How much I had missed the chastisements of my great guru! Each one had been a guardian angel of protection.
“Dearest Master! Rebuke me a million times-do scold me now!”
“I shall chide you no more.” His divine voice was grave, yet with an undercurrent of laughter. “You and I shall smile together, so long as our two forms appear different in the maya-dream of God. Finally we shall merge as one in the Cosmic Beloved; our smiles shall be His smile, our unified song of joy vibrating throughout eternity to be broadcast to God-tuned souls!”
Sri Yukteswar gave me light on certain matters which I cannot reveal here. During the two hours that he spent with me in the Bombay hotel room he answered my every question. A number of world prophecies uttered by him that June day in 1936 have already come to pass.
“I leave you now, beloved one!” At these words I felt Master melting away within my encircling arms.
“My child,” his voice rang out, vibrating into my very soul-firmament, “whenever you enter the door of nirbikalpa samadhi and call on me, I shall come to you in flesh and blood, even as today.”
With this celestial promise Sri Yukteswar vanished from my sight. A cloud-voice repeated in musical thunder: “Tell all! Whosoever knows by nirbikalpa realization that your earth is a dream of God can come to the finer dream-created planet of Hiranyaloka, and there find me resurrected in a body exactly like my earthly one. Yogananda, tell all!”
Gone was the sorrow of parting. The pity and grief for his death, long robber of my peace, now fled in stark shame. Bliss poured forth like a fountain through endless, newly opened soul-pores. Anciently clogged with disuse, they now widened in purity at the driving flood of ecstasy. Subconscious thoughts and feelings of my past incarnations shed their karmic taints, lustrously renewed by Sri Yukteswar’s divine visit.
In this chapter of my autobiography I have obeyed my guru’s behest and spread the glad tiding, though it confound once more an incurious generation. Groveling, man knows well; despair is seldom alien; yet these are perversities, no part of man’s true lot. The day he wills, he is set on the path to freedom. Too long has he hearkened to the dank pessimism of his “dust-thou-art” counselors, heedless of the unconquerable soul.
I was not the only one privileged to behold the Resurrected Guru.