A sanyasin (Swami) has moved beyond one family to embrace the world-family in equal love. For this reason, swamis do not normally speak of their pre-sanyasa families. They refer to their pre-sanyasa families as ‘poorvaashrama family’, the family from the previous Ashrama, the preceding station of life. I will call it their pre-history.

However, some high level swamis have written autobiographies in which they have detailed the pre-histories of their physical families as context for a guidance that the readers/students/disciples may receive from such writing.

Hoping that this writing may give guidance and inspiration, this swami is giving a glimpse of part of his pre-history.

The Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal, had a stepmother by the name Noor Jahan (1577-1645). She was a powerful empress who wielded the true royal power in the entire empire during the reign of Shah Jahan’s father, Jahangir (1569-1627).

Noor Jahan spent her childhood at a small settlement in Punjab, and later decided that the place where she grew up should be re-established as a proper township.

She invited a Brahmin family to settle in the new town and help establish it.

The founder of this family branch was a yogi. After serving the empress by helping establish the township, he took jivita-samadhi, a term used when a great yogi decides that s/he has completed his/her life work and it is time to leave the body. A hole is dug in the earth, the yogi sits down at the bottom in meditation, and leaves the body. Disciples/descendants then cover up the body with more earth and a grave or mausoleum may be built. Such ‘graves’ are called ‘samadhis’.

There are hundreds like these all over India where worshipful honouring continues for generations and centuries.

The samadhi of the founding father of this branch of the family is one such holy place.

This yogi founded the family line from which Usharbudh Arya is descended.

The sacred knowledge was passed on to the founding father’s daughter. She also followed on her father’s footsteps and took samadhi the same way. It has been a tradition in the family, established by her command, for four centuries, that a new bride must be brought and presented to this founding matriarch at her samadhi to become a full member of the family.

The land grants given by the empress Noor Jahan sustained the family for 300+ years. How much of the yoga or Vedic knowledge was carried on through these generations I cannot say.

The family is now scattered all over the world and hold successful positions. I have met them in Nairobi, Vancouver and elsewhere. In order to respect the privacy of the diverse living lineage of this family, I do not include the place or family names.

350 years passed. Usharbudh Arya’s father decided to give himself to the pursuit of this knowledge and dedicated himself to raising a son who should become a ‘rishi’.

That is again a long story of much family ‘tapas’.

In order to accomplish the spiritual goals for his son Usharbudh, his father Pandit Durga Das, cut himself off from all relationships and external worldly samskaras that might touch his son. The result is svb.

Dedicated to the transcendent, avoiding confinements of personal relations, svb met one of these physical relatives for the first time in his life only 4 years ago – the only first cousin who searched and found and came to see svb at SRSG Ashram.

These family members think that this svb may be the same founding father re-born.

Now, 400 years have passed.

Even though countries, cultures, circumstances, education systems have changed, the thread of spirituality continues. There are pictures of two granddaughters (actually grandnieces) meditating under the tree next to the holy samadhis.

Who will be the yogi descendants in the family, how many generations and how many centuries from now – cannot be said. The family samskaras continue to be passed on.

Would the founding father of the American branch of the family be thus blessed four centuries from now, with a yogi down that line ? Let us pray that a positive answer manifests itself.

One last word:

Some months before Gurudeva left his body he called over to his chamber and instructed :“The day you sit down in Samadhi and ‘will’ it that ‘I will now leave my body’, only then you will leave your body.”

Svb now wishes to prepare for that moment, of Guru’s prediction/instruction coming true, by taking five years’ silence from 2013.

More than 400 years will have passed since this family’s founding father sat in samadhi and willed himself to leave. Only the Guru knows whether svb’s wish to follow the footsteps of his ancestor and other yogis will be blessed with success.

Editor’s note

Swami Veda Bharati ji plans to take a five year vow of silence on the auspicious night of Shivaratri 2013. Before Swamiji goes into silence, he invites all of the initiates, Swamis, initiators, teachers, and potential teachers to Swami Rama Sadhaka Grama in Rishikesh, so he can impart special guidance on secrets of effective teaching and give further spiritual teachings.  For more information about this gathering, please follow this link:

https://www.ahymsin.org/main/index.php/2013-Gather-of-the-Sangha/2013-all-teachers-and-sangha-gathering.html

Question to Swami Veda

You encourage us to meditate on the full moon day. Through the meditation we are connected. You are in India and we are in Taiwan. What is the mechanism by which this happens?

