“Samsara (literally, ‘a flowing with’ the phenomenal flux) induces man to take the line of least resistance. ‘Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.’ To become the friend of God, man must overcome the devils or evils of his own karma or actions that ever urge him to spineless acquiescence in the mayic delusions of the world.” -Yogananda, from Chapter 49 of the “Autobiography,” in turn quoting James 4:4.
“In men under maya or natural law, the flow of life energy is toward the outward world; the currents are wasted and abused in the senses.” – Yogananda, from Chapter 26 of the “Autobiography”
“Spineless acquiescence in the mayic delusions of the world” – that is what the children of the 1960’s approvingly called “go with the flow,” which became the mantra of an entire era. If you didn’t want to go with the flow, it meant you were a “square” or “all uptight.” The hippie generation believed that the key to a happy or “mellow” life, was simply to flow “with the phenomenal flux,” as Yogananda puts it, taking “the line of least resistance” as they moved through the crowds at Woodstock, or at sit-ins, teach-ins or love-ins. They saw themselves as good insofar as they saw themselves in opposition ot the uptight squares of the Establishment.
What the flower children did not perceive was that they were as asleep as the poker-faced National guardsmen in riot gear who faced them down. The soldiers and “pig” policemen were going with the flow too. Theirs was a different manifestation of “flow” or mayic delusion, but both opposing sides were equally deluded or asleep. Why? Because they were both blinded by the conformist norms of their own socio-cultural sub-groups.
When Hindu and Buddhist scriptures say that man is dreaming and asleep, what they mean is that man is so taken up by the powerful kaleidoscope of powerful sensory impressions that he cannot awaken to “the possibility of divine communion,” as Yogananda puts it. Being awake means being aware of the reality of the one God who lights up the vast sky above the fog of maya’s karmic flow, its endless sensory presentations of dualistic light and shadow. Yogananda says in Chapter 49 that spiritual teachers “reveal the passage by which bewildered humanity may cross over and beyond the stormy seas of samsara (the karmic wheel, the recurrence of lives and deaths.)”
Most of us choose to be asleep without even realizing it. In fact, we revel in the dualism of maya so much that we deliberately create “virtual worlds,” man-made mayic worlds within the shared mayic earthly environment. In Chapter 30, Yogananda brilliantly compares our phenomenal world to the projection of a powerful movie whose “reality” is dependent upon flickering, contrasting images of light and shadow, which are in turn dependent upon our perception of linear time. If the movie projected light only, with no shadow, there would be nothing to see, but if we were truly to perceive the light alone, we would arise from our sleepy perception of our own ego’s separateness to a fully awake state of union with God.
In recent years, our love affair with ‘going with the flow’ has led us to create an even more intense form of virtual world than what is presented to us through the illusion of cinema: computer video games, in which we act as well as simply observing the screen. Video game players become so lost in their addictive mayic world of the game that they become almost unaware of the larger, shared phenomenal world around them. It is maya within maya, a going with the flow that leaves them more deeply asleep even as by contrast they keenly feel a heightened sense of waking alertness. This same fascinating and deliberate construction of a sleeping world within a sleeping world has been even more consciously created in Christopher Nolan’s current movie, “Inception,” starring Leonardo di Caprio. Nonetheless, what these games and movies can really teach us is that in our paradoxical and bewildering phenomenal world, to be asleep is to perceive that one is awake, whereas to be truly awakened is to be fully aware that one has “(crossed) over and beyond the stormy seas of samsara.”
Bird of Spirit 