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Newsletter Oct. 19, 2016
Upcoming Events
Wednesdays Hatha Yoga - 5PM –6:30PM
YES, HATHA YOGA CLASS WILL MEET WED. OCT 19 & WED. OCT 26
5:00pm –6:30pm, taught by Ellen Schaefer of One Yoga Center, Foster RI will be conducted at the Vedanta Society. Cost is $30/for 6-week session or $10.00 walk in per class. Please contact Ellen only at: 401-368-9642
After Oct. 26, Hatha Yoga classes will be suspended until Further Notice.
Swami to NewYork and Shelton, CT - Oct. 22 – 23
Swami Yogatmananda will visit Vivekananda Study & Philanthropic Center of New York
172-05 Highland Avenue, Jamaica Estates, New York 11432, on the evening of Sat. Oct 22 and will give a talk there on ‘From Truth to Truth’ from 7:30-8:30 pm. Then on 23rd morning he will speak at a devotee’s home in Shelton, CT, before returning to Providence to deliver the Sun talk.
Swami Travels – Oct. 28 - Nov. 13
Swami will be traveling to San Francisco, CA to participate in re-dedication ceremony of the Old Temple and deliver talks; he will then travel to Australia for 10 days. Upon returning, he will again be in CA; then Indianapolis IN. He will be back in Providence on Sunday Nov. 13th night.
Weekly
Programs (in addition to Daily Programs given below)
| Friday, Oct. 21 |
7:00 PM: Aarati (devotional music) & meditation 7:30 – 8:30 PM: Study Class by Swami Yogatmananda on Jnana Yoga (based on the book of Swami Vivekananda) |
| Saturday, Oct. 22 |
8:30 – 10:30 AM: Karma Yoga/Cleaning |
| Sunday, Oct. 23 |
5:00 – 6:00 PM: Sunday lecture: Journey to ‘No-WHEN’ by Swami Yogatmananda 7:00-8:00 PM - Meditation in chapel |
| Tuesday, Oct. 25 |
7:00 PM: Aarati (devotional music) & meditation 7:30 – 8:30 PM: Study Class by Swami Yogatmananda on 'The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna', Ch 51, pp 968 |
Daily Programs
| Morning : | 5:45 – 6:45 AM: Meditation 6:45 – 7:00 AM: Chanting followed by a short reading from 'The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Vol. 7' 7:00 – 7:25AM – A short ritual worship/Puja. Open to all. |
| Evening : | 7:00 – 7:15 PM: Aarti (devotional music), with a short reading from 'THE STORY OF AN EPOCH: Swami Virajananda and his Times', by Swami Shraddhananda 7:15 – 8:00 PM: Meditation. Open to all. |
Past Events
Day-long Retreat – Sat. Oct. 15, 10:00AM - 7:00PM
Fifty-three devotees attended in this fifty-fifth (55th) day-long retreat, from 10:00AM – 7:00PM.
The topic was: '700 Verses on Divine Mother', two 1 ½ hour lectures and a 1-hour-plus Q/A session conducted by Swami Yogatmananda. The retreat also comprised of a Hatha yoga session & guided meditation by Pat Blake; refreshment breaks, devotional singing segment, luncheon, Aarati and dinner.
Swami at Central Falls H.S. – Mon Oct 17
To a class of about twenty to twenty-five High School students in Central Falls RI, in a morning class, Swami explained importance of meditation in one’s life, how meditation moulds one’s personality, answered questions, and offered a ten-minute guided meditation segment.
Click here to see photos of above events.
Synopses of Past Classes
Study Class on 'Jnana Yoga' - Oct. 14, Friday
Class #37:
Due to some technical difficulties, we could not webcast this lecture. For those who are interested:
Click here for the recorded audio mp3 file (about 25 MB)
A doubt comes – if God/Absolute cannot be known, (as ‘knowing is limiting’ and God cannot be limited) then He must be ‘unknown’. But that also is not true, as ‘unknown’ is also a category, opposite to ‘known’. He is not knowable as an object, nor is He unknown and unknowable like something hidden inside a faraway black-hole. He, being our very Self, is intensely more known than anything else; to know anything, first we have to know ‘I’ and then, through that we know any other object. He is hidden in every vibration of knowledge, like sea is hidden in every wave. Upanisads and Bhagavad Gita declare that God is infinitely higher than known or unknown. In and through Him that we breathe, in and through Him we exist. He, being the eternal indweller of everything, cannot be projected outside of me to be ‘known’; but He is involved in all knowledge. In this sense, He is far superior to both the relative categories of known and unknown.
Sunday Lecture – Rosetta Stone - Oct. 16, Sunday
The Rosetta Stone symbolizes understanding the same meaning through different vehicles. It helped decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. The purpose of writing is to share experiences, and has been more durable and pervasive than oral communication. The physicist John Wheeler chronicled the evolution of the basic stuff of physics as going from particles to fields to information. The latest conclusion is that the world is made up of different arrangements of binary digits, or bits, each of which comprises either a yes or a no. The five senses experience the universe as just bits. Vedanta proposes one element for each sense. The dichotomy of bits, of yes and no, is the source of all contradiction and conflict, or Maya. The creative arts see the world beyond discrete bits. Non-duality is beyond the bit world, and resolves all conflict. The “I am”, or self-consciousness, is beyond bits. Through meditation and transcendence, we ask: Am I the body? Am I the mind? And so we remove the different sheaths. We cannot express in words what results, except to call it Brahman, the all-pervading reality. We are actually already seeing nothing but God. If we experience this, our life will be fulfilled, and perfected. The point is to use the body as an instrument, and not to identify with it.
Study Class - The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna – Oct. 18, Tuesday
Date: April 22, 1886; page 968
Hirananda, a devotee is visiting Sri Ramakrishna from far off Sindh. Narendra sang a very thought-provoking song that makes one think who is using these instruments called body and mind. We need to feel that being who sees through these eyes, hears through these ears, breathes through these nostrils etc. The user of an instrument is not the instrument itself but someone beyond the instrument – someone beyond space and time, as it is not limited by mind where the ideas of space and time originate.
Narendra, prodded by Sri Ramakrishna, then sings another song that describes the immanence of God. Going “beyond” the body may mistakenly give us the sense that the reality is beyond and separate from the body. We need to realize that it is not so, we are all IN this reality and this reality is IN the body – just as an ocean is not beyond the wave but the wave is in the ocean and permeated by it. This tells us that God dwells in our heart. We do not need to go far to find Him. All we need to do is to realize by identifying with Him – just as we need to realize that while watching a movie, we are not watching a movie but watching a screen. We can remove our mistaken identification with the body by persistently telling ourselves that we are not the body. If we do this with love and devotion to this idea then we can find the energy and drive to act on this understanding. In the absence of this, it is dry intellectualism.