Month: March 2015

I ache as a mother aches when she holds an ailing child.

I ache at the suffering of those I have loved all over the world. Like children, they won’t listen!

If emotions remain our tools wielded with a craftsman’s skill, they remain wonderfully sweet poetic sentiments and make life a moonlight on the lake. When they put a noose around us, a bridle in our mouth, and we follow them around and chase after each one of their faces and phases, we are bruised. They become an addiction, with all its symptoms and consequences. Loosen the nooses and undo the bridles; do!

Declare your independence of them. Let them follow your commands.

Wherefore is your ocean running after ripples? There is a place in you which is a reservoir of strength; draw from it as a thirsty person would draw from a sole water well in the desert. How? How? Did you ask “how” to suckle at mother’s breast at your first hunger? What is this howl of hows I hear everywhere! Knowing is in you.

I wish you the enjoyment of your fulnesses, not dwelling on vacuities. May you look within your depths and be filled.

[August 2011]

A recent issue of Scientific American Mind, November/December 2012 (pp.30ff.) gives a random list of geniuses in history. All names are western except one Arab (Ibn Khaldun) and one ancient Egyptian (Imhotep). Obviously, from this ‘scientific’ writer’s point of view, India and China never produced any geniuses!

Here I take a different approach. While the IQ scores are reported to be rising, the modernity also makes us lose some of the abilities of our brain. We no longer want to do mental work; we want to depend on calculators and computers.

Our parents and grandparents, in the east and the west, did mental arithmetic as a matter of course. Their minds were trained to do so. Now, calculators are allowed in the examination rooms (at least in the Western countries) so that the students no longer need to depend on their memory work of the Tables (pahaRas in Hindi).

Then there is the mnemonic ability. The western priests perform their religious services by reading from a book. Even the village pandits of India perform the entire hours and hours of rituals simply by memory. They recite the Vedic hymns because their minds have been trained to do so from childhood. I have not come across a single western priest who could perform High Mass in Latin by memory alone. I do not know if there are any in the Vatican to do so.

When I went to the West for the first time sixty years ago, wanting to learn of the Christian culture, I went to the famous St. Paul’s cathedral in London for a Sunday morning service. I was shocked and surprised that the priest read his homily from a written paper. I had been giving spontaneous discourses on the Vedas without writing down a single note to help me prepare for a lecture. Even when teaching at the University of Minnesota, I never used any notes to give my lectures. So, it was indeed a surprise when I discovered that every western speaker, whether speaking on science or on religion, has to write down his lecture!! I never saw a piece of paper in the hands of Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel or Maulana Azad (leaders who escorted India to independence in 1947) when they addressed crowds of thousands and thousands, even from the Red Fort.

Griots of West Africa, the keepers of oral histories, can recite these histories from memory in all night sessions. So do the hafiz recite the entire Quran by heart.

Here I tell you a story I heard in the city of Patiala. The kings of India were well known as patrons of arts and sciences. Guru Granth Sahib is the sacred book of the Sikhs with 6000 ‘songs’ or hymns. The sikh king of Patiala asked the chief granthee (the one who knows the text by heart): Is there anyone who can sit in one asana (one posture) and recite the entire holy text? The learned granthee replied: if you can sit in one asana for all those hours, I shall recite the holy text for you to listen.

On the appointed day the audition took place. Both the reciter and the listener sat still in one posture all the way through, motionless. After the recitation, the king arranged for the venerable granthee to be sent home in the royal palanquin as a gesture of honour.

On the way the holy man was amazed and surprised to see unusual expressions of reverence of the people. He was puzzled.

When the palanquin arrived and the learned granthee alighted, he was shocked and surprised that the king himself was one of the palanquin-bearers.

It is through such veneration for knowledge that the traditions have continued.

I still cannot understand why the wise presidents and prime ministers of the nations today need electronic cues to give their speeches. More shocking, in the country of Gandhi and Nehru, the present prime minister also reads out a written speech. What has happened here?

However, the pandits still recite the hours of liturgy from memory and most Indian public speakers speak extempore without any notes in front of them.

I came to India after a sixteen year absence in 1968. I knew of the tradition of ‘pandas’, the priests who are the keepers of family genealogies. There are thousands of ethnic communities in India. I knew that our family priests resided in the city of Haridwar. So I went to the sacred spot called har ki pauri where one is sure to find one or two of these priests. I addressed the first one I saw and asked: I am a Saraswat Brahmin of Kaliya clan; my ancestry is in the town of Nurmahal in district of Jalandhar in Punjab. Where will I find our family panda?

