After completing his internship at Princeton University, having received a scholarship in science and where he could also maintain contact with Albert Einstein for almost two years, Rohden was invited to teach Philosophy and Comparative Religions at the University of Washington, DC, a position he held for five years, before returning to Brazil in 1952. 1
During this period, he attended the Temple of the Golden Lotus under the direction of its founder, the Indian guru, Swami Premananda (1903-1995), who received his academic education and religious training in his homeland at the University of Calcutta, where he graduated in Philosophy, Oriental Languages and Comparative Religions and who was also a disciple and friend of Paramahansa Yogananda.
Premananda was initiated into the practice of Kriya-Yoga by Paramahansa Yogananda in India in 1920. In 1928 he came to the United States at the invitation of the Master and was ordained to teach Kriya-Yoga in Washington, DC. He was also the founder of the Church of Self-Realization of All Religions and the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Foundation. He was consecrated as a Swami in 1941 when he changed his name from Jotin Brahmachari to Swami Premananda, which means Love of Supreme Wisdom.
He has written a few books, among the most popular are: The Path of Wisdom and Self-Liberation, Prayers for Self-Realisation, Light on Kriya-Yoga: The Mystic Path; The Mystic Ritual; The Mystical Revelation. The latter deals with a series of sacred Hindu treatises written in Sanskrit c. 800-200 BC, expounding the Vedas in predominantly mystical and monistic terms.
According to Premananda, “The innermost radiant light within the spiritual eye is the mystic door of God revelation. When the mind remains firmly established on that light, it is gradually absorbed by the ever-expanding effulgence pervaded with the pure self-consciousness that finally leads to the realization of the absolute Self, represented by the Ultimate Reality, Brahman.”
“Meditation is the key to spiritual life and illumination. It is the only way to know God and our soul, our true self. Meditation is much more than study and discussion. Intellectual understanding and thoughtful deliberation are the most vital and fundamental prerequisites to the attainment of subjective knowledge and wisdom. But they must lead to meditation. Meditation is the ultimate means of attaining the direct perception of spiritual truths. From time immemorial, man has sought to find the way which leads to the realization of God, and he has discovered the path of God within himself and has called it Kriya Yoga.”
“Literally, Kriya Yoga is a Sanskrit expression of two words, Kriya and Yoga. Kriya means work. Yoga signifies union or oneness. In its spiritual connotation, Kriya Yoga is the subjective method of meditation whereby the realization of soul’s oneness with God is attained.”
“Since the book Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda was published, I have been asked the above question countless times. Almost everyone thinks that Kriya-Yoga is a particular creed of Eastern philosophy, a kind of secret doctrine known only to the great masters.
I, who was invited by my former guru Swami Premananda to study and practice Kriya-Yoga, could tell those interested what it is. But the difficulty is in saying the unspeakable. There are no words that favour an analytical exposition of an essentially intuitive subject.
When a spiritual master perceives or instead feels and intuits that a disciple has the consciousness and experience of the truth about man, he can then invite him to concretize, through a symbolic ceremonial, what has already been spiritually accomplished by the disciple. The master invites; the disciple does not offer himself, but he can accept, for a true master knows intuitively when the disciple is ready to receive Kriya-Yoga. When the disciple is ready, the master accomplishes his duties!
Mahatma Gandhi initiated himself during the 20 years he spent in South Africa between clamorous injustices and great sufferings. Much later, as recorded in Yogananda's Autobiography, he was invited to the ceremony, that is, to the ritual confirmation of the process of spiritual self-initiation.
In fact, it is a traditional misconception to think that someone can initiate someone. There is no initiation by external factors; there is only self-initiation. Jesus, the greatest of the spiritual teachers known to Western Christendom, did not initiate any of his disciples; they initiated themselves, on the morning of Pentecost, after nine days of silence and deep meditation. The Master just showed them the way to this self-initiation and prepared them for three years.
Self-initiation is a kind of cosmo-fulfilment, which only happens to someone who has performed, or is performing, a total ego-emptying - and all the fullness spontaneously overflows.
When the disciple has made his ego-emptying, then the cosmo-fulfilment takes place, which even overflows for the benefit of others. A self-redeemed being is a redeeming agent.
God, says Spinoza, is the soul of the Universe, which flows into man emptied of his ego.
Kriya-Yoga is, therefore, a ritual symbol that confirms spiritual symbolism. The spiritual belongs to the disciple; the ritual, to the master. If the spiritual does not exist, the master cannot perform it. If a master were to ritualize a non-existent spiritual, he would commit fraud and dishonesty and lose his power. Therefore, the master can only invite - either expressly or silently - the disciple to Kriya-Yoga, when he has a sure and certain intuition that the disciple has already initiated himself spiritually in order to be able to initiate him ritually.
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1)- From this relationship with Albert Einstein, Rohden wrote one of his most famous books, EINSTEIN, The Enigma of the Universe. A book that presents a philosophical approach to the life and creative processes of the greatest genius of the 20th century. In the book, the scientist and the philosopher harmonize. The simultaneous effort of this interaction and deep philosophical identification is materialized in a humanistic vision of the world and the comprehension of Einsteinian intuition.
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