We are fortunate we have two eyes to see. More fortunate are those who are blessed with a third eye to foresee. What I am trying to do in this article is to show that we need not despair, as it is possible to train oneself in the art of activating one's own third eye. Everybody, without an exception, is endowed with an embedded third eye in him/her. Some, because of their work in their earlier incarnations, are born with a fully activated third eye. Ramanujan, for example, was a mathematics prodigy from the start, without having had much formal school education or training in mathematics. Today he is known for his significant contribution to infinite series, analytical theory of numbers, elliptical functions, and continued fractions. However what it all meant to him was expressed by him in the oft quoted one liner: An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God. He was honored with the Fellowship of the Royal Society and the Fellowship of Trinity College, Cambridge!
Shakuntala Devi is another example. She has been a mental wizard since age three. In January 1977, at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, she beat the fastest computer of that time by 10 seconds while extracting the 23rd root of a 201 digit number! On June 18, 1980 she was asked to multiply two 13 digit numbers, picked randomly by the Computer Department of Imperial College, London. She accomplished the feat in 28 seconds! She now finds a place in the Guinness Book of Records of 1995. Some are born psychics like Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet, who healed hundreds of people with his psychic powers. He is also known for a slew of predictions that came true. Here I may mention just half a dozen out of them. These are: freedom for India, birth of Israel, death of FDR, assassination of JFK., rise and fall of Hitler, collapse of Soviet Union. Another psychic, Uri Geller of Israel, is known for bending spoons on TV shows, with his psychic gaze.
With Quantum Mechanics occupying center stage, it is now well established that matter is an extended form of energy and vice versa. Emboldened, the metaphysicists claim matter is part matter and part spirit, part physical and part metaphysical. As a corollory to it, we can now say we are all part form and part formless. It has, therefore, become easy to explain that pran astraddles breath. I would venture further and say that the third eye piggybacks on the pineal body. The pineal body which gets its name from the pine cone because of its semblance with it, is an endocrine gland, the size of a pea, situated at the geometric center of the cranium. Rene Descartes, the French philosopher, did an extensive study of the pineal body and came to the conclusion that it is the seat of the soul. Swami Vivekananda endorsed his statement. Before Descartes, Herophilos a Greek physician deemed to be the first anatomist, had described it as the sphincter of thought. However, till the other day, most biologists were uncertain about its functions.
They considered it a vestigial organ of little, or no utility and mockingly labelled it the appendix of the brain. Now it has been found that it secretes melatonin, the wonder hormone that rejuvenates the body by regulating its circadian rhythm. To date it has been found that more than a hundred bodily functions have a daily rhythm--some diurnal, some nocturnal and some both. It is this clock work of the pineal body that informs the cells whether it is light or dark outside. The cells slow down, speed up or stop work accordingly. It is therefore known as the regulator of regulators. In many creatures, especially the Reptilia, it resembles the eye in its appearance and functions and so it is reffered to as the third eye. But the Indian mystics had experienced its function of bonding with the universe, intuitively. They found out that kundalini, after negotiating the ajna chakra, enters the sahasrar or the thousand-petalled lotus, which is located at the center of the crown, a point occupied physically by the pineal body.
In the middle of the sahasrar sits the a-ka-tha triangle. The terms a, ka, and tha, I may explain, stand for the infinite, the light, and the protector respectively. Be sure that the triangle is not symbolic of but verily the infinite light that is our protector and progenitor. About this light Sri Krishna Prem* writes: That light dwells in all beings and speaks--that is why some traditions have termed it, the Logos, the Word--in our hearts with the voice of conscience; though only too often we confuse its voice with various other voices that speak with louder accents. This triangle shines uniformly like lightning and is reffered to by the tantrics as the yoni of the universe. Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa called it brahmayoni or the womb of brahma. These visions of brahmayoni came to him while he was at work on his spiritual practices under the wood apple or the bilva tree in panchvati, the temple garden, at the instance of the Brahmani.
