MAHA SHIV RATRI

In the pantheon of Hindoo festivities two nights stand apart. One is Moh Ratri and the other is Maha Ratri. Moh Ratri translates as the night of illusion, in English. It happened when Krishna was born in a prison house and was transported to a place of safety at a distance of 5 miles, across the river Jamuna, in the dead hours of the night. The veil of illusion was so complete that no body had an inkling of what had transpired. Moh Ratri is nowadays celebrated as Krishna Janmashtmi. Maha Ratri, which in English means the great night, refers to the night of Shiv's wedding to Shiva. Since Shiva is reified shakti; in a way, it is a night when Shiv is infused with the shakti of Shiva. Therefore, after being united with Shiva, Shiv is worshipped as Maha Shiv. Without Shiva, the same Shiv is reduced to a shav (corpse). Maha Ratri is celebrated as Maha Shiv Ratri.

Broadly speaking there are two types of laity: literalists who go by the book and metaphorists who don't like to see a tree without a Dryad inhabiting it. Literalists are generally seen to gravitate towards ritualism, ultimately. A symbolic act gets somewhere morphed into a rite, and then rituals take it upon themselves to uphold it. There is nothing unusual in the use of symbols though. Symbols are unavoidable. Even words are nothing more than symbols. But words can't deliver a present, they have ability only to represent it. If I type the word apple here, it only represents an apple. It is not going to make a present of an apple to me. So the problem arises when a literalist forgets that a symbol is not an end in itself. It is just a signpost. But make no mistake, it is a live signpost. It should be allowed to breathe.

Only then it can conceptualize what is otherwise abstract or incomprehensible. One must remember that meaning is always larger than the symbol. The asterisk (*) here may be used to represent a star which is humongously bigger than this symbol.  Symbols are, hence, signals; live signals, not substitutes. They are like the finger pointing towards the moon, not the moon itself. And therein come the metaphorists. In matters spiritual, we can name them Bodhisattvas, at large. Baba Muktananda once told the story of a Shiv Yogi. He was denied entry into a Shiv temple for he came from the so-called low caste. Undaunted, he went to the beach, made a lingam of sand, put a bunch of flowers over it and sat before it in meditation.

It was revealed to him that it was not imperative for him to worship the outward lingam as the real lingam was an integral part of him, in the form of the spinal column which sustains the spinal cord inside it. The abstract version of the spinal cord is referred to by the yogis as the sushumna nadi. Perhaps because he was at an advanced stage of sadhna, he did not need any outer symbol to meditate upon. It should, however, not be construed from this that it was for the first time that such a revelation had come to somebody. Revelations have been happening always, at all sorts of periods, but of course, not to all sorts of people. Therefore, to pass on the knowledge to others, it becomes imperative to make use of a coded language. The symbol works like modern day time capsules that are buried deep in the earth for the benefit of posterity.

Just like it is with parables, symbols are meant to remind people in a hands-on way of something that is different from the promise of its surface. This helps people in breaking their conditioned responses, enabling them to puzzle over them and figure out for themselves what they really mean. After all, gold pay streaks are not seen on the surface; they are found deep in the veins of the earth. Etymologically speaking, lingam is a Sanskrit word which means a sign. It also means the mool prakriti, Root Nature, or the Cosmic Power. You must have seen that the most sought after article for the worship of lingam is a bel leaf. Why? Well, because it is trifoliolate. Every leaf is made up of three leaflets. They represent the triune power of Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesh. In a way the leaf symbolizes the Cosmic Power.

The phallic appellation applied to the lingam is a recent development, borrowed from Freud and nurtured by his adherents. If what they say has any substance in it, how are they going to explain the presence of the ophidian? How did it get coiled up round the lingam? What is the serpent doing there with no garden of Eden in sight? Anyone having a nodding aquaintance with yoga can easily vouch for the kundalini lying coiled at the base of the sushumna, like a serpent. Meditating on the lingam means meditating on the sushumna, to awaken the Cosmic Power of kundalini, which lies asleep in the root chakra or muladhar. When the kundalini is aroused, it sends its emissaries, the light photons, to the brain, sometimes in a stream like flow, sometimes like a streak of lightening, sometimes leapfrogging and sometimes crawling like ants. They turn the brain into a powerhouse of light.


In yogic parlance, this process is named the ascent of kundalini to meet her spouse, Lord Shiv. Mool Prakriti, or, the Cosmic Power ascends up the sushumna to seek union with Purusha, that is, the Absolute. It is said that she had been lying asleep at the base of the sushumna because of the veils of illusion wrapped around her. As she stirs up, she tears through these veils, called the chakras, gets purer and purer succeedingly, and finally merges into the ocean of pure light in the sahasrar, at the seventh chakra. This is how Shiv weds Shiva, his shakti. According to the adage shubham iti shivam, that is, whatever is benevolent is Shiv, benevolence gets wedded to shakti, that is, strength. This underlines the fact that to be effectively benevolent, one has to be strong as well.

The union takes place because sushumna serves as a bridge between Shiv and Shiva, his shakti. Sushumna is a Sanskrit word which means beautiful. As a column of light she really looks gorgeous. Yogis have sung paens in her honor. Many hymns have been written in her praise. She is so bewitching, many sadhaks won't like to lose their identity by immersing themselves in the ocean of satchidananda. They spurn even moksha, saying they don't need it. The Shiv Yogi I talked about before, was such a sadhak. He became so much enamoured of meditating on sushumna, that the seven-node baton that he always carried with him as his trademark, began to reverberate with the sound of om namah shivaya, his mantra of choice. His disciples meditated on his baton which had become a symbol of sushumna nadi for them.

By now it must have become apparent why Hindoos solemnize their marriages walking around the flame of fire seven times. For them, the flame is a replica of the sushumna nadi and the seven circles denote the seven chakras that kundalini traverses before she finally consummates her search. In the temples of Shiv you must have noticed that people circumambulate the lingam seven times so that their wishes are answered. My point in writing this article is to explain the story behind the story of rituals. There is nothing wrong in observing rituals if they are done with proper understanding. Because then they won't remain mechanical, I mean lifeless like a machine; they will become vibrant, that is, full of life. Therefore, the need is to get transformed on the inside. Then there will be no need to do cosmetic surgery from the outside. Once one gets strong from the inside, outer events tune themselves to the inner rhythm.

Here, I would like to introduce you to the story of Maharshi Dadhich. It is a story from Hindoo mythology. You know in mythology, fact and fiction combine to create a fantasy. If in the process, the meaning is not lost, the story is said to be a success. It is such a story. Once upon a time, a battle raged between the gods and the demons. The demons had an upper hand, so the gods rushed to Brahma for help. Brahma advised them to go to sage Dadhich and beg him to part with his merudand, that is, the backbone. Dadhich, though himself a fakir, never disappointed anybody, as an almsgiver. He willingly donated his merudand to the gods, who made a formidable weapon, called vajra, out of it. With the help of vajra, which means hard and strong, the gods defeated the demons. As you can see the story is a spiritual allegory. Let me now explain it:

Gods and demons are symbolic of the forces of Good and Evil. The battleground is inside everybody, where the battle is always raging between these two opposing forces. We are always trying to do our best but sometimes we do end up making a mess, of course to our chagrin. Man is, by nature, a very noble creature and fortunate too. How ? You see only man has the wherewithal to meditate. Without meditation it is never possible to achieve superconsciousness. Even a highly developed intellect cannot break the barriers of consciousness to achieve superconsciosness. Consciousness is defined by body-mind and is therefore problem oriented. Each solution will come up with fresh problems. Superconsciousness is another name for soul consciousness. It is solution oriented.

