Autobiography of a Yogi
too would produce men and women of divine realization through the
ancient yogic path.
This disciple and a number of others generously insisted on making a
donation for my travels. The financial problem thus solved, I made
arrangements to sail, via Europe, for India. Busy weeks of preparations
at Mount Washington! In March, 1935 I had the Self-Realization
Fellowship chartered under the laws of the State of California as
a non-profit corporation. To this educational institution go all
public donations as well as the revenue from the sale of my books,
magazine, written courses, class tuition, and every other source
of income.
“I shall be back,” I told my students. “Never shall I forget
America.”
At a farewell banquet given to me in Los Angeles by loving friends,
I looked long at their faces and thought gratefully, “Lord, he who
remembers Thee as the Sole Giver will never lack the sweetness of
friendship among mortals.”
I sailed from New York on June 9, 1935 {FN39-1} in the EUROPA. Two
students accompanied me: my secretary, Mr. C. Richard Wright, and
an elderly lady from Cincinnati, Miss Ettie Bletch. We enjoyed the
days of ocean peace, a welcome contrast to the past hurried weeks.
Our period of leisure was short-lived; the speed of modern boats
has some regrettable features!
Like any other group of inquisitive tourists, we walked around the
huge and ancient city of London. The following day I was invited to
address a large meeting in Caxton Hall, at which I was introduced
to the London audience by Sir Francis Younghusband. Our party
spent a pleasant day as guests of Sir Harry Lauder at his estate
in Scotland. We soon crossed the English Channel to the continent,
for I wanted to make a special pilgrimage to Bavaria. This would
be my only chance, I felt, to visit the great Catholic mystic,
Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth.
Years earlier I had read an amazing account of Therese. Information
given in the article was as follows:
(1) Therese, born in 1898, had been injured in an accident at the
age of twenty; she became blind and paralyzed.
(2) She miraculously regained her sight in 1923 through prayers
to St. Teresa, “The Little Flower.” Later Therese Neumann’s limbs
were instantaneously healed.
(3) From 1923 onward, Therese has abstained completely from food
and drink, except for the daily swallowing of one small consecrated
wafer.
(4) The stigmata, or sacred wounds of Christ, appeared in 1926 on
Therese’s head, breast, hands, and feet. On Friday of every week
thereafter, she has passed through the Passion of Christ, suffering
in her own body all his historic agonies.
(5) Knowing ordinarily only the simple German of her village,
during her Friday trances Therese utters phrases which scholars
have identified as ancient Aramaic. At appropriate times in her
vision, she speaks Hebrew or Greek.
(6) By ecclesiastical permission, Therese has several times been
under close scientific observation. Dr. Fritz Gerlick, editor of
a Protestant German newspaper, went to Konnersreuth to “expose the
Catholic fraud,” but ended up by reverently writing her biography.
{FN39-2}
As always, whether in East or West, I was eager to meet a saint.
I rejoiced as our little party entered, on July 16th, the quaint
village of Konnersreuth. The Bavarian peasants exhibited lively
interest in our Ford automobile (brought with us from America) and
its assorted group-an American young man, an elderly lady, and an
olive-hued Oriental with long hair tucked under his coat collar.
Therese’s little cottage, clean and neat, with geraniums blooming
by a primitive well, was alas! silently closed. The neighbors, and
even the village postman who passed by, could give us no information.
Rain began to fall; my companions suggested that we leave.
“No,” I said stubbornly, “I will stay here until I find some clue
leading to Therese.”
Two hours later we were still sitting in our car amidst the dismal
rain. “Lord,” I sighed complainingly, “why didst Thou lead me here
if she has disappeared?”
An English-speaking man halted beside us, politely offering his
aid.
“I don’t know for certain where Therese is,” he said, “but she
often visits at the home of Professor Wurz, a seminary master of
Eichstatt, eighty miles from here.”
The following morning our party motored to the quiet village
of Eichstatt, narrowly lined with cobblestoned streets. Dr. Wurz
greeted us cordially at his home; “Yes, Therese is here.” He sent
her word of the visitors. A messenger soon appeared with her reply.
“Though the bishop has asked me to see no one without his permission,
I will receive the man of God from India.”
Deeply touched at these words, I followed Dr. Wurz upstairs to the
sitting room. Therese entered immediately, radiating an aura of
peace and joy. She wore a black gown and spotless white head dress.
Although her age was thirty-seven at this time, she seemed much
younger, possessing indeed a childlike freshness and charm. Healthy,
well-formed, rosy-cheeked, and cheerful, this is the saint that
does not eat!
Therese greeted me with a very gentle handshaking. We both beamed
in silent communion, each knowing the other to be a lover of God.
Dr. Wurz kindly offered to serve as interpreter. As we seated
ourselves, I noticed that Therese was glancing at me with naive
curiosity; evidently Hindus had been rare in Bavaria.
“Don’t you eat anything?” I wanted to hear the answer from her own
lips.
“No, except a consecrated rice-flour wafer, once every morning at
six o’clock.”
“How large is the wafer?”
