The Lord Within
“The devotee inclines to think his path to God is the only way,” he said. “Yoga, through which divinity is found within, is doubtless the highest road: so Lahiri Mahasaya has told us. By discovering the Lord within, we soon perceive him without.”
Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi, Chapter 131
Lord God, grant that in my writing today I will seek to glorify you and to do nothing else but to edify my readers. May everything I write be informed by compassion and truth. May this practice of writing help me to better know You and to better know myself. All of this considered, may these intentions serve to improve my relationship with You, with myself, and with others. Amen.
I have been sober for almost 3 and a half years now. The beginning of my sobriety was launched with a series of profound spiritual experiences that have indelibly converted me from an agnostic to a firm believer in an almighty, transcendent God.
I was baptized in a Lutheran church as an infant. My family life was very secular and I had only ever been to a church perhaps half a dozen times. Prayer was foreign to me. Finally, at 27 years old, I received Confirmation and First Communion in the Catholic Church. Today, I can confidently confess that my relationship with God is the most important thing in my life, though my actions are certainly not always congruent with this.
I encountered the quote above in an excerpt from an audiobook. A beloved friend of mine recommended I use the app, Insight Timer, to find yoga classes, meditations, and more. I have really enjoyed this app so far, utilizing it for at least one session per day for the past 9 days now.
The book this quote comes from is one that I have encountered in various ways over the past few months as my interest in yoga has grown. I recently started researching different aspects of the history and philosophy of yoga. In the process, I learned a little about a particular school called Kriya Yoga. Yogananda, the author of the quoted book, is largely responsible for spreading awareness in the West of the Kriya school.
In the Insight Timer app, I listened to a recording of Chapter 13 from this book, and this particular quote stood out to me. I find it very relevant to an area of strong interest to me in spirituality, theology, philosophy, and day-to-day experience.
Last year, I became very interested in studying Spinoza, St. Augustine, and Erich Przywara, among others. Specifically, Przywara’s conception of the analogia entis has caught my attention. A paper by John R. Betz has granted me some crucial insight into this topic.2 What I am now keeping extra attention on as I explore Spinoza and Augustine are the concepts of transcendence and immanence.
As a point of departure for the rest of this post, I take Augustine’s statement from his Confessions:
“You were more inward to me than my innermost; higher to me than my highest.”3
In other words, insofar I can gaze inward toward my own soul, God is always deeper. On the other hand, insofar as I can gaze skyward toward heaven, God is always ever higher. God’s immanence is ever more immanent than the most present, centered consciousness I can experience. Similarly, God’s transcendence is always more vast, more expansive, more infinite and eternal than I could ever conceive.
I was recently reading Augustine’s Soliloquies and I came across a passage which reminded me of Proposition XXI in Spinoza’s Ethics. Augustine, speaking in the voice of Reason, claims that “there are no true things except those which are immortal,” and, “therefore nothing can rightly be said to exist except immortal things.”
Spinoza’s Proposition XXI resonates with this claim: “All things which follow from the absolute nature of any attribute of God must always exist and be infinite, or, in other words, are eternal and infinite through the said attribute.”
As, according to Spinoza, there is only one substance — God — and all things are modifications of this one substance, it would appear (bearing in mind various aspects of Spinoza’s logic established within the Ethics) that all things follow from the attributes of God. Therefore, all things are eternal and infinite. Spinoza provides a lengthy proof for this proposition which I had to read over several times as I did not quite believe what I was reading.
At this point, I will interject my own perspective, and in doing so I will tie these concepts in with Yogananda’s passage about finding “the Lord within.”
Augustine continues his conversation with his own voice of Reason discussing the differences between things which are true and false, what is deceit or true reality.
What is it that one is finding in deep meditation? In yoga, or in Christian contemplative prayer? Truth, I suggest, which may also be known as God, Atman, the True Self, the One, the Beloved, and many more.
God is both infinitely immanent and transcendent. It is my understanding, based on my experience with prayer and meditation coupled with my personal studies, that in centering oneself into the most immanent place within, one approaches the True Self, the One that is the collision of infinite immanence and transcendence. That is the Lord within, the Alpha and the Omega.
Truly, who else do we expect to encounter when we attain perfect silence, perfect solitude, perfect intimacy with the present moment? We find Being itself: the unutterable name of “I AM” — Adonai within, more inward than my innermost; Adonai, who is Being itself, higher than my highest.
We find both ends of eternity and infinity resting silently in our deepest center. This surely is Truth, this is the True Self, the Self which actually exists, for this Self is infinite, eternal, and immortal. The Lord Within is Ὁ ὬΝ — “He who Is.”
Perhaps in cultivating a relationship with that true existence within myself, I am able to recognize that same truth which exists in everyone and everything else, that immortal divinity in which all beings participate.
https://www.crystalclarity.com/pages/autobiography-chapter-13-the-sleepless-saint?srsltid=AfmBOopkfOoa6Xiitfm1eMEluJU3VOZenFeAqUOAsXavKybcBXg2fn2L
https://www.unifr.ch/orthodoxia/de/assets/public/Lehre/FS2020_Analogie/Betz-2019-Modern_Theology.pdf
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110103.htm
Image By Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48659808