Since, without meditation it is not possible to break away from body consciousness, man remains prone to making mistakes. From the Maharshi's example it is amply clear that it is the merudand that comes to our help in our times of crises. You see the axis of the earth on which it moves, is also called merudand. The earth's very support is the merudand, and so is it our body's and our life's support too. Literally speaking, merudand means gold-staff. Pace Einstein's energy equation, on the spiritual plane, sushumna is an avtar of merudand. Sushumna is of the color of gold. With the blessings of our sushumna, we can pull ourselves out of the quagmire we have managed to push ourselves into. Since sushumna and spine are interchangeable, we can safely say that the inner strength corresponds to developing a stronger spine. That is why we have such phrases as a spineless man for a namby-pamby guy and a spined man for the redoubtable one. A spined man is like vajra, that is hard and strong. By hard, however, is meant a state of determination, in which one is capable of taking hard decisions.


Obviously, all this boils down to making the sushumna strong. You see our energy level dips every time we open our eyes or mouth, move our fingers or imagination, love one or hate another. Besides these activities, there is a huge leakage of energy from the background gossip going on incessantly, that doesn't stop even in sleep. We average about fifty thousand thoughts in twenty four hours, which is increasing everyday because of the shortening of the attention span, induced by fast computers and cell phones. And look, the only source of energy intake is the food we eat! Unfortunately, it can provide us with only the physical component of energy, whereas we need emotional, intellectual, and spiritual energies as well. Obviously we run ourselves on a depleted supply of benevolent energies.

This recurring deficit of benevolent energies makes us bite the bullet of negative energies. We succumb to all sorts of negativities in our behaviour. What do you think, the newspapers are splashed with every morning? News of benevolent energies? You will have to search with a powerful magnifying glass for one. Recently a University of Massachusetts researcher Robert Feldman published his study on reflexive lying in the Journal of Basic And Applied Psychology. He found out that in a short span of 10 minutes his subjects told an average of 2.96 false things. Civilizations flourish on the backbone of integrity. Decadence starts when commercialism takes over, because commerce is preoccupied with profit and loss, not morality and ethics.

An overview of the global behavioral graph is enough to show that perversion of thought has become the norm of the day. Why do we have to resort to lying, let us ask ourselves. Is it not to show ourselves in a better light in public life, than what we know in private, we are in? Aren't we pressing the wrong button to show us in the right image? If we are convinced of our veracity, where is the need to look different. And if we think we are not upto the mark, let us work on ourselves, instead of indulging in petty tricks and gimmicks to look what we know so well we are not. If we sincerely wish to arrest and reverse the trend, we need to cherish our sushumna. When we meditate on sushumna, all energies realign themselves and start flowing into it. The upshot is that sushumna grows stronger by the day.


With the emergence of a strong sushumna, we can make up the deficit in energy budget. Yes, a strong sushumna facilitates the bonding of Shiv with his shakti. Benevolence gets fortified with strength. Since the leakage of energy is stopped to a large extent, we build surplus energy reserves of benevolence. We become strong from the inside. Now we don't need to run from pillar to post in fruitless pursuits. According to Sri Ramakrishna, kanchan and kamini, that is, lucre and lassie, are the two foot soldiers of maya, well-known for tempting people to commit all sorts of stupidities. A fully lit sushumna with humdinger reserves of benevolent energy is a surefire deterrent to these brazen pillagers. So dear readers, it will do us a lot of good if we celebrate Maha Shiv Ratri each night of the day, on each day of our life. However, we can do special puja on the 14th night of krishna paksha in the month of Phalgun, so that symbolism lives on.

Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi

S NOVYM GODOM !! HAPPY NEW YEAR !!

The present article has been written on the eve of the New Year to assuage, on both sides of the fence, ruffled feelings which had been stoked by an unfortunate lawsuit (now quashed) in a Tomsk court, between the Russian Orthodox Church and Iskcon.
Ajit Sambodhi.
_____________________


Tomsk is likened to the Athens of yore, for its philosophy, its culture, and above all for its love of learning. If Athens was known as the cradle of Western civilization, Tomsk is lauded as home to the Siberian civilization. As Athens is venerable, being one of the world's oldest cities, so is Tomsk, being one of the oldest cities of Siberia. Like Plato's Academy and Socrates' Lyceum in Athens, Tomsk is proud of its State University and Polytechnic University. Situated on the Tom river, this idyllic town is nowadays in the news, but for wrong reasons. Whoever thought that Bhagavad Gita which has been giving succor to whoever needed it, over the past 3000 years would find itself a subject of ire and contention, to be debated in a court of law, of all places, in the peace loving town of Tomsk? It is beyond comprehension, simply baffling.

Mr. Alexander Kadakin, the Russian Ambassador to India, is also at a loss to make head or tail of it. Says he: It is strange that such events are unfolding in the beautiful university city in Siberia, as Tomsk which is famous for its secularism and religious tolerance...Well, it seems that even the lovely city of Tomsk has its own neighbourhood madmen. It is sad indeed. Happily, it was not a trans-Russian event. It was just like a storm in a teacup--a spillover of the uneasy ties between Iskcon and the Russian Orthodox Church. That is the problem with Orthodox Religion. Allow me to use OR for it, henceforth. OR rests on a set of beliefs and practices agreed upon by its adherents. It has a certain code of conduct to be observed by one and all. Religion, on the other hand, is a private affair between an individual and his God.

Religion comes from the Latin re-ligare which means to bind again. In religion an individual binds again with the One he has unwittingly become separated from. One discovers to one's astonishment that the One is but his own self. When one gets united with one's own self, one becomes religious. One becomes a witness to an unfettered play of one's own divinity. One day Kierkegaard, who was once a regular churchgoer, suddenly stopped going to church. When asked about his abrupt decision, he said he had come to realize that he did not need a midwife for such an intimate relationship. ORs work, at their best, as religious fronts; at their worst, as arbiters of culture and power politics. The most that they give is an outline of their homegrown cosmology, and certain dogmas and rituals, to uphold it.

In OR, religiosity is often sacrificed at the altar of an esoteric regimen. ORs are mostly born after the Master who embodies the freshness of religiosity in him passes away. No OR was born while the Master was alive. When the chasm between Religion and OR grows wildly wide, a Bertrand Russell rises up to explain Why I Am Not A Christian, a David Dvorkin testifies Why I Am Not A Jew, an Ibn Warraq underlines Why I Am Not A Muslim, and a Kancha Ilaiah laments Why I Am Not A Hindu. It is a very sad state indeed. Count Leo Tolstoy, Russia's tallest novelist, had perhaps the toughest time braving this gap. He took up the gauntlet against the obduracy of the Church and proclaimed what Jesus Christ had taught eighteen hundred years ago that The Kingdom Of God Is Within, (not in a church).

After doing his two major works, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1876), Tolstoy experienced a spiritual awakening. He did not write any fiction for seven years after that. Instead, he focused his sights on his inner life. He began to admire and live the simple rustic life of Russian peasants. He discovered that a true Christian could find lasting happiness by striving for inner self perfection through following the Great Commandment of loving one's neighbour and God rather than looking outward to the Church or State for guidance and meaning. Instead of paying lipservice to God in a church on sundays, he thought it fit to look into his heart and weave love for fellow beings in his daily dealings. True to his conviction, he founded thirteen schools for the children of his serfs.

