Material Success and Happiness Through Yoga Principles

by Swami Kriyananda
(J. Donald Walters)

Copyright © 2005 Hansa Trust
All rights reserved.
Lesson Twenty-Five
Creating Opportunities
The Principles
I have often thought about the subject of creating opportunities in life. As I sat down to begin work on this lesson, a childhood recollection came to me—perhaps because in the last lesson I’d just written about that mud-slinging episode during our Downs School outing in England. This new recollection was of comic books I used to read at the barber shop when I was a teenager in Scarsdale, America. The “books” featured impossibly great heroes—Superman, Batman, Spiderman—each with a special gift for handling a special kind of villain. The hero was always on the scene with his gift, and—lo and behold!—a villain always appeared whom only this hero could handle! In real life, of course, neither such heroes nor such villains exist.
Opportunity is often like that: What comes to you is, generally, that for which you yourself are prepared! The most important thing, then, is to be prepared for the opportunities that come your way. In a way, you create them. Karma is certainly a part of that process, but even more important, because immediately useful to you, are right attitude, right expectations, right use of energy.
Here are a number of thoughts to help you prepare. All of them center in how you present yourself to the world, and in how you relate to the world.
Your voice can and should be one of your chief assets. Many people however, unfortunately for them, never take the trouble to develop magnetic voices that express warm feeling and other uplifting qualities of the heart. Some people croak at others like frogs. When they announce, “It’s great to see you!” your instinctive reaction, often, is to ask yourself, “What do they want from me?” Voices like that repel; they do not attract. Their friends will make excuses for them, perhaps by explaining, “He really has a heart of gold.” (“Yeah, sure,” we mutter silently to ourselves.
To bring magnetism to your voice, learn first to breathe properly. Think of a garden hose for an analogy. There are two ways to strengthen the flow of water passing through it. One is to tighten the nozzle; the other is to increase the flow at the tap. “Tightening the nozzle” is also a very common way of increasing the power of one’s voice. What people do is squeeze the throat, which enables them to produce a thin, crackling noise that may, for some things, be effective, but that cannot but be unattractive also, and sometimes even offensive. Instead of trying to squeeze the vocal cords to increase the volume of sound coming through them, try to increase that volume by using the diaphragm as a bellows from below. Relax the throat; don’t tense it. Lift your breath upwards, past the vocal cords, like a violin bow stroking the strings.
I studied singing when I was eighteen. My singing teacher, an old lady, told me at our first lesson, “The voice is the one instrument you can’t see. I can show you how to hold your hands over the keyboard of a piano. I can show you how to stroke a violin bow. But I can’t show you how to use your voice. The only way I can help you is by example. I will sing a note as it should be sung, and then ask you to listen sensitively and imitate the way I placed my voice.”
She proceeded to sing a note. I tried to repeat it as she had done it. Her training was so sensitive that only six months later, during a song I was singing to her piano accompaniment, she stopped me at a certain point and cried, “That note! That’s just how all of them should sound.”
By this time she began to have ambitions for me. As she announced, “I’m living for only one thing now: to see you become a great singer! It isn’t only your voice. Lots of people have good voices. But you understand.” When she said that, I realized I simply could not continue our lessons. I’d been studying for the sheer fun of learning to sing well, but I’d never had the slightest ambition of taking up singing as a profession. All I really wanted was to find truth. I’m afraid I did no more studying with her.
I did learn, however, that one can inject much more power into the voice, and do so quite effortlessly, by simply relaxing the vocal cords and “lifting” the voice up through them to the lips and the forehead, which soon were vibrating with the sound of my voice.
I went beyond her teaching, eventually, by discovering that the “violin bow” of the breath can also stroke the heart strings to bring warmth, rather than a pure operatic tone, to the voice. I can’t easily explain this discovery through this medium of the written word, but in classes I have worked with people on their voice production, and have found that within very few minutes they were, virtually all of them, singing—audibly so—from the heart. To the extent that you can understand these written words, experiment with what I am saying. You will find that if you can infuse consciousness into your voice, people will want to hear you, and will feel even before they get to know you that you are (as you must in fact feel yourself to be) their friend.
