“Giri Bala,” I said as the saint opened
her eyes, “please give me a keepsake-a strip
of one of your Saris.”
She soon returned with a piece of Benares silk, extending
it in her hand as she suddenly prostrated herself
on the ground.
“Mother,” I said reverently, “rather
let me touch your own blessed feet!”
{FN46-1} In northern Bengal.
{FN46-2} H. H. Sir Bijay Chand Mahtab, now dead.
His family doubtless possesses some record of the
Maharaja’s three investigations of Giri Bala.
{FN46-3} Woman yogi.
{FN46-4} “Remover of Obstacles,” the god
of good fortune.
{FN46-5} Sri Yukteswar used to say: “The
Lord has given us the fruits of the good earth.
We like to see our food, to smell it, to taste it—the
Hindu likes also to touch it!” One does not mind
hearing it, either, if no one else is present
at the meal!
{FN46-6} Mr. Wright also took moving pictures of Sri
Yukteswar during his last Winter Solstice Festival
in Serampore.
{FN46-7} “What we eat is radiation; our food
is so much quanta of energy,” Dr. George W.
Crile of Cleveland told a gathering of medical men
on May 17, 1933 in Memphis. “This all-important
radiation, which releases electrical currents for
the body’s electrical circuit, the nervous system,
is given to food by the sun’s rays. Atoms,
Dr. Crile says, are solar systems. Atoms are
the vehicles that are filled with solar radiance as
so many coiled springs. These countless atomfuls
of energy are taken in as food. Once in the human
body, these tense vehicles, the atoms, are discharged
in the body’s protoplasm, the radiance furnishing
new chemical energy, new electrical currents.
‘Your body is made up of such atoms,’
Dr. Crile said. ’They are your muscles,
brains, and sensory organs, such as the eyes and ears.’”
Someday scientists will discover how man can live
directly on solar energy. “Chlorophyll
is the only substance known in nature that somehow
possesses the power to act as a ‘sunlight trap,’”
William L. Laurence writes in the new York
times. “It ‘catches’ the
energy of sunlight and stores it in the plant.
Without this no life could exist. We obtain
the energy we need for living from the solar energy
stored in the plant-food we eat or in the flesh of
the animals that eat the plants. The energy we
obtain from coal or oil is solar energy trapped by
the chlorophyll in plant life millions of years ago.
We live by the sun through the agency of chlorophyll.”
{FN46-8} Potent vibratory chant. The literal
translation of Sanskrit mantra is “instrument
of thought,” signifying the ideal, inaudible
sounds which represent one aspect of creation; when
vocalized as syllables, a mantra constitutes
a universal terminology. The infinite powers
of sound derive from Aum, the “Word”
or creative hum of the Cosmic Motor.