He became disenchanted with worldly pursuits and started living the life of a recluse. He renounced his inherited assets as well as his earned wealth, disclaiming the copywrights of his works. This strained his relations with his wife. In the end he even left Yasnaya Polyana, his estate, and breathed his last on a railway station. In India his asceticism would not have raised a single eyebrow. He was doing what Buddha, Mahavira, Bhartrihari, Atisha, Mira, Bodhidharma--the number may get out of hand--had done before him. It is a done thing in India but in Russia it was labelled anarchism and radicalism. One writes as much for others as for oneself, to put to test one's own convictions. Tolstoy wrote: Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ touched anything like what Churchmen understand by the Church.

He repudiated the Church and its dogmatism, at every step. For his supposedly heretical stance, the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him. But the world as a whole embraced him! In 2001, after 100 years of excommunication, when his great-great-grandson, Vladimir Tolstoy, made an application to the Church to lift the excommunication, the Orthodox Church did not relent and his request was turned down with the plea that Leo Tolstoy's was a tragic personality. Again at the time of his hundreth death anniversary on November 20, 2010 Sergei Stepashin, a former Prime Minister of Russia wrote an open letter to the Church to explain its position on Leo Tolstoy. He was informed by a letter that the excommunication could not be overturned because of Tolstoy's tragic spiritual aberrations.

The intelligentsia is helpless. What can be more tragic? His friend Nicholas Roerich, a mystic, painter, writer, philosopher was a free pilgrim of the soul and so was his contemporary rebel against orthodoxy, whether in science or religion, HPB*, the founder of Theosophy. I am sure had they not moved out of Russia in time, they would have met the same fate. What I am saying about the Russian Orthodox Church does not in any way exonerate Iskcon. Far from it Iskcon has more than its share of skeletons in its cupboard. Kirtananda Swami scandal, Turley child abuse cases, Akshya Patra controversy, Sarnagati Village temple scam, Succession intrigues are some of the evergreen cases that still pop up in newspapers. When the next skeleton tumbles out of its cupboard, is anybody's guess. So Iskcon's track record as an Organized Sect appears no less questionable than that of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The present controversy is not as much about Gita as about who scores over whom in a turf war that has been going on for a long time between two deft players over the Russian checkerboard. Gita is being used only as a scoreboard. Gita is very well respected in Russia. Russians know that Gita had been given a place of honor in the households of Leo Tolstoy and Nicholas Roerich. Gita was held in great respect by HPB also and she had been presented an ancient copy of the Gita in a mother-of-pearl and gold binding by an Indian prince. I think it is time I explain what exactly is the meaning of Bhagavad Gita and what it stands for. Well, the word Bhagavad in it means like light, that is, of the nature of light. And Gita means a song. So Bhagavad Gita means a song in the likeness of light. Just as light shows us the way, so does Gita.

Gita has been accused of being an extremist text while the truth is that it rests on the bedrock of the middle path. Couplet 17 of Chapter 6 beseeches: Be temperate in eating, recreation, work, sleep and waking, to lead a painless life. Can there be a more sobering text than this? Where is extremism in it? Gita seeks moderation in all walks of life, all the time. A Russian newspaper Gazeta.ru questioned how a work of antiquity has suddenly morphed into an extremist text. Another newspaper Vechernyi Tomsk titled its report: Trial Of Indian Book Brings Shame To Tomsk. A human rights ombudsman, Nelly Krechetova, aired her resentment on radio Echo Of Moscow thus: This book is considered sacred by more than a billion people the world over, and in Russia itself the book has been in circulation for 20 years. The trial is absurd, she added.

Again it has been blamed for sowing discord amidst people. On the contrary, Gita admonishes people to be very careful about their thoughts, lest they should harm themselves by wayward thinking. See what couplet 25 of Chapter 9 forewarns: Know gods to become godlike, manes for to be manes, ghosts to become ghostly, and divinity for to be divine. Three thousand years ago, Gita propounded what Quantum physics has come to realize now. Says Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, a Quantum physicist: It (Quantum physics) says that you can't have a Universe without mind entering into it, and that the mind is actually shaping the very thing that is being perceived. Gita gives the high sign that one can not think bad about others without first imperiling oneself.

So the allegations just won't wash. In this respect I would like to make a mention of the wonderful work of Dr. Masaru Emoto, a Japanese entrepreneur. His researches have demonstrated the power of thought on water! With the help of photographs, he has shown how water forms beautiful crystals if you say good words to it and makes ugly crystals if you say something disrespectful to it! Now human body is 80% water. It is the single most important constituent, under our skin. It knows all our secret thoughts and motives. We can be disregardful of our thoughts only at the peril of degrading the quality of our life. Health foods are quite popular and so are exercises, but they fall short in warding off diseases. Why? Because we don't take into account the quality of our thoughts. Diseases are largely psychosomatic.


I will wrap up this piece with the summary of a beautiful story of Leo Tolstoy. The story has been woven round a legend that was prevalent in the Volga district. He wrote this story to underscore the point that one doesn't need OR (Orthodox or/and Organized Religion) to connect to one's God. All one needs is simplicity of heart to generate a truthful thought. In his story Three Hermits, a bishop is seen overseeing a fisherman talking to a knot of people on the deck and pointing his finger towards a scarcely visible island while they are sailing in a ship from Archangel to the Solovetsk Monastery. As the bishop's curiosity gets the better of him, he walks over to the group of people to enquire what they were talking about. The fisherman reruns, for his sake, the story of Three Hermits, who live on the yonder island, for the salvation of their souls.

He tells the bishop that once he was out fishing on the sea. Night fell and he was stranded on that island. In the morning, as he wandered about aimlessly on the island, he came upon an adobe hut. A man stood out front. Presently two more came out. Without speaking, they fed me, dried my things, and helped me mend my boat. On being asked how they looked like, the fisherman replied: They were all old but one looked ancient. His face shone like an angel's. He was the smallest of the lot and had a slightly bent back. His beard had a greenish tinge and he wore a priest's cassock. The second one was taller and strong. Before I had time to assist him, he had turned over my boat as if it were a toy. He is kind and wears a broad beard, tinged yellow. The tallest of the lot had a beard running to his knees and had an old mat wrapped around his waist.

The bishop became keen to see the hermits and though the captain dissuaded him from seeing those foolish old fellows, who understand nothing, and never speak a word anymore than the fish in the sea, he wanted to go there. The course of the ship was changed. After sailing over a distance the ship was anchored as it couldn't go any further and a boat was lowered to take the bishop to the island. Reaching the shore he met with the three old bearded hermits. As told by the fisherman, one had only an old mat wrapped around his waist, the second was in a tattered peasant coat while the third wore a priest's cassock. On seeing the bishop, the old men bowed to him and the bishop gave them his benediction. He then asked them what they did to save their souls and those of their fellow men, on that island.

The hermits looked at each other, smiling, and were silent. Then he asked them what they did to serve God there. When two of the hermits glanced at the very ancient one, he replied: We don't know how to serve God. We only serve and support ourselves, servant of God. All right, said the bishop, just tell me how you pray to God. To this the hermit replied: We pray in this way: Three are ye, three are we, have mercy upon us. The bishop smiled. He told them that that was not the proper way to pray to God. He said that he was pleased with them and he would teach them the way in which God in the Holy Scriptures has commanded all men to pray to Him. He asked them to listen to him carefully and repeat after him the Lord's prayer: Our Father Which Art In Heaven.

The hermits listened to him and followed him assiduously, word by word. They faltered and blundered a hundred times but the bishop didn't lose heart and labored ceaselessly with them till they were able to say the whole of the Lord's prayer by themselves. It was now getting dark and the moon had risen over the water. The bishop pulled himself up from his makeshift pulpit and after kissing the hermits goodbye, prepared to return. He got into the boat and returned to the ship which lifted the anchor and set sail again. The pilgrims lay down to sleep and all was quiet on the deck, but the bishop had no wish to sleep. So he sat in the stern all by himself and looked towards the island, meanwhile thanking God for making him an instrument to teach such godly men.

