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"A vessel of happiness...a beautiful
being who breathed the spiritual force in such a way that it
saturated his entire body." - Adi Da Samraj
Swami Prakashananda Saraswati was born into a Brahmin family
in November 1917 in Kamataka, South India, and given the
name Laxmi Narayan. His mother died when he was ten and left
home shortly after that. One of his earliest childhood
memories was of the eighteened-armed Goddess of Sapta
Shringh which he was destined to meet years later and
recognize as his true mother.
He is known as a divinely realized
being. After many years of sadhana he was called, in1953 to
a mountain about 40 miles north of Nasik in Maharashtra,
Sapta Shringh.
Swami Muktananda
and Prakashananda Saraswati
This biography tells the story of Swami Prakashananda, an
Indian saint. Titus Foster met Prakashananda in Bombay in
1976 and became one of his disciples. He communicates his
knowledge and experience of the swami's teachings and
stories, exploring his style of enlightenment.
The following is
from My Great Regard for My Adept-links to the Great
Tradition of Mankind, and My Realization of the Great
Onlyness of Me or Chapter 20 of the Knee of Listening
added in 1999, by Ruchira Avatar Adi Da Samraj
XL.
Yet another devotee
of Baba Muktananda, named Swami Prakashananda-Who did not
Function as My Spiritual Master (and Who, like Rudi, was not
a fully developed Siddha-Guru but, rather, a very much
advanced fourth-to-fifth stage SiddhaYogi) once
(spontaneously, in 1969) Showed Me (in His own bodily human
Form) the fifth stage Signs of Spiritual Transfiguration of
the physical body.
At that time
(according to what I learned from Amma), Swami Prakashananda
had been indicated, by Baba Muktananda, to be His principal
Indian devotee and eventual institutional successor (and
such was, then, generally known and presumed to be the case
by Baba Muktananda's devotees). However, at last, when (at,
or shortly before, Baba Muktananda's death, in 1982) Swami
Prakashananda was formally Asked to assume the institutional
successorship, He declined to accept this organizational
role (ostensibly, for reasons of ill-health, and His
reluctance to become a "world-traveler"-but, actually, or
more to the point, because of His puritanical and
conventional reaction to Baba Muktananda's reported sexual
activities).
In any case, Swami
Prakashananda and I continued to engage in occasional, and
always positive, direct communication (through My
devotee-representatives) in the years after Baba
Muktananda's death, and right until Swami Prakashananda's
death, in 1988.
XLI.
Swami Prakashananda
had always maintained a small Ashram, independent of the
Ashrams of Baba Muktananda's Siddha-Yoga institution-but,
after Baba Muktananda's death, Swami Prakashananda retired
to His own Ashram, permanently. And, in doing so, Swami
Prakashananda highlighted, and dramatized, a perennial
conflict that is fundamental to religious institutions all
over the world. That conflict is between, on the one hand,
the traditional (and, generally, rather puritanical-and even
basically exoteric) expectation of celibacy as a sign of
institutionalized Sacred Authority, and, on the other hand,
the equally traditional (but non-puritanical, and generally
unconventional) view that there is an esoteric sexual
alternative to celibacy that Sacred Authorities (including
True Siddha-Gurus--or even any practitioners of Siddha Yoga)
may (at least in some cases, and under some circumstances)
engage.
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