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Words
won't ever be adequate to describe how much I have
personally valued every
talk John gave, service he conducted, divine
blessing I received through him,
"OM"
he chanted, meditation he led and joke he told,
until he retired from his ministerial activities in
San Francisco the week before Christmas of 1996!
When looking back to John's last healing service in
San Francisco, my eyes fill with tears and my heart
becomes saddened, for that day marked the end of a
significant experience in the closest
personal
Spiritual Friendship
I have ever had and will ever have with a
direct
disciple
of Paramhansa Yogananda. John's character of being
utterly irreverent towards religious authority
& posturing, yet deeply devoted to God, as well
as his wonderful, alert sense of humor are so much
a reflection of what we now know the great teacher
Yogananda himself had been like, when he walked
this earth!
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John
at the various talks to which we chauffeured and
accompanied him often said publicly that Yogananda
wanted him to reach people "...who
wouldn't be caught dead in a church"
(if
his audience consisted of 'New Agers') or
"...who
wouldn't be caught dead in a yoga lecture".
(if
he was talking in front of a church
audience)!
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I
miss the countless inspiring, lively and candid,
private discussions John, Stephanie and I had in
J.L.'s living room as frequently as Spirit moved us
to get together. They were the closest to what we
will ever have to having satsang with Yogananda
himself! There was not one visit from which we did
not return more joyfully and spiritually charged
than before we had gotten
there!
While
every person who ever spends any time with John has
undoubtedly his or her own special, invaluable
relationship with him, ours is uniquely based on
our mutual love and devotion to Paramhansa
Yogananda. John therefore has shared with us many
of his experiences with Yogananda, which
are--regretfully so--too many for me to recount
here in detail. Nevertheless, I feel inspired to
briefly summarize here the story of his spiritual
journey (as he told it to Stephanie and me on
countless occasions), because it is a significant
part of who John is, and why he means so much to
us, in his role as our friend and spiritual
mentor:
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"Irish
Catholic Buddhist" turned "Hindu
Protestant"
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John
Laurence first met Yogananda in person on November
2, 1933 in downtown Washington, D.C., after having
read his how-to-pray-book "Whispers from Eternity"
(prefaced by John's opera idol Amelita
Galli-Curci). Inspired and forever changed by that
meeting, he became first a faithful student of
Yogananda's lectures and books and--in time--a
dedicated supporter and participant in his work.
When John first met the great Swami
Yogananda,
he had already begun his spiritual journey as a
devotee of St.
Francis of Assisi
(almost becoming a Franciscan Monk) and admirer of
the non-dogmatic wisdom of Buddha.
Yogananda encouraged him in his predisposition
towards a non-denominational, ecumenical
path--independent from organized religious
movements--which would incorporate and transcend
earth's finest spiritual traditions. Yogananda, who
must have sensed that John was an "autograph
hound", did this by writing him the following
'autograph':
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"With
unceasing blessings. There is no East nor West nor
North nor South but prevailed but my one father
whose children we all races
are. Swami
Yogananda November 2 1933"
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In
this spirit, during Yogananda's lifetime (in the
1930s, 40s, and early 50s), and with his blessings,
John Laurence served as a close assistant to one of
Yogananda's favorite saints and disciples
Kamala
Silva.
Together, Kamala and John served Yogananda's work
in San Francisco's East Bay, where Kamala laid the
groundwork for the Yogananda movement, which is
today known to congregate at the "SRF Richmond
Temple". After Yogananda's Mahasamadhi (a yogi's
final conscious exit from the body) in 1952, and
his successor James Lynn's (a.k.a. Rajarsi
Janakananda's) death in 1955, however, only
monastic
members of SRF served as ministers.
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Shortly
thereafter, John, still determined to serve his
spiritual teacher, founded his own church in San
Francisco, called the "Metaphysical Design for
Living Church", which he dedicated to Yogananda and
through which he served him for 25
years.
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That,
of course all took place many years before John
Laurence in January of 1992 became an honorary
Episcopal minister at Trinity Episcopal Church in
San Francisco, where Stephanie and I joined his
healing and meditation group as soon as we became
friends and students of J.L. in 1993.
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In
telling you the story of John's life of devotion
and dedication to one of the greatest Yogis of our
times, my wife Stephanie and I are naturally
inclined to wish that we could have been present in
any or all of these earlier
events of his life (and who wouldn't wish that?!).
But, as they say "Be careful what you wish for, as
you might get it!". A gifted intuitive counselor
(who never met John) told Stephanie and me once,
that John had been our father and we his sons in
the first century in Italy, when he was lost at sea
as a young sailor. In that lifetime, we had always
sadly wished that we could have known him in the
mature years of his life. The psychic concluded
that this was the reason why we got to meet J.L. as
an older
man this time around. When we told John that story,
he took it in very attentively and with a lot of
regard for what had been said, and he seems to have
acted more "fatherly" towards us ever since then!
So, who knows the content of that reading might
very well be true... and J.L. quite possibly has
(at the very least) a 'hunch' about it!