The priest immediately told me which way to go, where the house is and so on. And I could easily find it. I have had similar experience in two other holy places. Once in Kashmir at the Martand (Matand) temple and also at Gauri-kund on the way to Kedarnath. Now, the question is: of the 1.2 billion people of thousands of ethnic communities in the country, in which computer do these pandas keep the records that they can instantly guide a seeker even to the house address of his/her own family’s priests? What is that mental skill?

I find that many discoveries of mind sciences nowadays are based on the handicaps the people in the West, oops, in the modern societies, suffer; modern India being no exception.

I was walking in the science museum in St. Paul, Minnesota. There was an experiment one could participate in. It was a recording one heard with earphones and at the same time read a few paragraphs that were different from the recording being played. The assumption was, it was taken for granted, that one could not read aloud something different at the same time as listening to a different recording.

The ‘scientists’ had not counted on a meditator. I had no problem doing both at the same time and can prove it in any laboratory. It is a simple matter of withdrawing the mind from one sense and applying it to another.

This is nothing! There is an assumption that one cannot be reciting one thing while hearing something else at the same time. We prove that wrong each Shiva-ratri (Shiva’s Holy Night) when we go to the Virabhadra temple around 2 or 3 a.m. The space inside the shrine is about 10 ft by 10 ft. Often, 20 people are squeezed in there. When we arrive, the priests of some yajamana (officiant) are already performing the worship liturgy, reciting the hymns and so on. We go and our priests start reciting their own liturgy. The two groups go on independently but simultaneously and at optimum volume. Nobody gets confused. Each worship liturgy is completed with satisfaction.

This is, again, nothing. We were in the Kedarnath Temple in the high mountains. There was a group of maybe 70 people from USA. We asked for puja (worship) to Shiva to be performed for us. When we arrived in the sanctum sanctorum, three other liturgies were going on, one on each side of the shrine. Ours was fourth. The recitations are at high volume. All four groups of priests performed their own worship without any confusion. Dr. John Clarke, chairman of our Himalayan Institute in Pennsylvania, even commented about it. Then there are ‘moderns’ who say that they cannot meditate in a crowd!

We have also tested in our Ashram laboratory a traditional reciter (veda-pathin) of the Vedas. It is ‘normally’ unthinkable that one would produce alpha brain waves, symptomatic of total relaxation, while speaking. But the Veda-pathin, when reciting with eyes closed, was also producing alpha waves and we have recorded that in our Lab data.

Now let us take the case of shatavadhanis in Maharashtra, Andhra, Karnataka and other states. ‘Shatavadhani’ means a person of hundred concentrations. A shatavadhani sits down in a session with people. He may be asked a hundred questions one after the other. In between, someone may ring a bell ten times. Someone may ask that the master recite a verse starting with, say, the letter ‘P’. After all the hundred events have taken place, he answers all questions in the same sequence in which they were asked; at the right place he says that at this point the bell was rung ten times. At another point he recites the requisite verse starting with ‘P’. And I have even heard of sahasravadhanis, those of a thousand concentrations.

These are examples of mind’s capacities in the traditional societies, but there seems to be a conspiracy in modern education and social systems to impair the minds so that this kind of acuteness, intentness and concentration is lost in the on-going generations.

These feats of the mind are achieved without notebooks, calculators and computers. Sadly those with modern education do not even know that these traditions yet continue and there is something to learn from them. There is an attempt in modern India to laugh off the priests who recite many hours of the liturgy by heart and how many of us do really know about the shatavadhanis?

Now back to the talk of ‘genius’. There is quite an imposing list of geniuses in the history of India. Varaha-mihira (505-587 A.D.) who wrote on trigonometry, astronomy, astrology, planetary movements, eclipses, rainfall, clouds, architecture, growth of crops, manufacture of perfumes, matrimony, domestic relations, gems, pearls, and rituals (Wikipedia). King Bhoja of the Parmar dynasty (died 1055 A.D.) who wrote on medicine, architecture, poetics, literary criticism, and even about building of flying vehicles using heated mercuric vapour as fuel.

But, the purpose of this article is not to count the number of geniuses and polymaths in India or China (I should ask my friend and initiate Shi Hong about Chinese geniuses). What we are talking about is the application of mind without the help of any modern ‘apps’ and such.

