Falling in Love with Yourself Chapter III
Why We Should Love Ourselves
Like most women believe the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, so also, the way to the Consciousness Supreme begins with your physical incarnation. You need to love yourself at a physical level, at a spirit level, at a memory level, before you can reach the point of loving your individual soul or jivatma. Therefore let us start at the very beginning.
Statutory Warning: The inroad to this journey might be through the physical incarnation, but let’s not become a part of the Carly Simon song, which goes, “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.”
Please do not misunderstand ‘falling in love with yourself’ as a case of vanity or self-admiration. Nor is it the case of how impressed you can be by your personality and your ability to dazzle people. Neither is it a study on how popular you are nor how many people hero-worship you and that being the reason you should fall in love with yourself. No!
This is a study of how you can fall in love with all your ‘selves’, which are body, citta and the spirit within. Assuming by now you have understood the fact that we need to accept ourselves on an ‘as is where is’ basis, with all our defects, flaws, faults with our destiny and our thoughts, good and bad.
The physical body, which consists of our physical incarnation, our mind and our intellect
The spirit or the ghost within or the sukshma sharira (the body that exists before, during and after we take birth in this life)
The kaarna sharira or causal body, which is always attached to the spirit body and contains the hard disk of our samskaras
People who exist in the spirit bodies, after death, live in a particular dimension for extended periods of time. Those are the lucky ones. Many times, the unlucky ones are stuck in our realm as they do not have the ability, capability or the karma to take to them to these different dimensions. They get stuck in their homes or on a neighbouring tree in the village, or at the place of their death. These are normally referred to in colloquial terms as bhoots or haunting spirits. Some of these spirits do haunt and trouble others, while some don’t haunt anyone but try to improve themselves and help others. Some just exist in waiting, waiting for a time when they can be reborn or for their descendants to do some good deeds in their name, so they can get some brownie points and move on. Or just waiting and existing in a parallel life in this very dimension.
Science today has recorded these poltergeists as explainable and existing in our atmosphere. The more unfortunate of these spirits get captured by black magicians and are used by them to do their bidding. Some of them are captured by more powerful spirits, the Hindi word for them, is jin or jinn. These jinns are like spirit dons who control several spirits who serve them.
Besides our physical bodies, we need to fall in love with the spirit bodies that are manifested within our physical bodies. We need to think not only about our physical body’s future, which is limited to a maximum of 80 to 100 years but also about the future of our spirit bodies, whose future can last for several hundred years at a time.
Very often between one physical incarnation and the other there could be a waiting period of 100 years or more, depending on your spiritual status, your place of pre-birth existence (to get rebirth that will provide you a destiny that will match the fructification of your samskaras or at least a large part of them is by no means an easy task, that is why sometimes rebirth can be deferred when due till such time that a matching mahurat is obtainable. Sometimes the spirit takes birth in its own kul or family and that also can be a delay factor as you may need to await right timing and availability of the relevant parentage).
A very unique case study is the rebirth of the Buddhist Lamas (teachers of the Dharma in Tibetan Buddhism), who are in the cycle of being reborn in order to evolve further, even if they are born outside the families, as many of their family members are celibate. They are found through certain signs by the senior Lamas and brought into the fold to be reared again in continuity of where they left off in their last lives.
It is not a joke but a 30-year-old Lama in Ladakh, Thuksey Rinpoche, managed to get the property that belonged to him in his last life transferred to his current life, following a legal process.
The public ceremony to formally acknowledge five-year-old Thuksey Rinpoche, as a reincarnation of his past life as Thuksey Rinpoche, was akin to a king’s coronation with all its grandeur and protocol.
Uncanny, but true!
Judging from the dress of my son’s spirit body, that I encountered a few months before my wife got pregnant, I would say that he looked from the 19th century.
Abhay Taneja the yogi of yore, whose negotiations of birth I was a witness to, had waited 100 years in Bathri (near Dalhousie) for Gurudev to come along and grant him a rebirth. There are many other accounts of spirit messages that say similar things. The fact that 2500 to 3000 years back, Rishi Bhrigu wrote the future of the lives of people who are living today, is justification of the fact that those people existed in some human form at that time.
