Natural ruins

(Scribbled something yesterday, wanting to improvise later... no mood to do so anymore, so publishing it raw... including some made up title.)

When the ocean yells at us to talk
We prefer the beach for a walk
While the moon sends the tide,
We bother only to stand aside

The sun shines to show the care
Yet we have so much protection to wear
We've moved from eras of shades from tree
And into one where we fell them as we're free

Without the rains we'd have no water to drink
Taking them for granted we overflow the sink
There's no respect for nature around us
But for a little comfort, we make a huge fuss

We claim the animals too as domesticated
Only for opportune moments have we waited
Worse than viruses do we feed
On everything carelessly like weed

And oh, how we deny greater intelligence!
We surely didn't come along perchance
However selfish be the selfish gene
We humans will remain meanest of the mean.

Faster than the mind.



The mind is supposed to be the fastest known thing, though less understood. Ishavasya Upanishad talks of Atman as being faster than the mind so:

अनेजदेकं मनसो जवीयो नैनद्देवा आप्नुवन्पूर्वमर्षत् ।
तद्धावतोऽन्यानत्येति तिष्ठत्तस्मिन्नपो मातरिश्वा दधाति॥ ईशोपनिषत्  ४ ॥

Unmoving, It is one, faster than the mind. The senses cannot reach It, for It proceeds ahead. Remaining static It overtakes others that run. On account of Its presence, Matarsiva (the wind) conducts the activities of beings. (Translation by Vidyavachaspati V. Panoli)

In Bhimarupi Maruti stotram, Samartha Ramadas Swami says:

आणिला मागुती नेला आला गेला मनोगती
मनासि टाकिले मागे गतीसी तुळणा नसे
He brought it in and took it back, both with speed like mind; verily he surpassed the speed of mind, his speed has no comparison. (Translation by sanskritdocuments.org)


The former shruti quotation shows that mind is the fastest known and Atman is the (only) one faster than that, while the latter stotra reference is a praise to Hanuman as being faster than the mind, meaning that Hanuman is Atman itself.

Now that we've established that short of Atman, mind is the fastest, lets see what this essentially means. In avasthAtrayA parIkshA, having understood that the Self is different from the various koshAs, most one can achieve is paroksha j~nAnA. For aparokshA j~nAnA to arise, there has to anubhUti of the Atman. However, while moving from one avasthA to another, most importantly from dream or deep sleep to waking state, the naisargika or natural tendency of the jIva is to get bound to dehAtma buddhi. All of us have experienced, at one time or another, that immediately upon waking up from deepest of sleeps, there exists a few moments of a lost feeling, a feeling where we know not where we are, what we are doing, etc. Then slowly it dawns upon us as to we are in such and such a place and thats it, all memory is regained in that instant, without needing further delving as to what exactly happened to us! Then goes on an outward planning of our day or what have you. However, those few moments, or truly fractions of a moment, is of utmost importance. Thats a sandhi. Thats when anything can happen; it holds immense potential to understand the infinite!!


Lets step back a bit. So what exactly happened when that memory flooded back on gathering back the geographical presence of ours? What we lost there is that even before "where am I?" existed a question as to "who am I?" That question slipped our dullard minds, habitually. We have, across janmAs, trained ourselves to forget the important question itself, let alone wanting to find the answer. What we realize, therefore, is that we couldn't place ourselves as to where we were and thankfully we regained it soon after. If we were to know that the we identified ourselves as this body and then the mind found that this body is placed somewhere geographically in the vast created space, we would know that there was some state prior to this binding, which is our sahaja stithi, true nature, au naturel! That tremendous potential exists right there! Simple!