One prime example is Panini whose date is somewhere around 6th or 7th century BC. (Indian post office issued a stamp commemorating him). He is the founding father of meta-grammar and structural analysis of language. He analysed the entire Sanskrit language in 1959 sutras, or succinct formulae. I memorized this text at the age of 6, as do all the ‘real’ traditional grammarians of India. He invented algebraic markings for his analytical work. He has been called the only human computer ever born. I cannot begin to give you examples of his genius. One example:

I pose a question in English grammar. How does the verb root ‘be’ morph into the formulations ‘is’ and ‘are’. What is the phonetic connection between ‘be’ and ‘is’’?

Panini’s sutras, ‘computer codes’ if you will, have to be applied in a certain sequence. So, to go from the verb root ‘as’ (meaning ‘be’), to present tense third person singular ‘asti’ (meaning ‘is’) 27 rules have to be applied in proper sequence. Miss out on one link in the chain, you give a wrong ‘computer command’, you will not get ‘asti’, whatever else you might get. These processes are called siddhis in grammar. I had to learn to do these siddhis at the age of 7 with every possible word in the language.

Of the 2000 verbs Panini listed from existing lexicons and his own ‘field researches’, each verb, following Panini’s rules, can form 20000000 words. Multiply 2000 by twenty million (two crores), 40000000000, that is the number of words a Sanskrit grammarian versed in the formulae of morphology, can form if he has mastered Panini. Imagine the riches of such a language. And one who knows this system, learning a language for him is a child’s game. People ask me the secret of how I learnt to guide meditation in Italian in half an hour, never having learnt the language before. Once, when I was teaching Latin (somewhere—I need not give you the history), I invented/discovered the rules by which the Latin irregular verbs operate. (An irregular verb is one which does not follow the norms of established rules).

How did Panini accomplish this? Patanjali, the great commentator on Panini’s grammar, says (I paraphrase):

[Our] authority is the master himself who would sit at a pure place, having ritually purified himself, facing east, and brought forth the sutras.

‘Facing east’ suggests that it was a work accomplished through intuitions received in meditative states. It is still common in India to sit facing east for morning prayers and meditations. No computer language of today can yet match the ability of Panini all by itself without the agency of a Sanskrit grammarian trained in Panini’s system.

Fortunately the system still continues to be taught through the self-sacrifice of masters, who live in great austerity and who may not know a word of English and cannot operate a computer key. These are glimpses into a different civilization which I represent.

We use more than two dozen computers in my Ashram, including the meditation research laboratory, but I do not abandon my Paninian training in analysing all different areas of involvement. That goes to show that there need not be a conflict between the ancient and the modern. Both can enrich each other. Oh, how I wish the ‘moderns’ knew to ask us ‘ancients’.

Modern science has made incredible strides, but in understanding the capabilities of the human mind it is still in infancy. We the ‘ancients’ can help.

[March 2013]

In some unplanned moments in human history a sudden strange surge of silences becomes enfleshed. The people call it a “saint.” The enfleshment ends but silence continues so that many pilgrims may journey to immerse themselves in the pools left in the chambers where silence was thus “born” and had a dwelling.

Impelled, uninvoked, from the depths of some unknown ocean, the high tide of an irrepressible urge to silence comes welling up to sweep at the shores of some open-stretched-out minds, and leaves its overwhelming imprint of a quiet power behind.

The pools thus formed, the minds thus empowered, are thereafter revered as saints. The footprints of the saints too, on the beaches of history, form indelible pools of tranquility to remain forever as places where pilgrims from all polarities of the globe come penitent, praying for purity at these spots magnetized by sanctity where needles of many traditions converge.

Have you ever visited one of the birth places of Silence in any one of Her incarnations? This was one: where Silence and Her twin brother Love were born.

Silence is the twin sister of saints.

If you are not set that saints come dwell in your skull, you can for now keep company with their sister, Silence.

To enter where a saint was born is to be baptised in an invisible pool of the force of freedom named silence.

In an age where bodies of saints are no longer martyred but the sacred thoughts suffer cruelest inquisitions, one can find asylum in such a chamber.

The room where St. Teresa was born: the silence during prayer to Mother in that particular center of interior worlds was like that of a pool of water that had lain undisturbed for (the Cavemaker alone knows) how many millenia, like the mind of a yogi, that I saw the reflection of my face in, in the depth of Carlsbad caves.