Answer

I am sitting here and you are sitting two meters from me. That is quite a long distance! And we are connected. How does this happen? If you are sitting behind that pillar, how does that connection happen?  Your body is limited in space and time. It has dimensions, a past, a present and a future, and you think you are a body. So long as you think you are a body, you will not understand the connections that exist in the universal mind. When you and I are meditating together, and there are periods of silence, we are connected. Because at that time, you are not thinking of the body, you are purely in the mind. So when you will learn about your mind and soul, you will know that there are no distances the universe. If a master was sitting in a galaxy, one trillion light years away, and you were sitting on this mustard seed size planet, the connection would still be there. And when the master is not in the body, the connection is still there. In fact, the true traditions of this earth are still being passed on, mainly by the disembodied masters. They are the ones who have brought you here. Somebody dreams something, somebody gets a very strong feeling inside. Something inside you says, “Let’s go and meditate for fifteen days in Rishikesh.” From where does that feeling arise in you? Who make you think that thought? You think it was your own inclination.

But there is some greater hand that is guiding you. There are times when people come to Rishikesh who do not know anything about this ashram. Somebody in Brazil gets a strong feeling to go to India and go to Rishikesh. The lady arrives and goes and sits down in a hotel. She does not know where to go. Seven days she sat in her hotel room. Then she got tired of sitting in the room, so she came out and started walking. Or took a vehicle, which stopped somewhere, and she started walking, and she sees the ashram and just walks in. Somebody from the reception says, “Swamiji, there us a lady here from Brazil, and she is leaving for Delhi and the airplane tonight.” I called her to my chamber. She speaks Portuguese but she understands Spanish. I gave her five minutes of meditation, and that was enough, her purpose of coming was fulfilled. And she meditates impressively.

Why ask about Full Moon Meditations? Somebody is broadcasting in a machine in Moscow, or Washington or Beijing. And you are hearing it in Taiwan. The person who does not know about radio waves wonders, “How does this happen?” It is not coming over some wires, but the instrument is tuned to the waves, because those waves are everywhere. So your mind is everywhere. Understand the nature of the mind. How is it that a mother is sitting in her house and her child is in an accident. And she gets this strong feeling inside, and she runs out and finds her child. How is the connection established?

Because it is a link of love between the two minds – the mind of the mother and the mind of the child. The mind of the masters and those who are serving the masters – their mind is a motherly mind. If you are not a mother, you cannot be a teacher. When taking a teacher training program here, whether you are male or female, learn to be a mother. A mother to anyone who passes by you. A mother to anyone who comes to your class. A mother to anyone who has any suffering. A mother to anyone who has any need. Then you are a teacher. And the persons should feel that they are being mothered. So the connection between the master’s mind and your mind is like the connection between a mother’s mind and your mind.

Please understand that this mind is not something limited to the size of your body. Your mind is not some kind of liquid or solid that is poured into the vessel of your skull, and kept there with a tight lid. Like the radio waves, your mind is an all pervading wave. You are a wave in the universal mind, and you are also the wave that is the universal mind. Can you take a piece of chalk or pencil and draw a boundary line between two waves in a river? Can you draw a line between two waves in the sea and say, “Wave number one, you stay on this side, and wave number two, you stay on that side. This is my country and that is your country?” Can you do that? You cannot do that. The energy is not in the shape of the water. The energy is that, because of which, the water becomes the wave. So the wave of your mind, and the wave of another’s mind touch each other. When the one mind wave and the other mind wave touch each other, and know that they are loving and embracing a fellow mind wave; when they know that it is the light waves of the mind that are embracing each other – what is that called? That touching of the minds, that hugging and embracing of the minds? What is the name for that embrace? It is called love.

And when you truly love, you can sense what is happening with the object of your love, even a thousand miles away. How does that connection happen? It happens even in those who do not understand that they are not the body. It happens even in those who do not understand the universality of the mind principle. And it happens much more in those who have understood the universality of the mind principle. When you understand that, then you are a teacher. Not because you can recite the relaxation exercise. If you are not a mother to the person you are teaching, then you are not a teacher. You be the mother mind and let that person be the child mind.

