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A concept that came to me in a dream. One of my spiritual elders several times brought up a fire breathing swan with me and I think it sunk deep into my subconsciousness and surfaced in a very trippy dream. All night long I was dreaming of a fire breathing swan with a cobra coiled around it. The swan was opening and closing it’s wings and the snake slithered and writhed around it’s body. They were powerful and seemed almost like two sides of the same coin, not at odds but in total alignment energetically. The dream went on and on for hours. Then I awoke and was totally stunned by the experience. I laid there awake for some time then fell asleep. There it was again! The fire breathing swan and snake! Then I heard a voice… “I am Paramahansa Yogananda!” It rattled me to my core! That happens to be the name of my spiritual teacher but then I understood the meaning, even before I woke up the second time. In Sanskrit, Paramahansa means the Great Swan and is a title given to highly enlightened beings by their teachers. It signifies the highest form of spiritual development in which union with the ultimate divine reality is attained. That was the fire breathing swan. Yogananda means divine bliss attained through yoga. The word yoga literally means union with the divine. The cobra symbolized the life force existing between the coccyx at the base of the spine, the medulla oblongata where the spine meets the cranium and the brain. When the small consciousness residing in the spine of the individualized person unites with the infinite consciousness pervading all time, space and beyond, yoga is attained.