While the bishop sat there pondering over the events of the day, and gazing into the distance, moonlight flickering and touching the waves on the crests, he suddenly saw a blob of light rising from the direction of the island. It grew bigger as it sped on the water towards the ship. He leaned over to one side to share his wonderment with the helmsman. But by then the capsule of light holding the three hermits had overtaken the ship. The helmsman became terrified and the commotion drew all the pilgrims to the stern. Even before the ship could stop, the hermits chorused in one voice: Servant of God, we have forgotten the prayer that you taught us. Please teach us again. The bishop leaned over the starboard and said: Your own prayer is good enough. Please pray for me also. And bowed to them. The hermits made an about turn and were gone.

EPILOGUE:
The hermits were unlettered and untouched by worldly ways. They didn't know that there was a way to serve their fellowmen. They served each other--and sometimes a stranded person like the fisherman of the story-- the way they took their breath, uninterruptedly and without speaking. Well, this is called being in the present. Attending to whatever crops up before you, without involving the past or the future. Do you think they had a past? Or do you think they could invent a future, pawning their soul? They didn't know that one had to go to a Church to learn to pray. Or that there was a special way to connect to God. They even didn't know if they were themselves connected to God! This is called being religious. And this is Religion in its pristine form. When you are joined to the One without even knowing that you are joined. Because there is no second. Only you are!

HPB*: For a lowdown on her, please go to The Tipping Point, April 1, 2011.

S Novim Godam! Happy New Year!

Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi

THE FROLIC OF FREQUENCIES

In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were working for the Bell Laboratories on a project for detecting faint radio waves. They were experimenting with a very sensitive horn antenna. After they had eliminated all imaginable interference that could affect their receiver, they were intrigued to notice a steady, low, mysterious noise that persisted day and night. It extended beyond the galaxy and came from all over the space. After a lot of scientific deliberations, it was found that the duo had stumbled upon the background microwave radiation that permeated the whole universe. This radiation was interpreted as a signature of the Big Bang. They received the Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint discovery in 1978. Now what is this background noise ? Well, noise is defined as a set of multiple frequencies that have no simple rhythmical relationship between them. Kashmir Shaivism has something to say on frequencies.
The mainstay of Kashmir Shaivism is the principle of spanda. Spanda is the name of an impulse of cosmic consciousness that manifests itself as vibration. It is the causa prima, the first cause of creation. It is also the causa sui, of creation. If I explain it less literally, it means, it is born of itself. And therefore it has no antecedents. There is a popular Shaivite saying: sa sphuratta mahasatta. "This vibrating consciousness is the supreme reality". It follows naturally, that the vibrational frequency of spanda is the Universal Frequency that mothers and encompasses all the other frequencies, including the background noise of Penzias and Wilson. It is the dance of these frequencies that gives rise to this world of variegated colors and untold possibilities. Hindoos call this dance the Dance of Shiva. Verily, Shiva is no other than the Universal Consciousness. And His steps, gestures and poses depict the interplay of various cosmic frequencies.

Fritjof Capra, the high-energy physicist who shot into fame with the publication of his book The Tao Of Physics, describes his first encounter with the dance of cosmic frequencies in a fascinating way. Says he: "Five years ago, I had a beautiful experience which led me on a road that has led to the writing of this book. I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the waves rolling in and feeling the rhythm of my breathing, when I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance... I 'saw' cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I 'saw' the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in the cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I 'heard' its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshipped by the Hindus".

Fritjof Capra must have earned a lot of merit to melt Shiva's heart who then unlocked his locks of hair to reveal his cosmic play that goes on uninterruptedly behind the phenomenal subterfuge addressed as matter. All matter is engaged in an endless hidden play of energy frequencies behind a static facade. Mountains or molecules, atoms or phantoms, protons or electrons, time or space --every thing known or unknown is vibrating and therefore has a natural frequency of its own. This natural frequency is often called the fundamental frequency. When the fundamental frequency obtains an optimum amplitude because of resonance, it is called the resonant frequency. Resonant frequency may have a range of related frequencies called the harmonics. These harmonics are the overtones that serve as stepping stones to bring about harmony in one's life. Love blossoms when these harmonics bloom into full blown resonance.

According to its attributes the Universal Frequency, spanda, is variously described as abhasan, reflection; sphuran, throb; kampan, shudder; unmilan, unfoldment; nishyand, flux; unmesh, expansion; sphote, explosion. When we are in the abhasan or the reflective mode, the resonance or dissonance with certain frequencies causes enchantment or disenchantment in us. The frequencies that we resonate with, attract us. Non resonant frequencies repel us. For example it is not uncommon to spot a couple of faces squirming or yawning in the midst of a classical concert. Clearly they are not in harmony with the harmonics of the sound bytes being played there. May be the soundtracks of Why This Kolaveri Di from the muzak is all that they need to perk up ! It is the transference of sound energy, all the same, that takes place in both the cases but it is the frequency of the vibrations that makes the difference !
Recently I heard Sister Shivani, a rising star on the spirituality circuit, cite an example of a couple having nightmares of a particular type regularly for sometime. Then one day the nightmares stopped as suddenly as they had come. It came as the most revealing surprise to the couple to know that their nightmares matched exactly with the nightmarish thoughts of their kitchen help who cooked food for them ! The day the cook came out of her depression, the couple's nightmares stopped ! Obviously, the couple must have picked out the lowered resonant frequencies of the cook, filtering out other frequencies from her. It must have happened by way of the food they ate, food that had been cooked by one having negative energy. Lower frequencies-- and foods have a lower frequency vis a vis human beings-- work like a sponge for negative energy because negative energy lowers the threshold of human frequency.

In 1992, Bruce Tainio of Tainio Technology in Cheney, Washington built a machine named BT3 with which he determined the Hertzian frequencies of human beings and their various organs, different foods, herbs, and diseased cells. He found out that a healthy human body had a frequency range of 62-78 MHz, while fresh foods had a range of 20-27 MHz. As expected, all canned/processed/microwaved foods had a frequency of 0 Hz. Chaotic, depressive, negative, and extravagant thoughts were found to bring the human frequency down drastically, so that a symbiotic relationship was established between people with unstable minds and their hearty fares. Obviously, such people gorge themselves which further lowers their frequencies, which in turn turns them on for further binging. Long term indulgence of this kind is likely to compromise the immune system.

To have a lowered immune system is like giving an invitation to the host of illnesses. It was found that diseases like cold and flu start between the range of 57-60 MHz, cancer around 42 MHz and finally death between 20-25 MHz. In contrast, people who are spiritually developed have a frequency range of 92-360 MHz. Foods fall way behind them and don't seem to tempt them. Pavhari Baba, as the name clearly indicates lived only on air, that is, he ate no food. When Swami Vivekanand visited Baba in Kashi, he became so fascinated by him that he deliberated for 21 days if he should swap Sri Ramakrishna for him ! Yogananda Paramhansa mentions one yogini Giri Bala who gave up food after being scolded by her mother-in-law over her gluttony. He also mentions another saint, Therese Neumann from Bavaria, who left taking food at the age of 25 and lived only on God's Light !

