GOD IN THE PALISADES FIRE

Does He Love Me More than You?

(The SRF Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades, California)

The fires in Southern California have destroyed more homes than The Great Fire of London, The Chicago Fire, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, and the Maui fires combined. Hundreds of thousands are homeless - and the danger is not yet past.

For me the shock was deeply personal. I lived or worked in Pacific Palisades for 25 years. I knew every shop, school, church, hiking trail, every cafe - almost, it seemed, every tree.

Nearly all are gone. Rather than compare it to previous wildfires, the images of the incineration are drawing comparisons to the wartime devastation of Hiroshima and Dresden, with acre upon acre of nothing but ashes, with here and there a lone surviving chimney.

Mercifully, unlike the hundreds of thousands of dead in Germany and Japan, here we lost 24 confirmed, with 40 missing. Homes can be rebuilt, they say. But can the core of a community recover from the loss of its very identity - its history, its memory?

And when our spirits are lifted in hearing of a seemingly miraculous survival of a home or a beloved landmark here or there, the question naturally arises - why? Did those people pray harder? Did they plan smarter? Was it mere luck? If God favors a certain few, how is that favor earned?

So we come to the seemingly miraculous survival of the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine - the beloved and world-renowned meditation garden in Pacific Palisades where the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi are enshrined, the “Church of All Religions” founded in 1950 by the great yoga master, Paramahansa Yogananda, author of the spiritual classic, “Autobiography of a Yogi,” who is often hailed as “The Father of Yoga in the West.”

(Paramahansa Yogananda at the SRF Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades, August 20, 1950)

The skeptical may point to mere luck and coincidence. The 12-acre site, with its beautiful temple, retreat, ashram buildings, and historic Windmill Chapel are situated across from a fire station and contains the only spring-fed lake in all of Los Angeles County. When the reservoirs ran dry and the hoses sputtered out, the lake was surely the reason the Lake Shrine survived while nearly every surrounding building was burned down.

But no. The Windmill Chapel was doused by water pumped from the lake, but only until the mandatory evacuation was given. The staff left, the fires raged on, and a condo building mere feet from the historic gardens and chapel was burned to the ground. The newly built restrooms twenty feet from a museum housing irreplaceable relics was incinerated - but the museum, the Chapel, and the exquisite gardens surrounding the lakeside path were untouched, even as nearby hillsides mere yards away were torched by 80-mile-an-winds. On the hill above the lake, the beautiful new temple and adjacent retreat were also entirely preserved, even as homes fifty yards away were lost.

Meanwhile, nearly every other church, synagogue, and temple in Pacific Palisades was destroyed, along with thousands of homes, shops, schools and businesses. The president of Self-Realization Fellowship, Brother Chidananda, was quick to point out that there is no spiritual superiority involved in this anomaly. Rather there is, he said, an inherent obligation to join hands with our friends in other spiritual traditions to help rebuild this vital community of faith, a choir which blends the various voices of our brothers and sisters in God.

Still the question remains - what exactly is the power of prayer? For the Lake Shrine may rightly be regarded as a unique world treasure. Not on the level of the destruction of Notre Dame in Paris, but certainly the peril it endured called forth intense prayer from many thousands of people around the world - not merely SRF members, but from the multitudes who had meditated there during the last 75 years or whose lives had been transformed by Yogananda’s perenially influential autobiography.

It may regarded as no mere coincidence that Yogananda taught the science of prayer in detail, nor is it accidental that the lessons series studied by SRF members contains precise instructions on how to maximize that power, with reference to recent discoveries in quantum physics which validate the theoretical underpinnings of ancient yogic science.

But he also always stressed that communing directly with the omnipresent blissful Cosmic Consciousness is not a matter of mere cold science and technique. It is a science of love. “Kriya Yoga plus devotion,” he would say. “It works like mathematics - it cannot fail.” (Kriya Yoga being the ancient technique Yogananda brought from India of working directly with the life force in the spine to raise the consciousness to the higher chakras where divine communion may be experienced).

So when thousands of souls the world over, trained in these techniques, enter into meditation with deeply felt invocations for divine aid in saving this spiritual haven, does it actually effect changes in the wind? Does some unseen magic protective layer descend by sacred fiat over certain buildings, but not on neighboring homes? Is this fair of God?

Well, there’s this thing called free will, it would seem. And there is another instructive example of the power of prayer appearing to stop a fire in its tracks, at yet another of Yogananda’s ashrams. When a firestorm threatened the Hidden Valley Ashram and Retreat in Escondido in 2005, the monks and retreatants were ordered by firemen to evacuate - nothing, they said, could save the property from the oncoming blaze.

Until an elderly monk, the saintly and blissful Brother Bimalananda, a direct disciple of Yogananda, quietly walked out towards the perimeter of the property, raised his old arms in the air and began to chant the sacred word, Aum, over and over, invoking help from the Divine in the form of the devas and elementals said to control the fire and the winds. “The fire is Shiva (the Hindu deity of destruction),” he told the younger monks. “But Divine Mother is more powerful! Everybody chant Aum!”

(Brother Bimalananda, SRF monastic, direct disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda)

So they joined the frail old man, who never faltered with his arms raised, hour after hour as the flames raced down the mountainside toward the monastic ranch.

Whereupon the fire simply stopped at the property line and went out.

I had the privilege of knowing this delightful saint, and can testify that this is merely one of many miracles associated with him. I am alive to write this story only thanks to him.

But Yogananda insisted that “miracles” are in fact due to the operation of subtle natural laws which can be utilized by intense concentration…plus devotion. And this is, perhaps, what saved the Lake Shrine as a haven of peace where those devastated by the fires may come to replenish their spirits, to renew their communion with Source, and give thanks for the great teachers of all traditions who come to remind us of our true nature in God.

blessings,

Michael