Yesterday I asked for help from SM readers (also known affectionately as the “Great Brown Horde”) to ascertain the identity of the man on Obama’s “lucky charm.” Thanks to an eagle-eyed reader we now have a definitive answer. It is Paramahamsa Prajnanananda, the current spiritual leader of Kriya Yoga International.
Paramahamsa Prajnanananda is based in Puri, India, and travels up to 300 days per year, holding seminars and retreats all over the world. He runs the main Kriya Yoga ashrams in Balighai, Cuttack, Vienna, Holland , Miami, and the centers world-wide. He is also the founder of Prajnana Mission, which provides free medical assistance units and centers, residential schools for unserved areas, and many other charitable and educational activities.
Paramahamsa Prajnanananda is known as a powerful and loving teacher, author and speaker on world religion. On August 10, 1998, the highest title, Paramahamsa, a designation reserved for monks and saints who have attained the summit of realization was conferred upon him by his Master Paramahamsa Hariharananda. [Link]
Here is a brief background on the history of Kriya Yoga (from Wikipedia):
Kriya Yoga is described by its practitioners as the ancient Yoga system revived in modern times by Mahavatar Babaji through his disciple Lahiri Mahasaya, c 1861, and brought into popular awareness through Paramhansa Yogananda’s book Autobiography of a Yogi. The system consists of a number of levels of Pranayama based on techniques that are intended to rapidly accelerate spiritual development and engender a profound state of tranquility and God-communion. [Link]My post yesterday was meant to be light an humorous. Today’s is not. In posting this picture I am exposing an intimate detail that was probably (almost assuredly) never meant to be revealed. I feel like I am violating the President’s privacy. There is nothing more private than one’s spirituality. I have little doubt that some extremists that believe he is a Muslim, a socialist, a Nazi, etc. may just latch on to this as more evidence of his “otherness.” So what? In my view you cannot combat ignorance by hiding truth. I have made the conscious decision to shed light upon and pursue this and so now feel compelled to explain why…
Most American’s rarely get a window into the true spiritual beliefs of their Presidents until they are dead and we have their correspondence to sift through. In life we ask them what they think of taxes and health care and homosexuality. We ask them what God they worship and if they go to Church. We never ask them about their spirituality. You can’t really, because what good would it do? Such information is nearly impossible to extract, always dressed up pretty for an audience. But pictures always seem to capture what words can’t. Particularly pictures like the one above. It features the hands. A President’s spirituality (not his religion) is the true hand and the wheel of a nation’s ship and is therefore important to examine.
We have two distinct things we can believe (because isn’t this all about belief anyways?) upon seeing the picture above:
1) That this is just a random good luck charm that Obama picked up on the campaign trail and that he is holding it during the final critical health care negotiations because he needed something to fiddle with and burn off nervous energy; or
2) That Obama, Christian though he is, belives himself to be on a spiritual path, much like a devotee. He is holding a picture of a man that represents that path, as a means to stay centered and focused and keep his mind clear about the greater purpose of all his efforts.
I’ll let you guys choose for yourselves.
Also from Wikipedia:
The story of Lahiri Mahasaya receiving initiation into Kriya Yoga by the yogi Mahavatar Babaji in 1861 is recounted in Autobiography of a Yogi. Yogananda wrote that at that meeting, Mahavatar Babaji told Lahiri Mahasaya, “The Kriya Yoga that I am giving to the world through you in this nineteenth century, is a revival of the same science that Krishna gave millenniums ago to Arjuna; and was later known to Patanjali, and to Christ, St. John, St. Paul, and other disciples.” Yogananda also wrote that Babaji and Christ were in continual communion and together, “have planned the spiritual technique of salvation for this age.” [Link]Last year I listed to the audio book version of Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” I was awestruck by it. It is an amazing thing to hear about a person’s life and their formative years in their own voice. It is all the more impactful when the author seems to focus ever inward and reveal the most intimate of thoughts, not just his life’s events. Obama continually seemed to question himself, his motives and his beliefs as he searched both his origins and for a future path. He is not afraid to change directions or abandon dead ends. Reverend Jerimiah Wright and his church was one such dead end. From a NYTimes article in 2007:
His embrace of faith was a sharp change for a man whose family offered him something of a crash course in comparative religion but no belief to call his own. “He comes from a very secular, skeptical family,” said Jim Wallis, a Christian antipoverty activist and longtime friend of Mr. Obama. “His faith is really a personal and an adult choice. His is a conversion story.”The grandparents who helped raise Mr. Obama were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists. His mother was an anthropologist who collected religious texts the way others picked up tribal masks, teaching her children the inspirational power of the common narratives and heroes.
His mother’s tutelage took place mostly in Indonesia, in the household of Mr. Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, a nominal Muslim who hung prayer beads over his bed but enjoyed bacon, which Islam forbids.
This polyglot background made Mr. Obama tolerant of others’ faiths yet reluctant to join one, said Mr. Wright, the pastor. In an interview in March in his office, filled with mementos from his 35 years at Trinity, Mr. Wright recalled his first encounters with Mr. Obama in the late 1980s, when the future senator was organizing Chicago neighborhoods. Though minister after minister told Mr. Obama he would be more credible if he joined a church, he was not a believer.
“I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won,” he wrote in his first book, “Dreams From My Father.” [Link]
Abrahamic religions tend to emphasize the dichotomy between light and dark, between good and evil. Yogic philosophy is more neutral and nuanced. It emphasizes logic and questioning, often between a student and master.
… he developed a tone very different from his pastor’s. In contrast with Mr. Wright — the kind of speaker who could make a grocery list sound like a jeremiad — Mr. Obama speaks with cool intellect and on-the-one-hand reasoning. He tends to emphasize the reasonableness of all people; Mr. Wright rallies his parishioners against oppressors. [Link]Obama has often been described by the media as overly logical, as “cold,” or like Star Trek’s “Spock.” These are also all the qualities that people following a yogic tradition aspire to.
So I for one feel better knowing that our President seems to be guided by a core set of beliefs that have him a) continually questioning his own ego to hold it in check; b) searching for wisdom in whatever form it presents itself; c) staying true to his path even if it is winding.
I will leave you with a quote from Paramahamsa Prajnanananda book, “Yoga: Pathway to the Divine.” I have no idea if President Obama has read it:
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