The better placed your voice is, the better your own individuality will come out. It will be like your “calling card.” Often, when I return to some city where I have spent time in the past, and phone a friend after reaching there, I may only say, “Hello,” and a pleased voice over the wire exclaims, “Swami! When did you arrive?” Sometimes I get to say nothing but, “Uh,” and the same thing happens.
Many years ago, in 1959, at the airport in Patna, India, I was transiting to another city, and was talking English with a small group of Indian friends. I was well “disguised”: hair halfway down my back, a beard, and a geru (saffron) robe. Just then, an elderly American gentleman came over to our table and addressed me: “From your voice, you must be one of the Walters boys!” This man’s name was Harry Gibbon. He and his wife had been friends of my parents in Scarsdale, N.Y. They knew us “boys,” too—rather abstractly, as parents tend to do with their friends’ children. Even in those years, I had been away from Scarsdale most of the time, whether at school or traveling, Our family name, I should add, was Walters. How did he recognize my voice, “disguised” as I was, after the more than fifteen years that we hadn’t seen each other?
Your accent when you speak is another very important point in any effort you make to reach people and thus to attract opportunities to yourself that might, otherwise, prove elusive. Many people keep their mouths almost fixed in one, basic position, and find it next to impossible to speak with an accent different from the one they’ve developed, usually by imitating their peers. You can often tell just by looking at a Texan, with his slight smile at the corners of his mouth, that that is, in fact, his home state. That position enables him to speak with a Texan accent.
Another example: About sixty years ago, I was sitting with a friend in a New York restaurant when a young woman came in with an escort. I said to my friend, “I’m sure she’s English.”
“How can you possibly tell?” he demanded, almost dismissively.
I replied, “She just looks it.” Just then, she turned to her escort and spoke with a clear English accent. How did she “look it”? It may have been something about the mouth, or the eyes—or possibly it was the hairdo, though in such matters I am no expert.
I am sensitive to accents, having grown up with several languages, some of which I spoke almost as well as English. I used as a child to enjoy imitating people’s accents: for instance, when I was in school in England I heard a story about an American and a Cockney meeting in a London Pub. The Cockney announced his name as, “’Arrison.”
“Say, you must mean Harrison, don’t you?” replied the American, speaking with a nasal twang.
The Cockney, outraged by this evidence of stupidity, said, “Wha’? A haitch, a hoy, two hars, a hi, a hess, a ho, and a hen: If that don’t spell ‘’Arrison’!” It’s always been fun to tell that story.
My point here is that accents are not only widely diverse, but that they can also be quite unattractive—or, alternatively, attractive. When visiting Texas some years ago, I noted that radio announcers spoke with a universal American accent, which people define as more from the north. Evidently, even Texans felt that this accent was less “down home,” and more “sophisticated.”
A general belief is that an accent is created by climate. In the colder northern climes, for instance, the air induces people to speak through lips that are stiff and almost closed. In the warmer southern climes, people tend more to open their mouths to let the air in. Considerations like these have little bearing on the present lesson. I am more interested in what is revealed by people’s mental attitudes in their accents. These often override to some extent the influence of their environment.
I have come to realize that there are universal aspects to people’s accents. People with a stronger feeling quality will tend to emphasize their vowels more than their consonants, regardless of their basic environmental accents. People with a strong will power often tend to emphasize their consonants. In Mexico I noticed that, although their language tends to be a little lip-lazy (reflecting a “mañana” consciousness), macho young men, when coming to the letter “r,” roll it with gusto. I’ve enjoyed listening to them pronounce the “r” in Monterrey, for example, making it sound almost like “Monterrrrey.”
A nasal accent is a sign either of arrogance, if people speak loudly, or of aloofness or a shyness that borders on self-preoccupation.