Alas, that simplicity is extremely difficult to come by. I mentioned the ill training across countless lives. But herein, ties in the speed aspect of the mind. That binding is so fast, that of false identification of me and mine, that there is no tool available at our disposal which is faster than the mind to stall this process, or even slow it down. Here, Vedanta comes to the rescue, using tools as described in Sankhya philosophy. Sankhya says that the antahkaraNa manas itself is divided into manas, buddhi, ahaMkAra & chitta. The binding, quite a series of binding events, that happens is that of the ahaMkAra with the body, assisted by the thinking manas, chitta bringing forth the memories all at once and we get lost in this prapa~nca. Interestingly, that the buddhi or the intellectual aspect of the mind is still asleep and late to wake up is not an accident. Its created so and aged lazy by habit so as to keep the creation ticking! The sleeping intellect is what causes an almost insultingly dull feeling, so to say, since we have moved to analyze our sharpness with our alertness to this outward world. The fact is contrary to this. We ought to train ourselves back to reality. The trick lies in waking the intellect up earlier in the cycle so much so that the binding hasn't yet happened and never does happen! All our sAdhanA is really focused towards this singular goal, a complete end in itself, that of sharpening the intellect and training it against this binding taking place after which it has no control. Another way, sAdhanA can be understood as slowing down the pace of the mind from binding. The binding can be likened to an arrow being shot in the outward direction towards the world when the mind is out there to the point of no return, let alone changing direction in the opposite direction. The intellect waking up early can stop this outward arrow being shot, which means that the jIva remains in its essential state as the Atman.



श्रीगुरुपादुकार्पणमस्तु ||

Chakras, healing, meditation, etc.

हरि: ॐ ||


Most spiritual paths trace back their source to the Vedas one way or the other, some traces are lost across eras while others have been purposefully removed for many an obvious reason. Similarly, most healing techniques trace their origin back to the Vedic wisdom. Consider even the "mistaken" caduceus or the correct asklepian symbol of medicine, the former with two snakes around a staff and the latter with a single snake. Even if one doesn't think it to be exact, its obvious that it very much represents Kundalini.

That being the case, is it any surprise then that most alternative healing techniques have something to do with Kundalini, directly or indirectly? Reiki talks of Universal (source of) energy, which is not truly divorced from Kundalini. A Reiki channel (healer) pulls energy from this universal source and directs the same towards the healee; put in other words, the channel draws kundalini energy from sahasrara chakra and directs it towards the chakra dominating the ailed area! Working with sahasrara may sound ridiculous and laughable to one initiated into and following a traditional path of kundalini yoga, but I shall fill in the gaps to clarify this point later in this post. Pranic Healing methods talk of Chi, which is same as prana, but one would rather use Chi or yin-yang kind of jargon this day to credit an unorthodox Buddhist source than an orthodox Vedic one! Then there are meditations of all sorts varying from under a minute to hours together, individual and group sessions. I landed up once, unaware of what the "course" was all about owing to trust, in such a meditation! Its a different matter that I paid through my nose for the same, but suffice it to say that meditations done for a particular physical or mental benefit are no meditations at all. (And if you know me well from my earlier blog entries, you know I don't believe that meditation can be done purposefully, its a happening).

Back to healing, it has been established that all healing methods somehow tie back to kundalini; ergo, to chakras. However, what chakras themselves are have been interpreted variously as energy centres, concentrated nerve centres and the like, there have been researches tracing the 72000 nadis into physical nerves and categorized as plexuses. Although healing and modern meditation techniques target opening chakras at various levels of the healer and the healee, they are not really the same chakras that kundalini yoga deals with! This may come as a shock to many modern "yogis" and healers alike, and they may disagree, the fact is that just the names and identifiable location of chakras being same doesn't mean that the chakras are also the same. You are free to ask how and why that is so, but one who has a background of Vedanta should revisit the five koshas to get an insight into this fact. The way the body is identified with annamaya, pranamaya, manomaya, vijnanamaya and anandamaya koshas, so too the chakras seeming the same at a particular location, is not really so. One cannot directly reach a particular chakra by some healing technique or short meditation, what one is doing instead is forcing physical aspects of the chakra or prana aspects or mental tendencies locked at a particular chakra to unfold thereby, seeming as if one has opened or activated a chakra. So, as mentioned above, when drawing energy from sahasrara or whichever chakra directly via some healing technique is only at a particular plane or kosha and not really a kundalini chakra. Of course, there is a good chance that all these techniques would partially affect a spiritual chakra indirectly since changes in prana movement added to heat caused by the intensity of meditation may give an indirect push to kundalini if its around that area. This effect is purely unintentional and no one other than a true spiritual guru can predict the same. Thats risky, just as in hatha yoga, except that in the latter there is a reference available as to what hatha yoga practice leads to which kundalini effect!

I think this is a good point to stop, till I wake up another day and feel like writing more. :)


श्रीगुरुपादुकार्पणमस्तु ||