If the resonant mode is a sphote or explosion, we may experience an explosion, a literal one, or an implosion if it is a meditational experience. Many opera singers are known to have shattered wine glasses with their high decibel notes. If they are dead-on pitchwise, and tested the fundamental frequency of the glass beforehand, they can put 100 decibels of volume to their vocal frequency and cause an explosion. A report in the Scientific American of August 23, 2007 reads: "Champagne flutes shatter, monocles crack, and the chandelier explodes as the power of her voice wreaks havoc on the concert hall". When the crescendo of the opera singer's voice reaches the resonant frequency of the glasses, there is a nishyand, a flux of energy by way of her high pitched frequency which overbears the resonant amplitude and explodes, turning glasses into smithereens.

Dr. Royal Raymond Rife, a scientist, inventor, and innovator used spanda of sphote, that is, vibrations of explosion, for humanitarian purposes in the late 20's and the early 30's of the bygone century. Firstly he designed and made microscopes, spectroscopes, frequency instruments, micromanipulators, stop-motion photomicrograph instruments, and many other optical tools. The microscope that he created was named Universal Microscope as it had a very high magnification and could view living micro-organisms. For keeping the organisms alive he stained them with resonant light frequencies, that is, he tuned the light frequency to that of the micro-organism which made the organism luminiscent. The usual practice was to stain them with chemicals that killed the organisms. But he wanted the organisms alive so that he could make use of their resonant frequencies.

He developed a frequency instrument for measuring frequencies of various micro organisms. He named resonant frequency Mortal Oscillatory Rate or MOR for short. He would then create a corresponding frequency with his quartz prizms and send it to the area affected by the organism. If the induced vibrations were powerful enough and long enough, they would cause the organism to explode. The clear advantage of this process was that the correct frequency would affect only the diseased cells and tissues leaving the healthy areas untouched. He treated hundreds of tubercular and cancer patients successfully with this technique. You may wonder whatever happened to the technique because we never hear about it. Well, all his invented machines and every bit of his technique was confiscated and destroyed. But that is a different story. However if you want to know about it, you may go to the book Royal R. Rife : Humanitarian Betrayed And Persecuted written by Gerald F. Foye.

I made a mention above that implosion happens in meditation. It is the end result of a long process which begins with unmilan or the unfolding of the psychic energy, popularly called the kundalini. Kundalini is said to lie coiled up at the basal chakra. In meditation when the meditator raises his frequency to correspond with that of the basal chakra, the chakra begins to vibrate and emit red light. This is called the opening of the chakra. Blockages are removed and cleansing starts. Regular practice frees one from the sleeping, eating and defacating syndrome. When the chakra is cleansed, the energy moves on to the sacral chakra and activates it. An orange light begins to flicker which frees one from the Freudian obsessions. One then moves on to the solar plexus. When this starts resonating, a yellow light appears which wipes away ego and its cohorts--anger, pride, jealousy, greed, attachment, lust.

For some this stage marks the end of their spiritual journey, though all that they have done by now amounts only to offloading their past cumbersome baggage. Of course this also is a formidable job, I mean this cleansing of the house, but they have not gained anything besides feeling light. If one persists and raises one's frequency enough to induce resonance in the heart chakra, one is overwhelmed by an onrush of compassion in him. A steady green glow welcomes him. He is on the peak. He can see the debris he had been through and left behind, the carcasses of the phantoms that had relentlessly beleaguered him. The journey onwards is of frolic, and of dance which intensifies and becomes refined at the throat chakra. The light here is of intense blue color. Meditation on this chakra, or speaking scientifically, resonating with this chakra, intensely for a long period rids one from the pangs of hunger, for ever !

As one approaches the ajna chakra, in the middle of the eye brows, one begins to hear the otherworldy naad. Yes, naad is the music of the higher regions, of the rarefied frequencies, not the noise of Penzias' and Wilson's microwave frequencies. This is the music that had enchanted Mira, Surdas, Kabir, ... and ... Fritjof Capra ! Unknowingly, Fritjof had synchronized with the frequencies of ajna chakra and as he says "I 'heard' its sound", he heard the divine naad. From here it is a touch and go. Literally speaking ajna means permission. If you are permitted, you go forward ... only to be lost... of course in the worldly sense. In my blog of September 30, 2010 on Dipawali: The Festival Of Lights, I have narrated the experience of Pt. Gopi Krishna when he reached sahasrar unprepared, or say, without permission. It left him with problems that trailed him all his life. But if one goes well prepared one may, if one is lucky, experience an implosion of light, which means one is resonating with spanda, the Universal Frequency. After that, bits of the imploded light permeate one's whole body and one experiences oneness with the Universal Light. Enlightened ? Well, what else does Universal Light do ?

Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi

HELPLINE GITAJI

Everyday the stage is set. Actors: Dhritrashtra, Duryodhan, Dussashan...Draupadi. Place: Indraprastha...Hastinapur. The Act goes on without number. Numbers have become numb. Jamuna has gone dumb. And the Act goes on in moving buses, in spinning cars, behind tinted glasses, in broad daylight. Plunderers, punks, killers, gamblers, cock a snook at wagered away Pandavas and bonded Bhishmas and Dronas. Simone Weil warned vehemently: Either be ready to be wiped out or be ready to be transformed. The choice is yours. I wonder if it is in response to her admonition that the South Africans have started incorporating the teachings of Bhagavad Gita into their workaday world. Who would like to smoulder in the heat of OWS or be ripped up by an Arab Spring ?

Jean Paul Sartre said man is condemned to be free. I say man is born free to vindicate his humaneness. I subscribe to Nietzsche's point of view that man is a bridge, not a goal, not a destination. He is like a conveyor belt that runs between the Animalia and the Gloria. He is not a resting place because nobody rests on a bridge. He is the existential link between the Animal and the Divine. Without the help from this ferryman no growth, no upward movement, is possible. Man has to work steadily. There is no respite for him. Tension seems to be his lot. But it is not something to be wary of. He has only to learn how to transcend tension so as to usher himself into the world of compassion. A little slackness on his part and he is likely to find himself back to square one.

Bhagavad Gita, as Emerson rightly claims, is the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and disposed of the same questions that exercise us. It is as much a dialogue between Lord Krishna and Arjun, as an inner duologue between Arjun's two voices--one coming from Hrishikesh, the illuminer and the other from Gudakesh, the alert one. Let me tell you that Hrishikesh which means conqueror of senses, is used for Lord Krishna and Gudakesh which means conqueror of sleep for Arjun. There is a duel going on inside Arjun because the outer is always a reflection of the inner. A seed first of all needs darkness for incubation and only afterwards it requires light for germination. Without this inner conflict Bhagavad Gita would not have seen the light of the day.

Why has Arjun been chosen for this task? Yudhisthir was the King of Indraprastha and Bhimsen was elder to him. But it was Arjun to whom the supreme wisdom was revealed by the Lord. Why? Because only Arjun was gudakesh, that is conqueror of sleep, that is alert. It was a revelation from an enlightener(Hrishikesh) to one who was alert. What is the point in speaking to people who are asleep (Gita:2.69) ? So the first thing to understand about Gita is that it makes sense to only those who are awake. Without inner awakening, no transformation is possible. Those who are asleep, being unable to rise to its level, try to drag it down to their level to justify their way of living. This is easy because then they don't have to make any effort to bring about the required transformation in them.

Gita arises out of the conflict between Arjun's weakness for complacency and his desire to transcend it. Arjun, along with the Lord, is seated on the great divide between Dharmakshetra and Kurukshetra. On his one side is the army of Kuru prince Duryodhan, and on the other side is the army of Dharmaraj Yudhishthir. Krishna has provided him with the enviable position of witnessing the whole situation. Now he is a witness to both Dharmakshetra and Kurukshetra, inside as well as outside of him. Krishna is enlightened and Arjun, which means straightforward, is on his way to become one. Arjun is both a Kaurava and a Pandava, by virtue of his dynasty. So for Arjun every time he kills a Kaurava it will amount to killing a part of himself also. That is his dilemma.