I’ve told a story from my childhood in this lesson, and another in the last one. Here’s another that might be from those years but that in fact, despite its childhood origins, took place quite recently. Just two evenings ago a few friends and I watched the Walt Disney movie “Bambi.” In passing I have to say that I consider that movie a true work of art, inspiring as well as beautiful. I have a special “accentual” memory of that movie, however. There is a rabbit called “Thumper.” The slightly swallowed, American “r,” as pronounced by the rabbit, comes across as friendly and charming in his first declaration, “I’m Thumper!” Later, this thought came to me: How would the rabbit have come across if he’d announced, with the accent of an English schoolboy, “I’m Thumpah.” The feeling would have been altogether different: slightly off-putting, perhaps, instead of warm and friendly.
Accents have been, as I said, a particular fascination of mine throughout my life. In several countries where I speak the language fluently people think I’m “almost” a native. In Paris, they think perhaps I’m from Geneva; in German Switzerland I’ve been asked if I was from Germany; In America, many (foreigners especially) have wondered if I was English; in Spain, they’ve though perhaps I was Mexican. In Italy, as I’ve commented before, I am often taken for an Italian—though that may be because many Italians are new even to their Italian language, having grown up speaking one of the many dialects. In Calcutta, one day, someone asked my driver incredulously (as he later told me), “Is he Bengali?!” My Bengali accent didn’t go with my white skin!
From experience then, I can say that it is possible to change your accent if you want to. Do you consider your speaking voice less attractive than it might be? If so, work on it. It is important to speak with a pleasing accent. People will often categorize you, for instance as cultured or rustic, refined or poorly unlettered, and will treat you accordingly.
Here are several things that will help you when speaking:
1) Don’t speak in a monotone. It will lull people to sleep. Your voice will be much more magnetic if it has a certain melody to it. Melody should be very individual, not the product of a socially recognized pattern. Americans tend to speak in a monotone. The English often infuse an attractive melody into their speech—until one realizes that the melody is culturally induced, and hasn’t creative feeling behind it.
2) Avoid the common practice of dropping your voice at the end of a sentence. Imagine someone saying to you, “I find it simply amazing!” but reducing that last word to a mumble or a whisper!
3) The beginning and ending of a sentence are vital to the impact it has. Your voice will be more magnetic if you can inject extra energy into those first and last words. (When writing, also, how you end a sentence is important. If I had cast that sentence to read, “How you end a sentence is important also, when writing,” it would have been perfectly grammatical to do so, but notice how such a sequence lowers the impact.)
Words are expressions of consciousness. Be conscious of every word you utter. Speak it with concentration. Infuse the tone of your voice with the feeling you want to convey. The tone of voice, more than any musical instrument, can evoke the feeling intended in a composition.
Many years ago at Mt. Washington, the new monks’ ashram was being build on a corner of the property that was situated on a lower level than the main building. One late afternoon, while the site was still open to possible marauders, I saw a group of neighborhood boys clambering around the premises. As I went down to tell them to leave, I was still some distance away when I called out to them in a deliberately harsh tone, “What are you doing down there?” As the boys ran away fearfully I heard one of them cry to another, “God, what a wicked voice!”
Listening to the tones your own voice expresses can afford you an excellent means of self-analysis. After that last-mentioned episode I had a good laugh with my friends, but notice how instantly any mood of anger, for example, is reflected in the voice—even before you yourself are even aware of that sudden spurt of emotion in your heart. Try especially to keep your vocal cords relaxed. The very practice will help you to feel an expansion of consciousness.
One way to make your voice more magnetic is to use the breath consciously to project the vocal tone upward, through the heart, then on through the bishuddha chakra, or cervical center, then projecting it outward through the Kutastha between the eyebrows. When your voice is really well placed, you will feel a vibration in the forehead, and in the lips also.
Calmness is expressed more through keeping the voice steady than by tones spoken softly. Expansive calmness radiates upward and outward when it is consciously centered in the bishuddha (the cervical).
When expressing your thoughts to others, remember that the heart is more important than the head. Perfectly clear logic is less important than deep feeling—as opposed to the excitement of emotion.
Keep your consciousness centered in the higher chakras of the spine. The lower the center of energy, the weaker—or else, the darker—will be your magnetism. (For remember, there is also negative magnetism. You yourself, if that is what you project, will be the greatest sufferer.)