The saint used to see a large luminous triangle emerging out of three blue dots of living light. Later on, Swami Vivekananda also saw a vision of the effulgent triangle which he conveyed to the Master. The Master was very happy and said, "Very good. You have seen the brahmayoni. I also saw it, but further I saw it giving birth to innumerable worlds every moment". A little while ago we had agreed upon the premiss that pran rides the breath and that breath is physical, and pran metaphysical. It can be argued now that the pineal body is the physical aspect of the third eye while the a-ka-tha triangle is the metaphysical one. The pineal body is photosensitive. It releases melatonin only in the dark. How much wisdom we exhibit in turning our nights into days, thereby slicing the time of darkness, is anybody's guess because this long time low production of melatonin sends the body out of whack.
All the numerous rhythms of the body turn topsy-turvy. The disfunctional body clock affects the production of some euphoric hormones also such as met enkephalin, anandamide and serotonin. These hormones are most essential as they are known to strengthen the immune system, and relieve pain, besides reducing stress and postponing the aging process. Their presence imparts confidence and ardor which makes one feel pretty upbeat. On the other hand their absence throws up a plethora of maladies such as insomnia, irritation, depression, dyspepsia, despair, dissatisfaction, disorientation, untimely ageing---you name it, it is there. Because of the commonplaceness of these ailments, we don't prick up our ears considering it all to be a normal feature. But it is not. Hi, in this medley, the pineal body had slid on to the back burner! Well, let me tell you the pineal body becomes calcified and therefore almost non-functional.
A calcified pineal body is a common feature in all dissections, all over the globe. But it is disastrous and the process needs to be stalled. When the regulator of regulators, the mount of the third eye, becomes ramshackle it undercuts our metaphysical growth. How? Let us first try to understand what is metaphysical. Well, metaphysical is but a protracted form of the physical. To be precise, metaphysical is the physical, spun out. Remember music spins out of the strings of the veena and lightning out of the billowing clouds. The pineal body gives access to the realm of the Divine. In medical terminology, the pineal body is called epiphysis cerebri which in plain English means nearer to the source of the brain. Perhaps a physician would take it to mean the center of the brain, but for a metaphysician it carries a much bolder meaning. For him it means nearer to the primal source, the source of divinity. I will tell you how.
Well, when we meditate, the state of our eyeballs reveals the progression of the kundalini as it moves inside the body. To begin with, our eyes are downcast when the kundalini rests in the mooladhar chakra. As it traverses upwards our eyes follow its movement and move upwards. When the kundalini crawls into the ajna chakra, our gaze becomes level with the plane of the horizon, neither turned upwards nor bent downwards. But as the kundalini glides into the sahasrar, our eyeballs turn upwards. Not only that, both the eye beams converge on one point at the center of the triangle, giving rise to one vision. Simultaneously most of the euphoria producing hormones are released at this moment and the meditator experiences bliss. On the physical level, it re-invigorates the internal organs, including the pineal body . The physiology of the body gets a boost which overhauls the inner chemistry.
The phenomenal world comes to an end at this juncture. Here the notion of duality gives way to that of the unitive vision. Now there is no more the feverishness of fighting the other half of one's own or to be at loggerheads over trifles. All the conflicts are dissolved here.The enormous dissipation of energy in fruitless pursuits stops here. Whatever happens to that huge mass of energy thus set free? Listen to Jesus Christ. Says he: when your two eyes become one , there will be light. We saw above that the two eyes converge at the center of the a-ka-tha triangle. They meld into the third eye. The light Jesus is reffering to is this light, the light of the triangle, of the third eye. Look how the physical melts into nothingness and becomes metaphysical. With the melting of the physical, the ego, our tenacious stickler, relents and leaves us for good. This is called attaining to the void, in yogic parlance. We become empty, empty of ego.
In my last blog I had talked about emptiness many a time. This is what I meant by being empty. You know Nature abhors vacuum. When one becomes empty of ego, love gushes in to fill the empty space. Till now we had been slogging along carrying the huge burden of a desert in our hearts. There was no love for fellow travelers or for the Divine in our hearts, only an imitation of love was there. Spirituality had become a casualty. From now onwards starts our spiritual journey. We have yet to go a long way but the road is safe. I am not going to describe the various laps of your journey. You will have to camp at different levels, and find your way yourself. But help will come at the right time. In fact I don't feel any hesitation in saying that it is the shakti itself that will navigate you. You will feel its presence all the time. Who bothers to waste time in investigating the nature of the Divine, when there is opportunity to meld with it?
