Hi:) In the Chidakasha Gita, Paramahansa Nityananda is quoted as saying, “He who meditates on the Reality is a sannyasi; he is a yogi.” How does this manifest in outward life?
Two married friends of mine who were serious about spiritual life had an intuition that in time they would be required to take up monastic life. So in their next trip to India they asked their guru, Sri Anandamayi Ma, about this. Ma simply replied: “Those who do sadhana automatically become sadhus.” So that gives us some idea about the reality of the many “yogis” we find everywhere. They not only do not become sadhus, they insist that monastic life is unnecessary, and that the “householder” life is the ideal. But not according to the most renowned saint of twentieth-century India who said to another married couple of my acquaintance: “You can choose: liberation or marriage”! One time an American devotee requested me to ask Ma to bless him to find a dharmic wife. Ma’s answer was brief and unequivocal: “This body has never at any time advised anyone to be married.” (Ma always said “this body” rather than “I.”)
It is not without significance that Anandamayi Ma called all men “father” and all women “mother”–if they were not sadhus. But Ma referred to all monastics as “my friend.” The first time I wrote to her, she began her reply with the words: “Tell my friend….” So Brahmacharini Atmananda, to whom she was dictating, told my friend that had brought the letter to India: “Ma considers him a sannyasi.”
Mataji refused to enter the home of a householder. When my friend Durgaprasad Sahai (a disciple of Swami Keshabananda mentioned in Autobiography of a Yogi) asked her to visit his home, she told him of this rule. When he asked if she would at least come onto the veranda of the house, she said that she would not do so. Another friend of mine, Dr. Ghosh, told me that his marriage had been arranged and he had built a veritable mansion to live in after the wedding. He asked Ma if she would come and stay in the house before the marriage, to bless it. She agreed. But when she came there, he realized that by being married he would be banishing Ma from his home forever, so he went to her and declared he was canceling the marriage and giving the house to Ma for use as an ashram. She accepted. Ma gave instructions that from then on, whenever he travelled to any of the Anandamayi Ashrams he was to stay in her personal room. I know of no other person who had this privilege.
How could a person possibly meditate on Reality and remain immersed in Maya? When we look at the life of Yogiraj Sri Shyama Charan Lahiri (Lahiri Mahasaya), the “ideal householder yogi” we find that he was a celibate of the highest vairagya, in no way “of the world.” The same is true of Sri Ramakrishna and his disciple Sri Durga Charan Nag, who Swami Vivekananda said had no equal in his experience.
Certainly a person first becomes a sadhu, a worthy yogi, inwardly, but then it follows “as does night the day” that he formally takes up the sadhu life. What else could he do? The outer must mirror the inner.