“It is paper-thin, the size of a small coin.” She added, “I take
it for sacramental reasons; if it is unconsecrated, I am unable to
swallow it.”
“Certainly you could not have lived on that, for twelve whole
years?”
“I live by God’s light.” How simple her reply, how Einsteinian!
“I see you realize that energy flows to your body from the ether,
sun, and air.”
A swift smile broke over her face. “I am so happy to know you
understand how I live.”
“Your sacred life is a daily demonstration of the truth uttered by
Christ: ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that
proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’” {FN39-3}
Again she showed joy at my explanation. “It is indeed so. One of
the reasons I am here on earth today is to prove that man can live
by God’s invisible light, and not by food only.”
“Can you teach others how to live without food?”
She appeared a trifle shocked. “I cannot do that; God does not wish
it.”
As my gaze fell on her strong, graceful hands, Therese showed me
a little, square, freshly healed wound on each of her palms. On
the back of each hand, she pointed out a smaller, crescent-shaped
wound, freshly healed. Each wound went straight through the hand.
The sight brought to my mind distinct recollection of the large
square iron nails with crescent-tipped ends, still used in the
Orient, but which I do not recall having seen in the West.
The saint told me something of her weekly trances. “As a helpless
onlooker, I observe the whole Passion of Christ.” Each week, from
Thursday midnight until Friday afternoon at one o’clock, her wounds
open and bleed; she loses ten pounds of her ordinary 121-pound
weight. Suffering intensely in her sympathetic love, Therese yet
looks forward joyously to these weekly visions of her Lord.
I realized at once that her strange life is intended by God to reassure
all Christians of the historical authenticity of Jesus’ life and
crucifixion as recorded in the New Testament, and to dramatically
display the ever-living bond between the Galilean Master and his
devotees.
Professor Wurz related some of his experiences with the saint.
“Several of us, including Therese, often travel for days on
sight-seeing trips throughout Germany,” he told me. “It is a striking
contrast-while we have three meals a day, Therese eats nothing.
She remains as fresh as a rose, untouched by the fatigue which the
trips cause us. As we grow hungry and hunt for wayside inns, she
laughs merrily.”
The professor added some interesting physiological details: “Because
Therese takes no food, her stomach has shrunk. She has no excretions,
but her perspiration glands function; her skin is always soft and
firm.”
At the time of parting, I expressed to Therese my desire to be
present at her trance.
“Yes, please come to Konnersreuth next Friday,” she said graciously.
“The bishop will give you a permit. I am very happy you sought me
out in Eichstatt.”
Therese shook hands gently, many times, and walked with our party
to the gate. Mr. Wright turned on the automobile radio; the saint
examined it with little enthusiastic chuckles. Such a large crowd
of youngsters gathered that Therese retreated into the house. We
saw her at a window, where she peered at us, childlike, waving her
hand.
From a conversation the next day with two of Therese’s brothers,
very kind and amiable, we learned that the saint sleeps only one
or two hours at night. In spite of the many wounds in her body,
she is active and full of energy. She loves birds, looks after an
aquarium of fish, and works often in her garden. Her correspondence
is large; Catholic devotees write her for prayers and healing
blessings. Many seekers have been cured through her of serious
diseases.
Her brother Ferdinand, about twenty-three, explained that Therese
has the power, through prayer, of working out on her own body the
ailments of others. The saint’s abstinence from food dates from a
time when she prayed that the throat disease of a young man of her
parish, then preparing to enter holy orders, be transferred to her
own throat.
On Thursday afternoon our party drove to the home of the bishop,
who looked at my flowing locks with some surprise. He readily
wrote out the necessary permit. There was no fee; the rule made by
the Church is simply to protect Therese from the onrush of casual
tourists, who in previous years had flocked on Fridays by the
thousands.
We arrived Friday morning about nine-thirty in Konnersreuth. I
noticed that Therese’s little cottage possesses a special glass-roofed
section to afford her plenty of light. We were glad to see the
doors no longer closed, but wide-open in hospitable cheer. There
was a line of about twenty visitors, armed with their permits. Many
had come from great distances to view the mystic trance.
Therese had passed my first test at the professor’s house by her
intuitive knowledge that I wanted to see her for spiritual reasons,
and not just to satisfy a passing curiosity.
My second test was connected with the fact that, just before I
went upstairs to her room, I put myself into a yogic trance state
in order to be one with her in telepathic and televisic rapport. I
entered her chamber, filled with visitors; she was lying in a white
robe on the bed. With Mr. Wright following closely behind me, I
halted just inside the threshold, awestruck at a strange and most
frightful spectacle.
Blood flowed thinly and continuously in an inch-wide stream from
Therese’s lower eyelids. Her gaze was focused upward on the spiritual
eye within the central forehead. The cloth wrapped around her head
was drenched in blood from the stigmata wounds of the crown of
thorns. The white garment was redly splotched over her heart from
the wound in her side at the spot where Christ’s body, long ages
ago, had suffered the final indignity of the soldier’s spear-thrust.
Therese’s hands were extended in a gesture maternal, pleading;