SRI KRISHNA PREM: Born Ronald Nixon in England in 1898, he was a fighter pilot in World War I. He was also the first westerner to be ordained a Hindu vaishnav monk.
Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi
Shakuntala Devi is another example. She has been a mental wizard since age three. In January 1977, at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, she beat the fastest computer of that time by 10 seconds while extracting the 23rd root of a 201 digit number! On June 18, 1980 she was asked to multiply two 13 digit numbers, picked randomly by the Computer Department of Imperial College, London. She accomplished the feat in 28 seconds! She now finds a place in the Guinness Book of Records of 1995. Some are born psychics like Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet, who healed hundreds of people with his psychic powers. He is also known for a slew of predictions that came true. Here I may mention just half a dozen out of them. These are: freedom for India, birth of Israel, death of FDR, assassination of JFK., rise and fall of Hitler, collapse of Soviet Union. Another psychic, Uri Geller of Israel, is known for bending spoons on TV shows, with his psychic gaze.
With Quantum Mechanics occupying center stage, it is now well established that matter is an extended form of energy and vice versa. Emboldened, the metaphysicists claim matter is part matter and part spirit, part physical and part metaphysical. As a corollory to it, we can now say we are all part form and part formless. It has, therefore, become easy to explain that pran astraddles breath. I would venture further and say that the third eye piggybacks on the pineal body. The pineal body which gets its name from the pine cone because of its semblance with it, is an endocrine gland, the size of a pea, situated at the geometric center of the cranium. Rene Descartes, the French philosopher, did an extensive study of the pineal body and came to the conclusion that it is the seat of the soul. Swami Vivekananda endorsed his statement. Before Descartes, Herophilos a Greek physician deemed to be the first anatomist, had described it as the sphincter of thought. However, till the other day, most biologists were uncertain about its functions.
They considered it a vestigial organ of little, or no utility and mockingly labelled it the appendix of the brain. Now it has been found that it secretes melatonin, the wonder hormone that rejuvenates the body by regulating its circadian rhythm. To date it has been found that more than a hundred bodily functions have a daily rhythm--some diurnal, some nocturnal and some both. It is this clock work of the pineal body that informs the cells whether it is light or dark outside. The cells slow down, speed up or stop work accordingly. It is therefore known as the regulator of regulators. In many creatures, especially the Reptilia, it resembles the eye in its appearance and functions and so it is reffered to as the third eye. But the Indian mystics had experienced its function of bonding with the universe, intuitively. They found out that kundalini, after negotiating the ajna chakra, enters the sahasrar or the thousand-petalled lotus, which is located at the center of the crown, a point occupied physically by the pineal body.
In the middle of the sahasrar sits the a-ka-tha triangle. The terms a, ka, and tha, I may explain, stand for the infinite, the light, and the protector respectively. Be sure that the triangle is not symbolic of but verily the infinite light that is our protector and progenitor. About this light Sri Krishna Prem* writes: That light dwells in all beings and speaks--that is why some traditions have termed it, the Logos, the Word--in our hearts with the voice of conscience; though only too often we confuse its voice with various other voices that speak with louder accents. This triangle shines uniformly like lightning and is reffered to by the tantrics as the yoni of the universe. Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa called it brahmayoni or the womb of brahma. These visions of brahmayoni came to him while he was at work on his spiritual practices under the wood apple or the bilva tree in panchvati, the temple garden, at the instance of the Brahmani.
The saint used to see a large luminous triangle emerging out of three blue dots of living light. Later on, Swami Vivekananda also saw a vision of the effulgent triangle which he conveyed to the Master. The Master was very happy and said, "Very good. You have seen the brahmayoni. I also saw it, but further I saw it giving birth to innumerable worlds every moment". A little while ago we had agreed upon the premiss that pran rides the breath and that breath is physical, and pran metaphysical. It can be argued now that the pineal body is the physical aspect of the third eye while the a-ka-tha triangle is the metaphysical one. The pineal body is photosensitive. It releases melatonin only in the dark. How much wisdom we exhibit in turning our nights into days, thereby slicing the time of darkness, is anybody's guess because this long time low production of melatonin sends the body out of whack.
