiggly lines, a plus sign and a star.

It was then thought that children were the best subjects to test ESP’s potential because they were still uncontaminated by society’s repressive forces. This perspective was the likely outgrowth of the 18th century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, a major figure of the European Enlightenment period, who championed the idea that all humans are born fundamentally pure and good, blaming society’s machinations for leading them to their dark sides. The outcome was that, as the only kid around, starting at seven, I was repeatedly solicited for novel ESP experimentations, which, in retrospect, were thoroughly stimulating!

The Institut Métapsychique, founded in Paris in 1919, remains one of the oldest organisms dedicated to the serious research of paranormal phenomena. Currently, with increasingly developed tools, its thrust now centers on the scientific study of the yet still far-from-solved phenomenon of sentience, namely how the nervous system (presumably) creates the stuff of emotions and the miracle of experiencing

In those lively evenings, the psychanalysts often robustly defended their respective positions. Freud and Jung were names most often heard, but Ferenczi, Adler and Wilhelm Reich worked in their way, sometimes in thermic discussions. My parents were distinctly Jungian and regularly countered the Freudians with introjections about archetypes, ancient universal symbols shared by all humanity, and the “supraconscious,” that higher cosmos-connected dimension elevating humans far

above the lowly impulses lurking in the Freudian unconscious and its wild repository of primal terrors, rage and unfiltered sex. All these good seekers were, each in their own way, intensely searching for clarity and deeper understandings of their existential questions, questing for higher personal meaning and self-realisation.

India, Nepal and the Himalayas, all were hot. As were ancient texts, from the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras to biblical scrolls and the Kabbalah, as were promising techniques of hitherto unknown yoga systems, recently discovered Egyptian tombs, the potential of hypnotism, mysterious hallucinogens and the enigmatic predictions of the Mayas.

Many travelogues were devoured by this effervescent segment of Parisian society. The bouquinistes along the Seine’s quais were flowing with works on esoteric parasciences. Books on the occult were the rage, as for example, “Méthode de Dédoublement Personnel,” by Charles Lancelin (1925), a book on how to willfully separate consciousness from the physical body, otherwise called “astral projection,” so it may be free to travel in space, and maybe even time. Paul Brunton, the English spiritual explorer, came out with immensely popular books, among them, “A Search in Secret India” (1934), and “A Search in Secret Egypt” (1936).” He wrote about exotic humans in faraway lands who performed the most unprobeable feats that transgressed all common notions of the possible.

Alexandra David-Néel, an iconoclastic French spiritual explorer was inspired in her youth by Jules Verne’s fantastic adventures. Her fascinating travelogues brought her readers to undiscovered temples in Nepal and introduced her to their meditation secrets. In 1924, she was the first Western woman to enter the forbidden city of Lhasa, in disguise, then a brazen feat (My Journey to Lhasa, 1927).

In 1935, Dr. Thérèse Brosse, a determined Frenchwoman, traveled to India with a portable EKG machine. For its time, that was quite a feat. Lugging around a bulky machine required dedicated fortitude. She connected electrodes to accomplished meditators and unequivocally demonstrated that cardiac rhythms could be influenced by meditative volition. Remarkably, the electrocardiogram tracings of some yogis demonstrated a progressive willful slowing of heart rhythm, and in one instance, an amazing complete cardiac stoppage lasting fully a few seconds!

In this bouillon of the esoteric, Theosophy also flourished. This movement held that all humans belonged to a common family and that all religions emanated from a single truth. Madame Blavatsky, a Russian émigré, founded the Theosophical Society. Her protégé, the enfant prodige Krishnamurti, became a world-loved philosopher. Many years later, Krishnamurti gave a series of lectures at the New School in New York that my family and I attended. A slight man with concentrated presence, especially as he intensified the power of silence, in perfect posture as he sat on his lone straight-back chair facing his audience with riveting behind-theeyes energy, he spoke for an approach to life that sought out “total awareness,” clarity, and a “free mind,” namely a mind purged of all habits and rote reactions, capable of being supremely present in translating the full intensity of every moment.

“Autobiography of a Yogi” came out in 1936. It quickly became a best seller and a Parisian event, devoured not only by spiritually leaning audiences but also by a public seeking alternative existential model. Its author, Paramahansa Yogananda, tells of his life from early on in India and his spiritual expansion, activated by his teacher who guided him through the discovery of ever wider layers of consciousness. Preceded by a long lineage of sages, his teacher told him that the West urgently needed the assistance offered by Kriya Yoga, one of the “mental Yogas,” namely yoga systems that center on the discovery of

human energy dynamics, so that all of humanity could benefit from the accelerated evolution that they can offer.

Yogananda’s spiritual philosophy can be summed up by the following quotes: “True wealth is measured by the richness of one’s inner life; “The greatest obstacle on the path to self-realisation is the ego;” and “The journey to self-realisation is a lifelong adventure, and the destination is love.” Kriya Yoga is an ancient meditation discipline, handed down through eons of oral teachings and meditative discoveries, promoting the experiencing of one’s core life forces, as a precursor to attaining fusion with universal energies. Kriya Yoga evolved from thousands of years of introspective journeys by explorers of human sentience. Derived from countless dedicated meditative forays, a human energy model evolved that is often represented artistically by colourful hubs of organismic energies called Chakras. While seven major human psychic energy hubs are named, there are said to be dozens of lesser ones, and thousands of minor energy roundabouts, all connected, and all intrinsically implicated in our biological workings. This is the model conceptualised as one fusing our physical self to the life forces that animate its existence.

