I didn’t understand what the small girl in her mother’s arms was saying. I was staying with Ananda friends in Argentina, where little girls speak only Spanish, while I speak only English.
Miranda was 2-3 years old and very shy towards this stranger staying in her home with her parents. Miranda pointed to me, and with the quiet authority that children sometimes command, spoke to her mother.
Mom became very quiet and thoughtful, so I finally asked, “what did she say?”
“Miranda pointed to your shirt and said, “That’s the color of God.”
I was wearing the blue color that members of the Nayaswami Order wear. It was my turn to become thoughtful. Until then, I never considered that God had a particular color. More compelling was the quietly confident way Miranda implied that she saw God, and therefore knew God’s color!
Children often speak the highest truths, before their pure hearts become conditioned by the world to have more “adult” attitudes. Jesus Christ famously said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
I’ll just touch on the idea of God’s color here. There is certainly some truth to blue being the color of God! Paramhansa Yogananda and Swami Kriyananda have said, in various ways, that “blue is the color of the Christ consciousness.” Lord Krishna is typically depicted as having blue skin. In one of his poems in Whispers from Eternity, Yogananda wrote, “O Divine Mother, in Thy lotus feet of blue light, the bee of my mind is engrossed.”
The Spiritual Eye
The spiritual eye, depicted in this painting by Kriyananda, is a reality that is universal to all souls. When you become very still in meditation, or after practicing certain techniques, you can see the spiritual eye behind your closed eyes. If you go deep enough, you can enter that tunnel of blue light, where everything becomes a brilliant “opal blue,” just as Yogananda described it.
Now, philosophers and intellectuals will argue about what is God’s real color, or that God is not a particular color. I’ll sit out such theoretical discussions and listen instead to a child that saw God.
Paramhansa Yogananda often urged his disciples to become more childlike (which is very different from being childish). He once surprised Swami Kriyananda with some children’s toys as a gift, then quoted the words of Christ to him, “Suffer little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of God.”
At the time, Kriyananda was still struggling with intellectual doubt, which drives away the presence of God. Typical grownup attitudes—which too often include skepticism, doubt, intellectual pride and egotism—are absent in the great masters who see and know God.
Kriyananda learned his Guru’s lesson well—at times you could see he was a divine child above all else. I have a note from him, written while he was working on a children’s book. He wrote, “And – well, you know, I really am a child at heart, before God, though few people know it. At Ma’s ashram (Anandamayi Ma) I was known as her chhoto chhele (little child).”
Swami Kriyananda once described Yogananda: “One of the most amazing things about Master was his complete inner freedom. In the deepest matters he maintained the simplicity and light-hearted innocence of a child.”
Pray Like a Child
If you want to see God, try to become more childlike and pure-hearted in your attitude. Pray as a child, not as a beggar or as an adult negotiating with God. Even when a child errs, it still approaches its Mother and ask forgiveness.
Yogananda taught us to pray as children:
“Never mind if you have erred. Just call to God with trusting love. Hide nothing from Him. He knows all your faults, far better than you do! Be completely open with Him.
“You may find it helpful to pray to God as your Divine Mother. For the Mother aspect of God is all-merciful. Pray, ‘Divine Mother, naughty or good, I am Thy child. Thou must release me!’
“Even the human mother loves her naughty children as much as her good ones. Sometimes she loves them even more, for their need is greater.
“Don’t be afraid of your Divine Mother. Sing to Her in this way from your heart: ‘Receive me on Thy lap, O Mother! Cast me not at death’s door.
Excerpt from The New Path,
by Swami Kriyananda
‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’ The truth in these simple words has been acclaimed equally by great saints of East and West. It is a truth which every devotee would do well to ponder, for among the followers of all religions it is a common delusion that mere membership in a body of worshipers will be their passport to salvation. Yet Jesus didn’t say, ‘Blessed are my followers, for they shall see God.’ His message was universal: By the yardstick of inner purity alone is a person’s closeness to God determined.
What is purity of heart? Jesus defined it effectively, elsewhere, as the capacity to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength. And why is this capacity called purity? Simply because we belong to God; worldliness is foreign to our essential nature.
How, then, can one achieve such purity? Is self-effort the answer? Is grace? St. Paul said, ‘By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. Christian fundamentalists often quote this passage as an argument against self-effort of any kind, and particularly against the practices of yoga. But the Book of Revelation states, ‘And, behold, I come quickly, and my reward is with me, to give [to] every man according as his work shall be. Do these scriptural passages contradict one another? Not at all.
St. Paul didn’t mean that self-effort is futile, but only that God is above bargaining. Outward ‘works’ in God’s name—works, in other words, such as building schools and hospitals—will not in themselves win His grace. It depends first of all on a person’s attitude. Love alone can win Him. Like attracts like, and God is Love. But as for those inner efforts which lift the soul up toward God—especially the unconditional offering of trust and love—they are essential, else were the scriptures written in vain. It is to this internal ‘work’ that the Book of Revelation is referring, above.
To develop love for God, the first prerequisite is that no other desire divert its flow from Him. This, then, is our first spiritual ‘work’: to renounce every desire that conflicts with our devotion. We need not so much destroy our desires as rechannel their energies Godward.
And it is in this true labor of love that the techniques of yoga are particularly helpful. Wrong desires, it need hardly be added, could never be transmuted by technique alone. But even as running techniques can be useful to those who hope to excel on the track field, so the techniques of yoga can help devotees to control their physical energies, and redirect them toward God. Yoga practice by itself won’t give us God, but it can help us very much in our efforts to give ourselves to Him. The yoga science helps us, in other words, to cooperate with divine grace.
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