But can there be a seedling without the annihilation of the seed ? How can there be birth without passing through the gates of death ? How can anybody establish a dharmakshetra without first crossing out kurukshetra ? But that entails effort. Status quo finds favor with most people because it is comfortable. Arjun also raises a smokescreen of rationalizations (Gita:1.28-45) to hide himself behind it. On the face of it the smokescreen is quite impressive and he carves out a memorable exit for himself, ringing down the curtain on I will not fight the war (Gita: 2.9). But who understands him better than he himself ? And so he keeps the door ajar: I beseech you to tell me what is good and decisive. As your disciple, I take refuge in you. Please enlighten me (Gita:2.7), he implores.

So the second thing to be remembered about Gitaji is that it makes sense only to those people who besides being alert are eager to learn how to become enlightened. And for becoming enlightened, you have got to surrender yourself to Existence (Gita: 18.66). You may call Existence by any name that is dear to you, but like Arjun, the reins must be handed over to it. To surrender implies blotting out all past impressions in an effort to become a clean slate. It takes Hrishikesh a full length narration of the Gita to bring Gudakesh to the point where he becomes fully empty to receive what he is trying so hard to impart. Again and again Arjun asks the same question in different ways and again and again the Lord's reply is the same but couched in different words, in response to the slant in Arjun's query.

Arjun speaks about the phenomenal, about the formed. The Lord speaks about the transcendental, about the unformed. When Arjun says I, he means his own manifest form. When the Lord says I, He means the all pervading essence behind the manifest form. For Arjun, as also for most of us, I dies when the form dies. For the Lord I never dies, only the form dies (Gita: 2.12). How can that which has no form, die ? The Lord asks us to look deep, rather very deep, into every phenomenon and see for ourselves that the form is changing every moment (Gita: 2.13). As an example, put a snapshot of an old person alongside his childhood portrait, to understand the truth of the Lord's statement. Someday we may include a blowup of the departing astral body to make things more clear !

Forms will always change and so will all relationships and situations. That is the law. You like somebody, it is bound to change into dislike and then again into yearning and so on and so forth. Your pal is going to be an estranger and then again a bosom buddy. You may become happy with a snooze and unhappy with a sneeze or vice versa. Therefore there is need to transcend dualities (Gita: 5.23) to become stable. It is not that an enlightened being doesn't feel hot or cold, pangs of hunger or separation. In fact he is more sensitive than an average human being but he does not cling to or reject any situation. We cling to whatever appeals to us and then make ourselves miserable when it leaves us. We forget that coming and going are part of one process. We cannot separate them like we cannot separate the two poles of a magnet.

An enlightened being doesn't choose anything, nor does he deny anything. Love comes, friend comes, heat comes, wealth comes, praise comes: he says welcome. Hate comes, foe comes, cold comes, penury comes, blame comes: again he says welcome. He neither craves for, nor cries down anything. The name of such a choiceless awareness is enlightenment. Lord Buddha, just before his final journey fell seriously ill. Sharp and deadly pains came upon him. He bore them unruffledly. Mahaparinibbana Sutta says: Anand, I am frail, old, and worn out. This is my eightieth year. Even as an old cart is held together with difficulty, so is the body of Tathagat kept going. It is when Tathagata, ignoring external objects, with the cessation of feelings, attains to and abides in mindfulness that the body remains comfortable.

It is not impossible to become enlightened as so many arhats and bodhisattvas have amply demonstrated. But it is not very easy either. One has got to work relentlessly upon oneself to remain awake, rather wide awake. Every moment the form undergoes a change, while in the background, the formless remains unchanged. We cannot miss a single moment because every moment a marvel is happening. Arjun's cosmic vision (Gita: 11. 10-17) was not the only marvel. A beam of light, a rustle of breeze, the dappled shadow, the crack of dawn, the bud smiling, a flicker of the eyes, a lit up face--be aware and discover a marvel every moment. The formless Invisible has been showering countless marvels for eons and will continue doing so endlessly. The need is not to get bogged down in the past.

It is not like you have become enlightened and now you can sleep over it. Oh, no, if you have chosen this path you will remain awake even in deep sleep. Paradoxical ? Yes, but absolutely true. A time will come when you will have dreamless sleep, while now you dream even when you think you are wide awake. Well, if you were wide awake, how did hate, envy, jealousy, greed, anger, lust, fear enter you ? They come from the past and the future which is the projection of the past. After arduous deliberations, Arjun becomes enlightened. And then he declares: karishye vachanam tav (Gita: 18.73). I will do thy bidding which is his way of saying: I will be wide awake to every moment henceforth. And if one is wide awake to every moment, everything that one does becomes holy like a scripture.

Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi

ADI SHANKAR AND HIS THEME SONG

Barmecide was a patronymic name of a family of princes that ruled Baghdad just before Haroun-al-Raschit. According to a story of the Arabian Nights, once a Barmecide prince welcomed a beggar, Schacabac by name, to a royal dinner in his palace. As the beggar stumbled into the Royal presence, gold and silver cutlery and diamond studded dishes dazzled his eyes. He saw bearers scurrying noiselessly with numerous scintillating trays in their hands. They were displaying animated motions as if they were serving delicacies onto the spread out tableware. To his utter befuddlement, Schacabac saw that the dishes remained empty as before. And then he was politely requested to eat to his heart's content! The Barmecide feast had all the grandiose festivity minus the feast!

If we interpolate religion in place of the foregoing feast, a situation similar to this obtains for India in the field of religion, just before the advent of Adi Shankar. At that time a number of cults--72 according to one estimate--such as the Charvaks, the Lokayatikas, the Kapalikas, the Sankhyas, the Shaktas and the Madhyamikas, had sprung up out of nowhere. All sorts of so-called religious joints and sancta, sanctuaries and shrines made their appearance conspicuous with their numerous flags, rituals, rites and ceremonies. Though a plethora of sects claiming religion as their ware came into existence, religiosity was at a premium. People were driven into the dens of vamachar (deviance) where various kinds of bigotry, perversions, superstitions, and kinkiness were practiced.

Amidst the noise of gongs and tongs, cymbals and dumbbells, kettles and rattles, the music of prayer floundered in these places. Now you know prayer without prayerfulness begets beggars and religion without religiosity breeds grabbers. In the din of this motley crowd of beggars and grabbers walked in the great navigator of man--Adi Shankar. Shankar was a prodigy nonpareil. By the age of seven, he had mastered the four Vedas and at seventeen he had started his commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, the Brahmasutras, and the Upanishadas. He floored the master discussant Mandan Mishra and his equally erudite wife Ubhaya Bharti when he was barely out of his teens. And he established four reference points of absolute monism at the four corners of India before taking samadhi at the young age of 32.

Now it is reasonably natural to misunderstand a genius. Who is there to stand upto him and size him up? It is only the test of time that decides his worth. Today he is remembered as Adi Shankaracharya, the first ever Shankaracharya who salvaged Hinduisim by purging it of the sectarian dross that it had managed to wrap around itself over the time. He is also remembered as a great dilectician, a great debater, besides being a profoundly learned being. But he was much more than all these appellations. While it is true that a logician, a debater, a knowledgeable person can vanquish his challenger with his sound and penetrating arguments, the question remains : Is it simply an academic exercise to earn Brownie points or will it help bring about the desired transformation in the vanquished person?