Similarly, sit, walk, or stand with a firm, upright posture.
I myself speak English deliberately the way I like it to sound. You might let your own preference be a factor in how you speak, instead of making your words merely beasts of burden to carry your ideas. Notice little things: In the movie “Bambi,” for example, the way the little rabbit pronounces Thumper—with the tip of the tongue curled slightly back in the mouth—seems to invite others to one, whereas “Thumpah,” with the tongue flat and the mouth opened more widely, would have subtly expressed a preference for keeping others at a distance.
The way to create opportunities involves, first, attracting them to you by projecting the right magnetism. Voice is only one aspect of that process, but from all that I’ve written on that subject it must be apparent that other aspects are involved also: posture, general physical appearance, the clothing one wears, neatness: From everything above I think you yourself can apply many of these principles to other aspects of your life.
The second thing necessary is to be alert enough to recognize opportunity when it appears. Many discoveries have been made, as I remarked earlier in these lessons, not when new facts appeared, but when people were ready to recognize their usefulness to mankind.
George Washington Carver was a black man in America, of low birth, a scientific disposition, and a desire to serve humanity. God told him in prayer that He would show him hundreds of uses for the humble peanut. Carver became, in his way, a great inventor. You, yourself, could discover wonders in everything if you would keep your eyes open to that possibility. Henry David Thoreau was walking with a friend across a field in Massachusetts when the friend remarked what a pity it was that the old American Indian culture had died out so completely.
“And yet,” said Thoreau, “there are signs of it all around us.”
“What signs?” challenge the friend. “I never see any.”
At that moment, Thoreau stooped down and picked up an arrowhead from the ground. Like Sherlock Holmes he said something like, “You see, but you do not observe.”
Be more observant. The successful person is one who looks, and who expects opportunities to appear in his life. Many others receive countless opportunities in life, yet pass them by as though they wore blinders and dark glasses. They see what lies straight ahead of them, but see even that only dimly as far as opportunity is concerned.
Face life with expectation. Wonderful adventure awaits you practically underfoot. Thoreau’s answer to people who boasted of their “continental tours” was, “I, too, have traveled extensively—around the city of Concord” (where he lived).
One aspect of being expectant and observant is, as I’ve stated repeatedly in these lessons, energy. I should repeat here a simple principle that I’ve explained before: Energy, projected with will power, can project a ray of consciousness that will generate a magnetic field around it, strong enough to attract to itself anything desired.
Another point I have touched on before is positive expectation. If you expect the worst, the worst is most certainly what you’ll attract, eventually. But if you expect the best, then that is what will appear, as if unbidden, on your doorstep.
Thoughts are things. Their power is far greater than any mechanism for accomplishing things. There was an episode in my life that I love to dwell on. This was in 1972. I had felt directed by the Divine Mother to return, for the first time in ten years, to India. In India I visited my old “stomping ground,” Calcutta. One disappointment I felt was that a certain Indian friend of mine, a Dr. Mishra, had returned from America to Bubaneshwar in the Indian State of Orissa, and I didn’t have his address. I landed at Dum Dum airport in Calcutta, expecting to find a couple of Bengali friends of mine waiting for me. They’d been delayed by heavy traffic, however (as I learned later). Not knowing what to do, I simply asked Divine Mother with complete acceptance of Her will, “What do You want?” If I’d rushed off to telephone for explanations as to what was happening, I’d have missed what I have always thought of as a miracle. Instead, as I stood there waiting inwardly for guidance, a passenger hurrying by from another plane stopped in front of me, paused, and then asked, “What is your good name?” (This is a common way in India of putting this question.)
“Swami Kriyananda,” I replied.
“Ah, I thought you must be he. A friend of mine, a Dr. Mishra in Bubaneshwar, has shown me photographs of you. I’ve been longing to meet you!”
“And I,” I replied, “have been wishing I could meet him. Can you please give me his address?”
“There’s no need for me to do so,” was his answer. “He happens to be staying in Calcutta, and I’ve come here especially to meet him!”
I got not only to see Dr. Mishra, but to stay in the same house for the night.

