Guru Nitya Chaitanya Yati’s Centenary 1924–2024

 

I went to lunch with two friends, and we have known each other since we were eleven years old. We met to celebrate my birthday; as usual we ate, drank and talked about life, and tumbled over the question, the big question of life and happiness.

 

One talked about security, mainly financial, as she was waiting for retirement to give the pause she needed. The other spoke of how hard life is, unfair, and unjust. I felt contentment and clarity, feeling the absolute tap tapping, drum drumming, whistle whistling, still stilling, within. I noted the difference in feelings, and felt a gush of gratefulness for my spiritual life that had been awakened and guided by “its proper alignment in contemplation,” by Guru Nitya.

 

I have been in study with Nancy Yeilding over ten years pouring over Guru Nitya’s various books especially: That Alone – The Core of Wisdom; The Psychology of Darsana Mala; Living the Science of Harmonious Union – Principles and Practice of Patanjali’s Yoga Sastra; Love and Blessings; and The Brhadaranyaka Upanisad (the most recent and on-going study). They teach how to reduce the self to its smallness, “to discriminate the true from the false” and aid in clipping the senses back to their proportion, unpicking the “epistemology, axiology, and ontology” of its worth and its limitations. Without Guru Nitya’s words and guidance from Nancy Yeilding, life would have been a journey without a map, entangled between the past and the future, neither of which can lead to happiness.

 

It is as Guru said, as Saigyo said:

 

The minute for truth

Begins, like a stream, shallow

At first, but then

Adds more and more depth

While gaining greater clarity

 

These two friends are dear to me, and we go back as far as school days, and have shared intimately and have similar upbringing. As the conversation deepened, I wondered what had changed in each of us in relation to the meaning of happiness. I began to see that the true meaning of happiness eluded them, and social ego clouded them, and they could not comprehend that we are “co–creators sharing with God the very precious opportunity of envisioning god’s own dream— or plan of creation.” To know this gives happiness a new colour, and one that they could not see, and which I was enjoying.

 

To say that “on the whole, the bargain of life is not bad,” in their eyes I was being naïve, innocent or fortunate when in truth I have learned through these studies that pain and pleasure are part and parcel of life, and each day it is evenly balanced and that most nights I now can “crawl into the sheets with a deep sense of gratitude.” At first, I was forlorn, as I resisted that I was naïve, and berated myself for ignorance, for they too have studied long and hard, and why did I wear gold tinted glasses?

 

At home, and upon reflection, I came to feel that these studies have re changed me, and the long years of more than ten have raised my “consciousness in a gentle, dignified and joyous manner.” I realised that rather than feel distant because I stood apart from the thinking of my friends, I was feeling “inspired from within, turning thoughts, musings and actions into a symphony of good taste.” All the while mindful as much as I can be of the creeper of ego not to dazzle in its splendour, clouding that which shines continuously and effortlessly in the centre as God is “the genus of all genera.”

 

I have come to learn that “the healthy attitude is to have a holistic appreciation of life, which comprises of elements of fear, curiosity, wonder, sense of justice, understandable opacity, bi-polar relationship, love, the need to sacrifice, great moments of serenity and beatitude, pure chance, hidden dynamics, hope, delusion, sense of loss, and the need for reverence, and acceptance of testimony.”

 

How can I not be changed by these words that fleet in and out of life as a breeze swings by; unless we can make sense of it, know of it, call it a breeze, and know that it is transient, we can remain in fear. To learn of such wisdom through these books which came to me by “pure chance” is a chance for which I am eternally grateful. Hundred years have passed, and in honour of your centenary I sat to collect my thoughts, and although you have gone from the transient body, you are truly Nitya, “eternal.”

 

As seed germinates and pushes through the soil, I too am pushing between “existence and essence” and I wish that I was fortunate to have met you in body form, although you live still in the fullness of your scent. I love that you realised that your life “is also within the grand scheme of the universe, in which (your) play mates are the sun, the moon, the stars, the wind and the waves, and the busy bees.” I think of these words as I watch the bees hover plenty in my garden between the abundant blue-purple flowers of the green alkanet, which I nurtured and which in the past was pulled out fiercely as weeds, and now they delight as the bees love them, and I love that they drink off them.

 

Through your “reverent sense of gratitude to everything, (you) borne by the winds of fate made your journey,” and I walk following your footsteps, filled with gratitude for every word you have written. Your seedlings have become giants in the forest of spirituality and to whom I am also in gratitude.

 

Guru Nitya: words as petals

 

The rose is yellow, tinted with edges of orange,

flowering plenty in the garden, and books

open to pages dropping words as petals fall.

 

We trundle past in haste, not seeing the rose

rosing in its beauty, as sentences opening its door

of wisdom. Scent invites, lingering as letters

 

forming words staying through the days,

months, seasons and years. Of lemon and peach

one off the rose and the other off the pages of the books

​

nestled deep as bees drunk on nectar, there is silence.

 

The quotes are a lift from the introduction by Guru Nitya in Love and Blessings, and from the article by Guru Nitya called God: Reality or Illusion.