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J.L.'s
FAMOUS TALKS & STORIES
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Back
to the healing and meditation group Rev. John
Laurence lead in San Francisco in the 1990s: We
will always remember John's famous stories, which,
over the years gave our services a very warm,
personal touch. Nobody that I know seemed to have
minded that J.L. repeated his repertoire once and a
while. In fact, it was the energy and the spirit
behind his talks more than anything else that
inspired, uplifted and mattered to us! J.L. was
very well aware of that, as he often prefaced his
addresses by saying:
"REPETITIO
MATER
STUDIORUM EST;
Repetition
is the mother
of studies!"
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Anyhow
for everyone who isn't familiar with
John's sermons
here are the punch lines of my favorite JL
talks:
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When
stressing the importance of never
turning over the responsibility for our spiritual
progress to pretentious, overbearing religious
'professionals', he told us vigorously:
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"Yogananda
came to bring us the great
democracy
of the holy spirit in teaching
that
you
can
do it yourself and that nobody with a magic hat, a
minister's robe or a
'collar
on backwards'
can
do it for you!"
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"The
only one thing all churches seem to have in
common is that only
their
way
is the right way"
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"My
wise Irish mother always said: Be careful John; in
trying to get closer to the
altar
one
often gets farther away from
God!"
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In
his 4th of July addresses J.L. always pointed out
to us:
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"Today
we celebrate our political and religious freedom
from churchianity. The word spells it right out for
us: it is our
'freed-OM!'..."
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About
the use of spiritual powers J.L. said:
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"There
is nothing bad about having and using psychic
abilities. The great Saint Paul himself said in the
bible that those are the gifts of
the
holy
spirit
and
that we have an obligation to appreciate and
use
them
for the good of others!"
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SUPER
CONSCIOUS DREAM ABOUT JOHN LAURENCE
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I
would like to end this tribute to John Laurence on
a personal note: As some of you may remember, I
once got--unintentionally so--involved in probably
one of the most amusing public moments of our
Trinity Healing Service.
On
the night of January 12, 1994, I had a
Super-Conscious
Dream about John Laurence.
It
was, as you will see, not particularly humorous in
itself, but rather quite profound. I wrote it down,
though, and left it on the minister's podium, so
Rev. John Laurence himself would find it
there. However, it just turned out that Fr. Tom
Dowling got a glimpse of it first, read it first
smilingly to himself, and then, (supposedly because
he thought it was funny) boldly took the liberty to
publicly read it out loud in front of the whole
group! I must say, that it was very
embarrassing to me at the time. Luckily, though,
John did not seem to mind it at all and was, in
fact, actually quite fascinated by it. Well, here
it is:
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In
the dream John Laurence, my wife Stephanie and I,
as well as Scott and Meridian, a couple who are
friends of ours, who also follow the spiritual
teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda, met at a
gathering among other devotees to celebrate
Christmas. John and I played the only active roles
in this dream; all others in our group were
interested listeners. All five of us were sitting
together at a banquet table as part of a Christmas
party in a room full of people. While chatting with
each other, I was asking John the question on
whether he believes that there are other planets
with human-like life on them. His
answer was "Oh yes, of course! See, I never told
you this, but
I
am
from
such a planet in another solar system of this
galaxy". "When
did you come here?", I asked him with sincere
interest. "Did I ever tell you", John replied,
"that my earth parents are really only my foster
parents?". "No you didn't; tell me more about it",
I requested. "Well", John went on, "I became their
foster child when I was a little boy. But, I wasn't
really what people here would think of as a 'little
boy'. Since
the people on my planet get much older than humans
in this age, I had already lived an entire human
life span when I came here in the body of a little
boy."
Because the essence of the truth that John was
about to reveal to me made more sense to me than
anything I ever heard on a 'day conscious' level, I
felt inspired to ask him the following questions:
"Does your planet have the same gravity? Do you
have similar plants, similar air, night and day,
the same male and female bodies, etc.? John
affirmed all of these questions, by saying "Oh yes!
All of these things are very much like they are on
earth". "How about religion?", I asked, "Do you
guys have a religious upbringing?". "It pretty much
depends", John answered, "on what
'continent-nation' you are from (continent and
nation have one and the same meaning here). See,
the continent-nation of the LORD of where I was
raised receives a different spiritual education
from people of the continent nations of the LORDS
of other parts of the planet (John was giving me
the names of the 'Lords' that I neither heard
before nor was able to remember).
The
fundamental difference between humans and the
people of my planet is that we are
psychic
and that we communicate
primarily telepathically".
I
was asking more specific questions of a similarly
basic and practical nature, which I am unable to
recall at the moment. What I do know, however, is
that John's
answers though simple,
were, in a way very sophisticated
and
profound
and made a lot of sense to me.
I
hope I will recall them at a later point. Our
conversation ended because it got very late over
this interesting dialogue and therefore John needed
to go to bed. After he had already gone to bed, I
remembered many more questions that I wanted to ask
him but didn't get a chance quite yet, such as:
"How does the sky look from your planet at night?
Do you have your own astrology there? How far is
your solar system and planet away from ours? During
and after I had been talking with and listening to
John, I
felt that he was describing something that I had
once very well known and experienced myself, and
that I had, for whatever reason forgotten about,
but that I am about to re-member
again
"NOW"
(as
John would say)!
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Stephanie
and I love you, John. Many blessings to
you!
Herbert
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