The Application
A classmate of mine once showed me a story he had written. It was about a young, aspiring violinist whose talent went unrecognized until one day a famous orchestra conductor happened to walk by his house. He heard the young man’s music through an open window, was amazed by its beauty, knocked on the front door and asked to see “this great genius.” Before long, the discovered artist was thrilling audiences around the country, then internationally.
It was, in other words, a very typical “wish fulfillment” story. Did the writer himself play the violin? Probably, though he may have had the decency to project that dream onto some other profession than the one he himself contemplated.
My mother’s comment, when I told her the story, was to exclaim pityingly, “Oh, how pathetic!”
Most people’s dreams of success, probably, revolve around unexpected offers, sudden recognition, unheard-of opportunities. “How pathetic,” indeed! All of us have of course heard of blessings suddenly being poured on someone: amazing recognition of talent or ability that has rocketed someone, who seemingly had done little or nothing to deserve it, to fame and fortune. What people don’t realize is the role past karma plays in everyone’s life. We can’t alter what has been done. The important thing is to understand that we can, in the present life, generate the energy to offset failure karma and develop success karma.
Karma is not what many people think it: fate, carved in stone. Stanza 51, in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, states:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Paramhansa Yogananda wrote, in his explanation of this quatrain, or “Rubaiy,” that in the context of the other stanzas what this one offers is hope, not hopelessness. In Yogananda’s words, “Omar’s warning that fate’s decrees are inexorable was given so as to draw our attention the more forcefully to the way of escape from destiny, emphasized elsewhere in his poem.
“Karma’s unalterable decrees govern human destiny only as long as man continues to live through his senses, in reaction to outer events. For such a person, moral reasoning is centered in ego-consciousness. Scriptural learning is centered in ego-consciousness. Self-pitying tears are centered in ego-consciousness. Ego-consciousness is the problem. The greater its hold on the mind, the greater karma’s hold on our lives.”
My next and final lesson is titled, “The Right Use of Ego.” Even in ego-consciousness one can improve on his karma by right action, and cancel out bad karma, not by trying to “cancel out” the past, nor by weeping and pleading for divine mercy, but by the right use of will. Were this not the case, there would indeed be no exit. The way out for the ego is to go out the front door, and not roam about through the house, or try to beat the walls down. Learn correct ways—not by mere “wit,” or cleverness, but by devotional attunement with the divine will.
Bad karma is simply the result of wrong use of one’s will in the past. Develop strong, positive will power in the present, and if your will is attuned to a higher Will you can at least move through the rooms in your house toward the front door!
It is not an easy point to understand. Where does personal will enter the picture, and how much of what happens in our lives is due merely to past karma? My Guru’s comment on this question was, “Only free souls can really understand.” Nevertheless, he repeatedly urged right attitude as a means of changing one’s destiny. One time he said, “Karma! Karma! I’m tired of people lamenting about their karma! This is a weakness of India’s culture. Just say to yourself: ‘I have no karma.’ Attune yourself to God, live more in His consciousness, and you yourself will be free!”
So then, when it comes to creating opportunities, never cower before the decrees of fate! Don’t wait for others to give you success on a silver platter! As Yogananda said during the depression of the 1930s, “If I needed a job, and couldn’t find one, I would shake the world until it had to give me work!”