Swami Veda Q & A

27 March 2008

Speaking to TTP group from Taiwan

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) holds their conferences worldwide and attract thousands of innovative thinkers in these fields.

In a recent TED conference in Taipei (Taiwan), on 15th January 2011, Swami Veda Bharati was asked to do the closing session. Each speaker in this conference is limited to 18 minutes. The speakers were asked to present their views on any one or many of the nine questions:

1. What is it like to learn like a baby again?
2. Is our culture controlled by media?
3. What makes a life worth celebrating?
4. How close are we to sustainable energy?
5. Is simplicity gone forever?
6. How far is our imagination frontier?
7. What world will we live tomorrow?
8. What is the price of clean water?
9. Do we have room for disappearing cultures?

Swamiji started his presentation with the usual short and intense meditation which need not be reproduced here. His closing of the meditation was:

Maintain the flow.  Observe how the mind, the name and the breath are flowing together as a single stream.
Maintain the feel of the flow and gently open your eyes without breaking the stream of consciousness.

As he led the audience to open the eyes from meditations he continued:

Now you look with your eyes as a baby looks at the world.  Everything new, everything fresh, nothing warped out from imprints and impressions, everything new.

One who learns the art of contemplation and making the mind flow as a smooth stream negates nothing excludes nothing.

He sees the world as a baby sees it.  At the same time sees the world as an adult sees it.

Such a one does not abandon spirituality, the inner happiness, in favour of technology, does not abandon technology in favour of spirituality.

What can be obtained by technology — do obtain that.  What can be obtained by contemplation –- do obtain that.
I’ll give you an example.  Mr. Gunter Pauli (who spoke before me) is so impressive.  He talked to us about how the heart may be made stronger with very simple technologies.

But, without the technology what can you obtain?  I was doing some MRI experiments in Germany in Bremen University testing what kind of brain waves are generated through different techniques of meditation.  After the test, the gentleman moderating called me and said, “Look at the computer screen, the picture of your brain.  How old did you say you are?”  That was four years ago.  I was seventy four. He said, “This brain the picture shows is fifty three years old.”  Without technology.

So, with technology, without technology,operate in life with both options.

In the exterior world and in the interior world, both, a contemplator will look at the production quotient, will also look at, as the King Wangchuck of Bhutan has proposed, the national happiness quotient.

One of my yoga students went from India for the first time to Germany.  They took him out to show him the big malls, shopping malls, supermarkets, very impressive.  He came back.  They asked him, “What did you think”?  He said, “Fine, but nobody was laughing.”  So big malls and laughter – can both go together?

Not only the worship of youth.  The worship of youth, the worship of modernity together with the stories of the ancients.  What the youth can create and what narratives the elders can give – listen to both at the same time.

Sometimes I dream of a global TV network that only broadcasts traditional cultures.  People sitting in a village square by the bonfire through the night and singing the songs in those six thousand languages which are about to disappear by the end of this century.

Why can we not enjoy those songs, those epics, those narratives while we also enjoy all the modern Hollywood-Bollywood stories and whatever else that we can create, both at the same time? Interior and the exterior, spiritual and the physical, gross national product and gross happiness product.

This you can obtain not by negating, not by canceling your busy business life.  You can create also by finding those few moments in the day that are kept concealed by your lack of observation.

Five minutes before leaving your bed, you have time.  Two minutes before breakfast, you have time.  Two minutes after sending the children to school, you have time.  Two minutes after coming home from work, you have time.

Wash off that which you have gathered of the tensions and stress.  Come back home to your interior self and make your brain younger and look at the world with the eyes of a baby and speak also the wisdom that your elders could give you.

Do both at the same time.

It can be done.

A contemplator negates nothing, excludes nothing, is both ancient and modern.  He recites the texts as I do from the third millennium B.C. and also reads the modern newspapers, both, at the same time enjoying both, and imbibing wisdom from both.

Ten seconds are left out of 18 minutes.

As he always does, Swamiji closed the session with a short meditation:

Bring your attention to yourself again.  Relax your forehead.  Feel the flow and the touch of your breath in your nostrils with whatever name of divinity, flowing in each breath. Continue feeling the breath flow in your nostrils.

At this point, Swamiji gently slipped off the stage but the audience did not know that he had left. They continued in contemplative absorption.

Editor’s Note

To see and hear the video of Swami Veda at TEDxTaipei 2011, please go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs7jNNlfEcQ