I feel the vanquished will, in turn, try to become a more sound logician, a better debater, and a more knowledgeable person so that he may retrieve the lost ground next time. A tug of war is likely to ensue which will defeat the very purpose for which the debate was initiated. In place of bonhomous cooperation, we will invite rankling competition. It is true that the intellect can see into the distance but it can not take us very far because it is only half the story. The other half comes from the wellsprings of the heart. Some people lean heavily on the second half but that again is a mistake because the heart lacks discretion. It knows only how to love. Shankar was great because he happened to be a fine blend of logic and devotion. He knew how to improvise a tango of the head and the heart.

Intellection is dry, devotion lucid. Shankar had the knack of lacing his logic with the lucidity of devotion. The outcome of this blending were the melodic cadences of his immortal song, Bhaj Govindam. It appears as if the ecstatic hymn just flowed out of the heart of the ecstatic peripatetic. The fragrance of this melodious chant wafted across the length and breadth of India. It resonated beyond the domes of temples, on the farmlands and moorlands, in distant hearths and hamlets, and above all in the hearts of men, women and children. This melliflous paean reminds us of The Ambrosian Chant of St. Ambrose, a fourth century Christian mystic. Prior to St. Ambrose there used to be no singing in churches. And the churches had a hard time attracting people, to justify their presence in that area.

After the introduction of St. Ambrose's melodious hymns, called after him The Ambrosian Chant, the very ambience of churches underwent a sea change. People started flocking in great numbers to fill churches that had been lying empty since long. A similar impact was made on the lives of people in India by Shankar's Bhaj Govindam. I say Shankar is unique because Bhaj Govindam is unique. Let me give you an example. Once Sri Ramakrishna was invited to bless a marriage celebration. There he heard someone summoning a guy named Govind. Sri Ramakrishna immediately went into a trance becoming statuesque. Govind was frozen inside him. Govind was not available to anybody else. But this ligatured locution, this ravishing melody of Bhaj Govindam is like the sempiternal flow of Ganga.

What is Ganga? Well, Ganga is the stream of consciousness that bounds along freely shored up by the twin strands of devotion and understanding. To rephrase Einstein's famous quote, knowledge without devotion is lame, devotion without knowledge is blind. For Ganga's flow to remain rewarding, it is obligatory to strike a balance between devotion and understanding. Though anybody can take a dip in Ganga, Shankar says just a sip of the holy water--gangajal luvkanika , if taken with right understanding, is enough to take us through. Ganga moves forward touching everyone who comes to her without asking any questions. She doesn't judge whether someone is young or old, healthy or diseased, beautiful or ugly, virtuous or sinner. J.Krishnamurti gives it the name of choiceless awareness.

In choiceless awareness, one remains aware without making any choices. One does not choose because one knows the futility of choosing. As such, there is nothing beautiful or ugly, virtuous or sinful--punyapunyaviverjitpanthah(there is no merit or demerit on this path). When the Ganga flows into the ocean, both the banks disappear. Only an awareness remains. There is no need to invent the Devil. Only God (awareness) is enough. Baba Muktanand used to remind us so often that there are only two things worth remembering--God and Death. However, nobody can approach God without dying first. Also it is not possible to welcome Death without first knowing God. We are capable of deceiving everybody including ourselves but we cannot deceive Death. Death is a certainty.

Death is the only touchstone which tells us in no uncertain terms whether we have lived our lives intelligently or stupidly. One must always keep enquiring whether one is well prepared to meet Death squarely or not. You see there is big difference between being driven unwillingly into the mouth of Death and walking gracefully to welcome it. The first act makes Death look ugly. However it needs a Shankar, or a Socrates*, or a Jnandev to make the event look graceful. Death makes us realize whether all that we had been collecting meticulously all our lives--power, prestige, pelf--have left us fearless or afraid. Bhaj Govindam moodhmate (sing the name of Govind, stupid!) presents a simple way to prepare oneself to become fearless--tasya yamah kim kurute charcham (what can the god of Death do to such a man?).

Just think, for no reason at all, God breathes into us, looks through our eyes, hears for us! He talks and sings and dances and plays! He has become the very fabric of our lives. In this limitless expression of his creation, he gives so much significance to our insignificant existence. Don't you think that the least that we can do on our part is to show gratitude to Him? On behalf of every one I express my gratefulness to Shankar for giving us Bhaj Govindam which has rendered the expression of gratitude to the Lord so enchanting. The beauty of Bhaj Govindam, beside its dulcet strains, lies in the fact that it rubs off on us quite effortlessly. One may find to one's pleasant surprise humming it all of a sudden, one fine morning. It sort of becomes a perennial undercurrent of nectar inside us.

Bhaj Govindam is a temple where love is expressed and experienced. Don't consider a temple to be a mere structure. No, a temple is the very abode of love. Nobody goes to a temple who goes there with a begging bowl or bagfuls of complaints, instead of love. See, love is a delicate mix of adoration and longing. When love is unrefined, longing turns into possessiveness. That is the lowest form of love, the nadir of love. But when love is sublimated, adoration becomes prayer. And prayerfulness is the highest form of love, the zenith of love. Shankar brought into focus, for the laymen of Bharat, the fact that the path to godliness runs through one's love of prayerful singing and dancing. The upshot was that Bhaj Govindam became the heart throb of Bharat. It still is. The need is to rediscover this nectarean chant once more.

SOCRATES: For the death scene of Socrates, please go to March 1, 2010 blog: Consciousness: The Cosmic Constant.
You may go to U-Tube to listen to MS Subbulakshmi's rendering of the song.

Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi

SRI KRISHNA : A SCRAMBLED RAINBOW?

For Surdas Krishna always remains a moppet; for Mira, a lover; for Shanker, a preceptor. Those who love Shrimad Bhagwatam find the Krishna of Bhagavad Gita, standing on the battlefield amidst two warring groups and preaching, an alien. And those who intellectually wrestle to understand the profundity of Gita, dismiss the frolicking Krishna of Bhagwatam as a mere prankster. It seems difficult not to be deflected by one's prismatic cribbling and embrace a facet of Krishna other than that happens to resonate with their respective predilections. Humanity is hardwired to drop all contradictions as if they don't exist but this leads to an obstinate division of opinions which is what has always been at the root of all conflicts everywhere. If we think only in terms of black or white, we are going to have either an ideal individual or a worthless one. But rainbows are formed only when we have both--sunshine and rain.

Sri Krishna is as fascinating, as colorful, as ungraspable and unembraceable as a rainbow. He is not only a yogi par excellence but a king too, not only a fighter but a nonpareil pacifist also. He is concurrently an inducer and a transducer, a flute player and sudarshan chakra wielder, a man and an overman, action prone and action free! These traits are too befuddling for a one-track mind to comprehend and hold on to. It is really a formidable task to contemplate the full spectrum panorma of Sri Krishna, to comprehend him in all his colors. People therefore conveniently drop all that appears unintelligible and highlight whatever is acceptable, to them. And this is not only relative to Sri Krishna. Whether it is Zarathustra, or Mohammed, or Jesus Christ, the story is the same. Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his novel Brothers Karamazov, introduces a parable of The Grand Inquisitor, in which Jesus visits the earth at the time of the Inquisition.