Kriya Yoga is a form of yoga that combines peaceful physical postures with supraconscious breathing and activated mentation. In a certain perspective, it could be described as a kindling of our nervous system

Knowledge of its practice is handed down orally, teacher to student, as sparse written guidelines exist. It is said to have been gifted in the 18th century to Mahavatar Babaji, a legendary Himalayan yogi. Babaji taught the technique to his disciple Lahiri Mahasaya, who then passed it on to Swami Yukteswar Giri. Swami Giri, in turn, initiated Paramahansa Yogananda to Kriya Yoga science, who then brought it to the West in the early 20th century..

The word “Kriya” means “action” in Sanskrit. Indeed, the Kriya meditator diligently activates all mental functions in the process. In the context of Kriya Yoga, it refers to meditative techniques designed to fuse the practitioner’s consciousness with universal cosmic energies. These techniques involve infusing breaths with organismic energy, maintaining attentiveness and using mantras that serve to engage resonant meditative states that, in modern terminology, are called states of “pure consciousness.” These special states of sentience are called “pure” because they contain no thoughts, no emotions, no memories, just the distilled energy of core sentience. Achieved then is a fundamental and coveted experience achieved by the separation of our “consciousness nature” from its “consciousness content.” Achieving the experience of “pure consciousness,” even for brief periods of real time, is transformative, because it connects us to the fundamental nature within ourselves (Experiencing “Pure Consciousness:’ A Catalyst in Psychotherapy?” http://www.triroc.com/sunnen/topics/experiencepureconsciousness.htm).

In those post-war years, new geopolitical tensions emerged, the “Cold War.” My father, along with many European engineers, was invited to the U.S. to contribute his electronic engineering skills to defense missions. With this wonderful opportunity, my parents decided that we would first visit their teacher, Paramahamsa Yogananda in California. We eventually drove cross-country in a green Buick, staying in many stunning national parks along the way.

The aura bathing the Self Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles is remembered as suffused with a holy ambience, as in a cathedral amidst the silent energies of radiant nature, the trees, cacti and flowers, all wildly exotic to me. In this milieu, people seemed to move more slowly as if time had gummed the clocks. Voices were strangely muted, bathed in silence even as they were spoken.

A man appeared. He had long dark hair and a flowing ochre robe. He too moved slowly, with poise and grace. His face emanated noble peace, which in retrospect, would be described as some form of bliss. Soon, a small group of five or six adults agglutinated themselves to him. As the kid I was then, trained in dutiful French politesse, I stayed outside this circle and looked on.

Spontaneously, there developed a fissure in the group, and in this opening, I was suddenly directly face to face with Yogananda, eyes steadily locked, no words, no movement, just stillness out of time, and now the recipient of a wave of violently profound kindness and benevolence, if only for several seconds of real time. My entire body took part in it, shaking it deeply in its entrails, the turbulence still there with me to this day.

In 1817, Stendahl, the author of “Le Rouge et le Noir (1830),” visited the Florence Basilica of Santa Croce. Gazing at the archetypal beauty of the frescos painted by Volterano bathed by the transcendent luminosities offered by multicoloured windows, he began to feel, in his awe, a disruption of his normal state of consciousness, with widespread visceral discharges translating into cardiac activation, vertigo, spinal chills, even faintness.

So profound was his experience that he extensively wrote about it, and it is now known as the Stendahl syndrome, a unique phenomenon triggered by wondrous beauty, also called “esthetic shock.” This global frisson of body and mind in response to stunning works of art, architecture or music has been described in other localities. Visitors to holy sites that embody high religion and spirituality can experience similar marking experiences, leaving them indelibly tagged. Thus the “Jerusalem syndrome” and similar experiences noted to occur in Far Eastern temples.

Analogous phenomena have long been recorded as occurring in certain special human-to-human communications, usually involving a holy figure and a receptive aspirant. They can be found in texts deemed sacred, such as Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the Kabbalah, and the Bible. Shaktipata, for example, is a spiritually driven phenomenon described as a profound experience where a being with higher access to life’s fundamental knowledge, imparts an experiential perception of it via consciousness-to-consciousness communication. This phenomenon assumes a medium, an ether, permitting this transfer.

To this day, I work to understand my special moment of electric interaction with a highly spiritual human because the experience is easily brought back to life in its full intensity, as if traveling in a space-time wormhole, as fresh and alive as if occurring in the now moment. In flights of musings, thoughts also flash back to Madame Giraud, the cards drawn, and how they eventually concorded with reality. Whatever the logical explanations my scientific mind attempts to construct, from the Stendahl syndrome to neurological origins, and on to Shaktipata, they are all in vain. Regardless of logical explanations, what remains is the now so familiar perennial real frisson for which I extend my deep gratitude to Paramahansa Yogananda.

Gérard Sunnen, MD,
Board-certified in psychiatry and neurology writes about the many clinical and self-development uses of medical hypnosis, imagery, meditation, Autogenic Training and yoga. He practies in New York.
triroc.com/sunnen Drsunnen.com