The silence rained so thick, my soul was soaked through and through and the tongue turned so heavy it forgot its functions both of taste and speech.

In the chambers in which those fully grown in Spirit are born are to be found pools of holy water deeper than an ocean. The infants in Spirit, if they dare a reverent dive, emerge a moment later fully grown in splendour.

The splendour will last forever if a single drop from the holy pool clings to a corner of their minds.
A chamber where a saint is born is a crystal chalice filled with the milk of silence placed in the full moon light of agape and apotheosis.

Some sip reverently; some gulp hurriedly; some, alas, pass by with eyes averted. Blessed are the few who will be bathed with this Mother milk, that is the mead of sanctity that is wine of starlight that is the river of rays whose origin is the palm of God.

To sit silently in a chamber where a saint was born is to become foetus in the womb of God.

---

Editor’s Note

One of the Diary entries and postcards written and sent (Summer 1996) from within the room where St. Theresa was born in Avila, Spain.

A painful physical condition grants me many advantages and benefits, such as these:

1. It enforces on me preservation and intensification of energy in the form of silence which I enjoy.
2. It enforces silence on those who need to see me. They are advised to come and sit in silent meditation, thus pulling away the curtain of verbosity that exist between teacher and the taught. They need to learn this silent communion.
3. It makes me abandon my pursuit of intellect, the attachment to books and writing, so I may go into meditation — the only thing one can do for prolonged periods without discomfort when in pain.
4. It makes me practice to go very quickly to those intense places within which are centres beyond the reach of pain and physical discomfort. It

a. gives the Guru spirit a chance to enter me and heal me;
b. teaches me the art of self-healing;
c. makes me go into intense depths quickly,
d. thus making me spiritually progress faster.

God’s gifts are many; oh, so many.

May you find God’s gifts to be precious even when they come in p(l)ain wrappers.

21 August 2011

 

It is said in the spiritual traditions of India, as they are commonly practised that

1. Whatever one’s last thoughts at the hour of death in this life. They will manifest themselves in the next life.
2. One’s last thoughts are the sum total of all that one has desired, enjoyed and suffered during this life.

It is therefore always advised that one not have to die harbouring unfulfilled desires if they can be fulfilled harmlessly and ethically before one’s death.

For this reason, the loving ones and relatives almost invariably ask a dying person questions like:

1. Is there anything you desire at this time?
2. Is there someone you want to see?
3. Is there something you want to eat?

Some years back in the Chattisgarh state of India when the Naxalite Maoists stopped the caravan of a politician to kill him, they taunted: Anything you want to eat?!!

I believe similar is the case in Indian prisons where a prisoner about to be hanged is asked the same question and is provided whatever he wishes to eat in his last meal.

What determines the last desire(s) is a question full of complexity. Who knows why one wants to see only that one special child, or wants to eat papaya before dying. From when the seed of such desire lay hidden in him cannot be determined.

This also has another dimension. The Gurus are known to fulfil a disciple’s remaining desires before making him enter Samadhi so that these desires would not frustrate his internal journey. A great deal can be written or said about this fact.

The last minute desires of a dying person are quite intense in spite of the body’s feebleness. The unfulfilled desires will migrate as part of his intense samskaras and form themes for his next life. A child may be born with intense desire for some kinds of foods and so on.

The very verb for ‘eating’ in Sanskrit incorporates a whole order of mental connections. The same verb ‘bhuj’ is used for

1. eating,
2. enjoying anything,
3. sexual congress,
4. any experience with the senses,
5. making a food offering in worship (bhog lagaanaa),
6. suffering or enjoying the results of an act (tum ne aisaa kiyaa, ab bhogo!) or karma (karma-bhoga).

I may be missing out on some connections here. Thus ‘giving food’ or ‘eating’ psychologically and karmically covers a whole wide range of mental and physical involvements.

There is a very solid base in the Indian custom in the realms of samskara-psychology. It is best not to bind the soul in this way before sending it on to its journey; hence the custom of asking.

[Note: This message is in Hindi and English.]

मन बहुरंगी है न ?
संस्कृत वर्णमाला में अक्षरों को वर्ण कहते हैं ।
वर्ण शब्द का अर्थ है रंग । आपको शुभकामना
देता हूं कि सब मन्त्रों के सब अक्षरों के सभी रंग
आपके मन पर चढ जायें ।

Since the mind is multihued, the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet are called varna. The word ‘varna’ means colour. I wish you the colours of the letters of all mantras to dye your mind.