The place is the main square of Seville, in the Spain of sixteenth century, where the crowd sees him, recognizes him, mobs him, seeking his mercy. Old, diseased, dead, desperate--it is the same old milieu, he catered to when he was amongst them fifteen hundred years ago. Had he not promised he would come back again? The crowd is cheering him but then comes the Lord Inquisitor. He also recognizes him but in the face of the crowd, sends him to a prison cell, on charges of heresy. In the dead of night, he pays a visit to Jesus in his cell, offers his respects and begs him to disappear again or else, he warns him he would be obliged to pillory him again. He tells Jesus that in his absence everything was going on perfectly well in his name but if he stays back everything will turn topsy-turvy. The whole edifice of Orthodox Religion will crumble. Who will be willing to preside over the liquidation of the Papal Empire?

What do you think? If Krishna decides to come back and indulges in his raas-leela, would he be welcome? I believe he is better placed in temples. He is safe in the confines of his idols. Osho is right when he says that Krishna belongs to the future. Humanity is not yet ready to understand him in his wholeness. Is it not an irony that of all the avtars only his avtar is said to be purna, that is, whole! We can easily understand Rama because there is no contradiction in him. He is unidimensional, an epitome of an ideal human being. He is a model son, an ideal brother, an exemplary husband, and an archetypal king. He makes sense to us. Krishna, on the other hand, is multidimensional, an array of rainbow colors. He persuades Arjun to fight a war while he himself does an end run around Jarasandh, earning thereby for himself the dubious distinction of being ranchhodji, that is, a deserter! And he calls his actions non-action!

It is true Krishna is paradoxical, but so were Lao Tzu, and Buddha, and Heraclitus. The fact is that anybody who transcends the magic of logic is bound to be paradoxical. Logic appears enchanting because it tries to define the nature of Truth. But the crux of the problem is that it is not the Truth. Only Existence is true and Existence is infinitely vast. Life is all inclusive, variegated, and hence full of contradictions. Walt Whitman once remarked that I contradict myself because I am vast. When we look at something specific, we miss out on what we are not looking for. It is our effort that gets in the way of a full scale view. To get a wholesome view we don't need effort but effortless effort. Then it will be possible to perform actions free of action. And then we will be able to see harmony in seemingly paradoxical situations. Till now it has been the prerogative of only a slender segment of humanity called the mystics.

Fortunately for the rest of humanity the paradigm is now shifting from focus to what I prefer to call open focus. In focus we tend to exclude everything other than the one we are interested in, a characteristic that ultimately leads to a straitjacketing of our outlook. Most of the conflicts, whether they are national, international, or personal, that happen all over the globe, all of the time, have their genesis in the mind being focused on one thing to the total blackout of the other. Open focusing, on the other hand, opens a window on the peripheral view also, which helps place focusing in a larger perspective. It is like the glow of a lamp reaching out to an overlooked corner. Open focusing can be suitably compared to holding a butterfly in the hollow of one's palm with all the fingers loosely forming a sort of perforated barrier, instead of nailing its wings in a pincer move, with the help of one's index finger and the thumb.

The paradigm shift happened with Albert Einstein's path breaking energy equation, e=mc^2, which may well prove to be the watershed in human understanding. For the first time in the history of science, man's focused view that matter is the ultimate reality received a severe jolt. Understandably, after that, it underwent a sea change. It now became open and was not averse to including the invisible component of energy into it. Scientists began to speak in the language of mystics, though they were approaching the problem from a diametrically opposite direction.
While the mystics had the knack of looking deep into the invisible which then crystallized and made itself visible to them, the scientists were digging deeper and deeper into the visible and then stumbled upon the invisible! A new paradigm was born in which the visible and the invisible were not opposed to each other but were a gestalt of Reality.

When this understanding that the visible and the invisible are but only two facets of the same reality, sinks into the humanity, it will come of age. As the lines between these so called pairs of opposites become blurred, people will refrain from being adamantine about their own belief system being the only true system. Then they won't be itching to jump at the other's throat as they do now. In fact it is the uncertainty inside them about the veracity of their adopted system, that goads them to garner support for themselves by however wayward means it may come. With the dawn of a proper understanding that there is an inner harmony behind all seemingly opposite entities, this fear due to uncertainty will vanish. Nietzsche says somewhere that the higher a tree wants to go, the deeper it sends its roots into the earth. So height and depth are not opposed to each other, but only adjuncts of an inner synchronicity to support the system.

With this deeper insight, humanity will be better equipped to comprehend Sri Krishna in his totality. People will then not get bowled over by his seemingly paradoxical gestures. They will understand that Krishna is no warmonger. He is a pacifist to the core. Look, he averts fighting Jarasandh to avoid impending men slaughter. And after Jarasandh is captured, he forgives him. He tries his utmost to forestall the great war of Mahabharat also. But the war is anyway thrust upon the Pandavas. On the battlefield the signal for initiating the war comes from the Kauravas with Bhishma, their army Chief, blowing the conch first. Dhrishtdyumn should have blown his conch to give a befitting reply, as he was at the head of the Pandava army. But no, we find it is Sri Krishna, the only pacifist on the battlefield, who blows his panchjanya conch first. He is then followed by his disciple Arjun who blows his devdatta conch.

What does all this posturing signify? It signifies that yes, we acknowledge that you are here but that the war can still be averted. Time is holding its breath and we can utilise this opportunity to see reason. This was Krishna's last-ditch effort to thwart the war. On the surface he may look like he is confronting himself in different circumstances, but if we do a mid-course correction and put him in the right perspective, we will see that he has been consistently a pacifist. Be it the killing of Kamsa, or Shishupal, or Panchajan or disarming of Banasur, he always gave them opportunity to see reason, before punishing them. His actions remind one of a switch-back in a mountaneous zone which has many hairpin bends. While negotiating such a grade one may find oneself moving opposite to the direction one has to go, but making the grade all the while. How? By not looking up or down, and flowing with the Existence.

Once the war is thrust upon them by Existence, Krishna honors it because Krishna is one with Existence. He is always present in the present. He is never unavailable to the present moment. It is living in the past and in the future that generates a dichotomy of opinion which in turn opens up the dilemma of choosing one over the other. Living in the present entails that there are no end runs and hence there is no scope for dithering. Arjun like any other human being is prone to being absent from the present. This amounts to coming in the way of Existence which in its turn creates the impasse for him. When he declares that he will not fight this war, Sri Krishna smiles because he knows that Arjun is stuck between his divided self. He is uncertain inside but emphatic on the outside, like the rest of the humanity. Sri Krishna on the other hand is a sthitprajna that is established in the state of stability.

Stability means that the mental graph shows consistency. It doesn't fluctuate with the turn of events. You see an event, any event for that reason, in itself is like a wild card. It has no life of its own. We impart life to it. Imagine a monkey jumping to a market square during busy hours. The older people would perhaps scramble to find a place of safety, the not so old would try to shoo him away. The children, on the other hand, may gleefuly imitate his antics, and the dog lazing under a push cart may perk his ears sensing food in it. And if there is a monkey trainer nearby, he may like to have it as an apprentice. If we are awake which means if we are present in the present, we will have no thoughts to resist the event.

Thoughts require space to manifest but there is no space available in the present. In the present we don't think, we simply are. It is not that one can't think. In fact one thinks so much that he chooses to go beyond thinking having realized fully well the futility of thinking. When you fall in line with the Whole, your actions become non-actions. Hence Sri Krishna says that he is action free. Sri Krishna appears like a scrambled rainbow because we do not know how to slip into that thought free state. Baba Muktanand launched his meditation revolution in the hope that it will generate mystics galore. If that happens, Krishna will not appear enigmatic but only a human being who happens to be at that end of the spectrum which we call divine. It will then be easier to unscramble the rainbow!

Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi

TERTIUS OCULUS OR THE THIRD EYE

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