Beyond Religion
In the name of religion, I am reminded of my experience during a short stay in Kashmir. It defines the type of mind where faith and religion grow and also the kind of communities who nurture such minds.
I was in Kashmir for two weeks during April 1980 and stayed in the boathouse of Rahim Pala, floating in Dal Lake. Rahim discovered an exalted Muslim self in me and our daily deepening relationship was based on his perception of strong Muslim feelings in me. He treated me as a Muslim, knowing that I was a Hindu physically.
Rahim asked me one evening “Do you know, how India won over Pakistan in the war of 1971?”
I looked at him a little bewildered. Reply was known too well – Pakistan lost the war.
“Indira Gandhi was dancing naked before Khwaja of Ajmer for the grace of the saint on the night bombs were pouring at Agra” He confided to me.
Rahim’s revelation shook me at heart at his stark ignorance about the Indo-Pak war. However, it was relevant for fixing a generic type of mind wherein faith or religion anchors with firmness of a rock.
For Rahim and his likes, in Pakistan and Kashmir, defeat of Pakistan at the hands of India was more than her defeat in a war. It was a defeat of Islam inflicted by Hindus. Mullahs had generated a story about Indira Gandhi, the then Indian Prime Minister, and spread it among Pakistani and Kashmiri Muslims to assuage their hurt feelings for strengthening Islam. The incidence proved that persons like Rahim form a generic type of less intelligent, faithful religious minds. They lack logic and believe even in absurd stories under the authority of a religion. Fancy and concocted lies of clergy condition the minds like Rahim on logically unacceptable ‘gospel truths’ in every cult. Religious heads often reap the weakness of such simple minds to coin stories for strengthening their faith in Gods A to Z. Even Science has its ‘Black Holes’ and Faithful!
Position or post does not change the quality of mind. Zail Singh, President of India, opined against the validity of Darwinian Evolution, Bush Jr., President of USA, emphatically stressed that human cloning is ‘wrong’ and Imam of Jama Mosque of Delhi says that jihad by Taliban is valid against American war on terrorism. Logic dictates, they and their brethren belong to the same group. All of them are conditioned by community thoughts; they reject logic and act under force of emotions.
Faith bound non-analytical minds line up for God, Kaba or Kumbh because ‘Favorite men of Gods are fools’ (16) and believe in cooked up religious stories. Hence, intelligentsia alone may opt for liberation of soul if they can discipline their minds and body, follow Yog and Five Mahavrats (2,p. 161), as required in the pursuit.
Guru culture is pretty old in India. Since long, running out of home early, preaching of scriptures subsequently, and establishing an Ashram ultimately is a respected tradition among Hindus. Missions, Ashrams and Maths add every year in the country by the children who renounce home early and become Gurus later. A logical person sees something despicable in the gamut of gurus. “In almost all ashrams, more than the radiance of the teacher, one meets the nauseating crowd of vultures in the shape of administrators and volunteers forming a coterie. As usual the lure is money”(17).
To a reader, however, an old maxim of Sanskrit (18) may serve as a guide in choosing proper path in the game of Gods and Gurus. “Alone for meditation, two for learning, three for dance, four for journey and many for war” (are needed). Growth of soul is best in a loner, living in isolation, away from community, religious congregations and gurus.
Conservation of Consciousness Energy
Now, benefits from study: protection, survival and growth of body, mind and soul through accretion, saving and judicious expenditure of consciousness energy. One may see a hornets’ nest in the sentence. It has an unconventional and, to some extent, unbelievable word like consciousness energy.
A graduate of science sent me nine questions in his letter of March 14, 2001 after going through the ‘Science of Consciousness’. The ninth is “Finally, what is consciousness? Is it a field that radiates energy like gravity or electromagnetism?” The young man is convinced that consciousness is an energy domain, but the main issue before him is its nature. For most us, intricacy of physics in explaining the energy may be less relevant than the actual description of energy as it affects our body-mind system.