All the numerous rhythms of the body turn topsy-turvy. The disfunctional body clock affects the production of some euphoric hormones also such as met enkephalin, anandamide and serotonin. These hormones are most essential as they are known to strengthen the immune system, and relieve pain, besides reducing stress and postponing the aging process. Their presence imparts confidence and ardor which makes one feel pretty upbeat. On the other hand their absence throws up a plethora of maladies such as insomnia, irritation, depression, dyspepsia, despair, dissatisfaction, disorientation, untimely ageing---you name it, it is there. Because of the commonplaceness of these ailments, we don't prick up our ears considering it all to be a normal feature. But it is not. Hi, in this medley, the pineal body had slid on to the back burner! Well, let me tell you the pineal body becomes calcified and therefore almost non-functional.
A calcified pineal body is a common feature in all dissections, all over the globe. But it is disastrous and the process needs to be stalled. When the regulator of regulators, the mount of the third eye, becomes ramshackle it undercuts our metaphysical growth. How? Let us first try to understand what is metaphysical. Well, metaphysical is but a protracted form of the physical. To be precise, metaphysical is the physical, spun out. Remember music spins out of the strings of the veena and lightning out of the billowing clouds. The pineal body gives access to the realm of the Divine. In medical terminology, the pineal body is called epiphysis cerebri which in plain English means nearer to the source of the brain. Perhaps a physician would take it to mean the center of the brain, but for a metaphysician it carries a much bolder meaning. For him it means nearer to the primal source, the source of divinity. I will tell you how.
Well, when we meditate, the state of our eyeballs reveals the progression of the kundalini as it moves inside the body. To begin with, our eyes are downcast when the kundalini rests in the mooladhar chakra. As it traverses upwards our eyes follow its movement and move upwards. When the kundalini crawls into the ajna chakra, our gaze becomes level with the plane of the horizon, neither turned upwards nor bent downwards. But as the kundalini glides into the sahasrar, our eyeballs turn upwards. Not only that, both the eye beams converge on one point at the center of the triangle, giving rise to one vision. Simultaneously most of the euphoria producing hormones are released at this moment and the meditator experiences bliss. On the physical level, it re-invigorates the internal organs, including the pineal body . The physiology of the body gets a boost which overhauls the inner chemistry.
The phenomenal world comes to an end at this juncture. Here the notion of duality gives way to that of the unitive vision. Now there is no more the feverishness of fighting the other half of one's own or to be at loggerheads over trifles. All the conflicts are dissolved here.The enormous dissipation of energy in fruitless pursuits stops here. Whatever happens to that huge mass of energy thus set free? Listen to Jesus Christ. Says he: when your two eyes become one , there will be light. We saw above that the two eyes converge at the center of the a-ka-tha triangle. They meld into the third eye. The light Jesus is reffering to is this light, the light of the triangle, of the third eye. Look how the physical melts into nothingness and becomes metaphysical. With the melting of the physical, the ego, our tenacious stickler, relents and leaves us for good. This is called attaining to the void, in yogic parlance. We become empty, empty of ego.
In my last blog I had talked about emptiness many a time. This is what I meant by being empty. You know Nature abhors vacuum. When one becomes empty of ego, love gushes in to fill the empty space. Till now we had been slogging along carrying the huge burden of a desert in our hearts. There was no love for fellow travelers or for the Divine in our hearts, only an imitation of love was there. Spirituality had become a casualty. From now onwards starts our spiritual journey. We have yet to go a long way but the road is safe. I am not going to describe the various laps of your journey. You will have to camp at different levels, and find your way yourself. But help will come at the right time. In fact I don't feel any hesitation in saying that it is the shakti itself that will navigate you. You will feel its presence all the time. Who bothers to waste time in investigating the nature of the Divine, when there is opportunity to meld with it?
SRI KRISHNA PREM: Born Ronald Nixon in England in 1898, he was a fighter pilot in World War I. He was also the first westerner to be ordained a Hindu vaishnav monk.
Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi
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