Meditation
There is a story in the Christian New Testament of the Bible which tells of the disciples in a boat on the Sea of Galilee when, suddenly, a fierce storm threatened to upset the boat and drown them. Of a sudden, Jesus Christ appeared walking over the water. “Peace!” he declared to the wind. “Be still!”
There is a somewhat similar story about Paramhansa Yogananda, in which he stilled a sudden, mighty wind. He and a woman disciple had just returned to Mt. Washington when the wind hurled itself upon the building. The Master said it was a consequence of the karma of World War II. He told the woman to take off one shoe and strike it with the heel three times on the porch, uttering a mantra he gave her. On the final blow, the wind suddenly ceased.
The following day, in the Los Angeles Times, there was a report of a freak wind that had appeared suddenly, then as suddenly had ceased.
In this meditation, think of calming the waves, or the mighty winds, or maya. Visualize yourself standing in the midst of all the turmoil, and addressing it calmly from your own center. Say to it, “Peace! Be still!” Feel an aura of calmness emanating from you and calming all the waters of delusion.

Affirmation
This is an affirmation recommended by Paramhansa Yogananda: 
“I stand unshaken amidst the crash of
 breaking worlds!”

Points to Remember
1. The most important thing is to be prepared for the opportunities that come your way. In a way, you create them. Karma is certainly a part of that process, but even more important, because immediately useful to you, are right attitude, right expectations, right use of energy.
2. Your voice can and should be one of your chief assets. 
3. To bring magnetism to your voice, learn first to breathe properly. Try to increase the volume of sound by using the diaphragm as a bellows from below and relaxing the vocal cords.
4. The “violin bow” of the breath can also stroke the heart strings to bring warmth to the voice. If you can infuse consciousness into your voice, people will want to hear you, and will feel that you are their friend.
5. One way to make your voice more magnetic is to use the breath consciously to project the vocal tone upward, through the heart, then on through the bishuddha chakra, or cervical center, then projecting it outward through the ajna chakra between the eyebrows. When your voice is really well placed, you will feel a vibration in the forehead, and in the lips also.
6. The better placed your voice is, the better your own individuality will come out. 
7. Your accent when you speak is another very important point in any effort you make to reach people and thus to attract opportunities to yourself that might, otherwise, prove elusive. Accents can be quite unattractive—or, alternatively, attractive. 
8. When speaking: Don’t speak in a monotone; your voice will be much more magnetic if it has a certain melody to it. Avoid the common practice of dropping your voice at the end of a sentence. Your voice will be more magnetic if you can inject extra energy into the first and last words of a sentence. 
9. Be conscious of every word you utter. Speak it with concentration. Infuse the tone of your voice with the feeling you want to convey. 
10. Try especially to keep your vocal cords relaxed. The very practice will help you to feel an expansion of consciousness.
11. Calmness is expressed more through keeping the voice steady than by tones spoken softly. Expansive calmness radiates upward and outward when it is consciously centered in the bishuddha (the cervical).
12. When expressing your thoughts to others, remember that the heart is more important than the head. Perfectly clear logic is less important than deep feeling.
13. The way to create opportunities involves, first, attracting them to you by projecting the right magnetism. Voice is only one aspect; other aspects are posture, general physical appearance, the clothing one wears, neatness. Sit, walk, or stand with a firm, upright posture.
14. The second thing necessary is to be alert enough to recognize opportunity when it appears. 
15. Be more observant. The successful person is one who looks, and who expects opportunities to appear in his life. Wonderful adventure awaits you practically underfoot. 
16. Energy, projected with will power, can project a ray of consciousness that will generate a magnetic field around it, strong enough to attract to itself anything desired.
17. If you expect the best, then that is what will appear, as if unbidden, on your doorstep.
18. Thoughts are things. Their power is far greater than any mechanism for accomplishing things.
19. The greater the hold of ego-consciousness on the mind, the greater karma’s hold on our lives. Even in ego-consciousness one can improve on his karma by right action, and cancel out bad karma, by the right use of will. Learn correct ways—by devotional attunement with the divine will. 
20. Yogananda repeatedly urged right attitude as a means of changing one’s destiny: “Just say to yourself: ‘I have no karma.’ Attune yourself to God, live more in His consciousness, and you yourself will be free!” 

Workbook Ideas
by Joseph Bharat Cornell
Generate a Flow of Positive Energy

A teacher at a children’s museum loved his work, but he noticed that sometimes his classes were successful and sometimes they were lackluster. At first he thought this depended on how well prepared the students were for their visit to the museum. As he thought more carefully, however, he realized that when he felt inspired and enthusiastic the children had a wonderful time, and on days when he felt low energy, the tour wasn’t particularly special—no matter how good the group of children.
Henry David Thoreau said that, “There must be the generating force of love behind every effort destined to be successful.” The world responds in kind to our energy and expectations. More than we realize, all success and failure is a result of right or wrong magnetism. If we generate a strong flow of positive, loving energy, we will attract positive energy in return.

Action Item
1. Pay attention to the quality of your energy today. What is the underlying tone of that energy: positive or negative, hopeful or hopeless, courageous or fearful?

2. If you find that you are holding negative expectations about a project, practice the following exercise to attract the outcome you truly desire:

•	Hold an image of your project at the point between the eyebrows. 
•	Then send a strong a ray of positive intention—from your heart and through the spiritual eye—to your project.   
•	Think of the energy you’re sending as a ray of light. Rotate around that ray the magnetism you want to create.
	Repeat this exercise when you feel the need to create a more positive outlook or 	magnetism for your project. 

3. Repeat every day: “Everything that comes to me is a reflection of my energy, so I choose to have only positive thoughts and expectations.”