Energy of consciousness is related to more than one type of function or perception in a living being like man. In the thoughtographs of Ted Serios depicting a Neanderthal man (5, p. 37) and thoughtograph of an ancient fort at Lakhpat (2, fig. 9.11) our consciousness has a dual behavior. Firstly, it acts like a ‘field of time’, which annuls the present scene and bring the scenario of past time frame before the camera; and, secondly, it regenerates ‘material image’ of past objects that get photographed by a camera. Decay behavior of consciousness objects (2, fig. 9.15) suggests that these are not optical images. Duration of each ‘material image’, formed by human consciousness, is about 0 .0085 second, while its frequency of generation is around 345 frames per second (Fig. 1.8).
Property of conscious self to go back or forth in time is used by Ping pong players to position their racket for hitting back the high speed ball sent by the opponent (19).
Fig. 1. 8 : Frequency of materialized image generation and its decay. The image of a pen-clip in a period of O.009 Second shows formation of pulsed images 1,2,3 and 4(4’) and their decay profile A (4’), B (1) & C (3). Position [2,4] in the figure, is the original position of the clip while 4’is residual decayed image of site 1.
Conservation of energy of consciousness goes a long way in protection, survival and growth of soul because the last requires serious attention on the type of life and lifestyle. Soul and mind mature no earlier than 50 years. An all out pursuit for health of mind, antahkaran and soul, thus, follows a simple logic: if one conserves energy in childhood his youth is fulfilled; when energy is conserved till forties then only a soul can separate out of the body as Brahm through rigors in Yog. That is why there is a prayer in Yajurved for reaching up to old age by ritual men of Vedic age (10).
For protection of our conscious self we have a body, a soul and a period of 45 years between five and fifty when body, mind and soul may be mauled individually or together by contagions, physical enemies or ‘floating souls’ and spirits through draining of consciousness energy. Protection of body, mind and soul till mature old age is a tough challenge. However, if the goal is clear and discipline is observed, gains are not disparaging. In the long journey of time, Eternal Life or Experiential Immortality could be set as target for soul. Mind may accordingly be set on the target and trained for conserving consciousness energy on the paths of Yog and Tantra.
Study of soul enables a person to visualize a true picture of his own conscious self besides his understanding of real objective of human life and relevance of consciousness energy. Peace of mind and food of consciousness are immediate gains for him from an in-depth study of the subject through channeling his consciousness potential.
Natural and Supernatural
A word like ‘supernatural’ is an unnatural nonsense scientifically if it is taken to mean, as in a dictionary, ‘above or beyond nature; not
according to the course of nature; miraculous, spiritual’. We discover a Pi meson once in a 50,000 photograph. Is this elementary particle supernatural? Or, does a lone pine tree, at Varanasi, among a million billion tropical trees of the blistering Ganges basin forms a supernatural phenomenon? Neither, so long as the elementary particle is predictable in theory and the tree in the Botanical Garden of Banaras Hindu University has a history of an extraordinary care in a hostile environment. In the same rarity are lions and elephants of circus dancing and cycling or Yogis like Satyamurti living without breathing for days (2, box 2.1). Not only these but objects like Brahm (often confused as God) also fall here – very rare but experientially verifiable.
I confronted a friend in France during autumn of ’83 who considers God as something supernatural and unbelievable. Our discussion on God commenced with his assertive conviction “I don’t believe in God.”
My reply was “I also don’t believe in God.”
“But I am told you are a very religious person” He said.
“Let me correct you my friend, about your information,” I clarified “I am not a religious man of faith, instead I am an enlightened Yogi who has experientially perceived Brahm or body-free soul, and documented the experience scientifically (20). It is also true that people in France cannot experience and verify my perceptions due to their warm body and inability to reach Samadhi. Taking the body to 96.5° F in Samadhi is a pre-requisite for the experience of Brahm. Cold climate, low solar energy and fabulous food habits with plenty of alcohol are the natural barriers in France. As mangoes don’t grow in your country, this experience of Indian mango belt also cannot be planted in France.”
My running into the French friend clarified, how the phenomenon of enlightenment, described commonly in Upanishads, moves to a shady area of disbelief in Europe. An experiential Brahm of India shifts to the status of a supernatural and unbelievable entity in France, Canada or USA, purely on account of geographic and cultural factors. Many ESP experiences relating to consciousness, like Brahm, are also rare in higher latitudes (21).