Possession by Community Consciousness
During my night walks on the streets of the ONGC Colony of Vadodara, I used to come across clusters of spirits besides individual spirits. On the occasion of an Id-day in October 1982, I found the cluster responsive and availing my happiness and peace for their enjoyment after I gifted my happiness and peace to them in the name of Allah. During the fieldwork of May ’81, I had come across a similar spirit cluster in the Buddhist caves of Bagh in Madhya Pradesh, responding to the thoughts of Buddh. A spirit cluster was also noticed in an abandoned Church of Goa in May ’82, near the then Government Museum. I designated such ‘spirit clusters’ as acommunity consciousness bodies. My experience of Vadodara and other two places suggested that each of these spirit clusters behaved like a living and responsive individual when I felt soft emotions for Islam, Buddh or Christ. Each of these bodies was like a pond of Islam, Buddhism and Christianity filled with distinct waters of different religions. It became obvious later that the thought of Buddh will not stir waters in the Christian or Islamic water bodies. Every religion is a distinct psychic entity, unable to accept the god or tenets of the other.
There are a number of Buddhist Caves at Ajanta, carved between I and IX century AD. One of these is highly echoing. Standing in the cave I felt like chanting a common couplet of a prayer in Sanskrit (23). The verse translates as “ May the Lord of Land bestow grace upon people and raise them on the path of justice (i); may there be good through Brahmans and Cows ever (ii)”. I was stuck during recitation of the second stanza. My mind turned blank and any effort to pronounce it won’t succeed. Since it was our routine prayer, I asked my wife to repeat it for me. She too got stuck after the first stanza like me, but her response was immediate. “ What are you doing? We cannot chant this prayer here in a Buddhist cave.”
She proved right; out of the cave, we repeated the couplet with ease. It was a terse lesson. Not only the community consciousness domain was alive, it could mute a Brahman couple in the cave, even a thousand years after the last Buddhist vanished from the caves.
Community conscious domains proved as powerful objects at Ajanta. But how funny, in my several lives of the same period as the caves, I was a Buddhist but the Buddhist thought field in the cave recognized me only as a Brahman. My inference, accordingly, is that the consciousness domains of past though living in the present are mere continuation of the past community consciousness clusters, unable to observe or analyze the situations of today or past events in distant lands. These control an individual’s thoughts on a single criterion: whether or not it is congenial to the relict community consciousness domain. When my thoughts were congenial to Buddhist thought domain in the cave of Bagh, there was a positive response. In the caves of Ajanta, response of the domain was just opposite when I acted as a Hindu thought-body (astral body / spirit) with my hrit affiliated to Hindu thought domain.
Later on, when Babari Mosque of Ayodhya fell at the hands of Hindu hooligans in December ’92, I had a better appreciation about the community consciousness. In a BBC interview, M. J. Akbar was looking grieved emotionally while pointing an accusing finger towards the deliberate laxity of then Prime Minister of India – Mr. Narsimha Rao. Babar was my great grandfather once but I had no emotions like MJ and most other Muslims. Muslims of India were feeling humiliated and I was without any such perception. My feeling-apparatus (bhavaschet) is skewed towards Hindu community consciousness while those of Muslims towards Islam. Seemingly, individuals live under the control of their religious community regimes, though unaware about them.
My observation also throws light on some pinching paradoxes of 2001. Tons of explosives were gleefully spent by Taliban to destroy the lofty Buddh at Bamiyan without a whimper from any Muslim in the world because Muslims declared, on 26 February, Buddha’s “ statues as insulting to Islam”! Twin Towers with thousands within were raised to ground without any accusing finger from any Muslim State on the perpetrator of the heinous crime but uproar was in air when Bush Jr. ordered a crack down on a single Moslem responsible for the tragedy.
Such is the controlling strength of past Islamic consciousness domain on the living minds of Moslem community. A nonintellectual, intolerant and corrosive community field of medieval era of Islam is virtually haunting the living minds mainly due to the spirits of past 1400 years. Can such a community-thought-field regime let the intellectuals act logically? Answer, to my mind, is no. A Brahman couple attempting to chant Brahman’s prayers was gagged in the cave of Ajanta by a 1000-year old spirit-cluster of Buddhists. The same applies also to a handful of modern Muslim minds under possession of an aggressively violent spirit-cluster felling Buddha statue at Bamiyan as enemy and murdering people world over in the name of jihad without remorse. We see here a unique and incurable fossil-ego-forcing on living Islamite mind (Fig. 3.5), exerting logic and rationale. Possession by medieval Islamic spirit-mind-set, almost a fifty times stronger than the living, turns it inane.