I saw myself in a vision state, in existence several thousand years ago, dressed in clothes befitting the Mahabharat era and using mantras to move chariots 20 to 30 feet high in the air, during a war scene. First, I was given the mantra in my dream state and then shown the scene of my past self using it in a battle. I assume it was a mantra from my past, re-taught now.
Further, there is an account of Lord Parshuram who is supposed to be in existence even today in the abode of Himachal Pradesh in the form of an immortal. I for one, have had the honour of being attacked and beaten up by him on a trip to Renukaji. I was saved by his mother, Renukaji, in the nick of time. To my shock, Gurudev explained this to me on my return to his camp. As usual, it was always a case of ‘How did he know?’(Of course I had done something wrong at a place of worship of Lord Parshuram and deserved his wrath).
There are accounts of several great saints who have left this human existence seh sharir – meaning alongwith their bodies. Better known among such saints were Guru Nanak, Guru Gorakhanath, Sant Kabir and Jesus.
According to Ramesh Chand Malhotra, Gurudev’s seniormost disciple from Delhi, one of Gurudev’s ancestors, Sitaramji, died in the 19th century and passed on seh sharir.
I have been closely associated with the practice of spiritualism for several years now and from my experience, and that of Gurudev’s, I have come to the conclusion that spirits can exist for several thousand years. So, in order to avoid the ‘waiting’, ‘drifting’ and ‘hanging’ indefinitely, we should begin work on a long term plan for our ‘inner’selves.
Understanding the Goal of Each Body
It may be the goal of the physical body to work towards economic, social and intellectual accomplishment, however, one of the important aims is to shed its adulterations and indulge in self-purification. Somebody once asked a carpenter “how do you make an elephant from a block of wood?” He said, “Simple, you just chip away all that doesn’t look like an elephant.”
To make an elephant from a block of wood; chip away all that doesn’t
look like the elephant!
Naturally, in order to do that, one of the aims of the physical body should be to change its guna mix to sattvic, reducing the other two gunas substantially. For the physical body to be purified it needs to surmount attachments, fears, likes, dislikes, and passions. It needs to work towards contentment and bliss. Bliss being very different from the regular perception of happiness. Normally happiness is considered to be synonymous with joy. Unfortunately, that is a state of emotion that is always accompanied by sorrow. It’s like sitting on a see-saw where joy is on one side, which goes up and sometimes it goes down. Bliss is the spot at the centre of the see-saw where emotion is almost non-existent. To me that is happiness. Actually we should call it Happylessness. In 2070 the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries would describe it as a word that means bliss, which is not joy, nor sorrow. Therefore, I infer, mankind’s pursuit of happiness would have been far more rewarding with a spelling change.
The goal for the spirit body or sukshma sharira, is the attainment of wealth that can be used when it exists purely in its non-physical incarnation. This is energy called shakti and commonly known as aura. Because the spirit bodies are made of ethereal material, the vibration of that body is much more subtle than the vibration of the physical or material body. The physical, material body can magnetise subtle vibrated products, including energy, more effectively.
During its existence as a spirit body, it needs that energy for movement and sustenance. Therefore it is the goal of the spirit body to use its physical body counterpart to work towards the collection of more energy.
The third body, as it is called, is the kaarna sharira or the causal body. It includes the hard disk also called karmashaya which is attached to the spirit body. It is the aim of this body to reduce the baggage of its data which consists of samskaras (also understood as long-term and short-term memory). It is only when this hard disk has managed to delete or cleanse its stored data, can a person be free of life and death, and attain mukti.
The aim of the jivatma is to be unburdened by the delusion of all the bodies that surround it. To learn to disbelieve in the existence of the reality that it is forced to see under the influence of the power called maya. When the jivatma becomes disillusioned and comes to terms with its reality of not being an independent entity, but a part of the Supreme Consciousness, then and only then can it attain moksha.
As moksha is a very high-flown aim and objective, let us look at lower levels of attainment. When the karmashaya has a reduced amount of baggage and data, there are fewer vitkaras or negative thoughts that would come to fore on a regular basis. There would be lesser lives to lead and longer intervals, where the spirit body could live in greater dimensions than Earth.
Earth is a dimension of matter at a particular gross level. There are other dimensions that exist at different vibrations of energy which are easier to live in, and where the mind of the entity is not so troubled or stressed. There are innumerable such dimensions or lokas where spirits dwell. Many of them are much more blissful than earth, whilst many are more bothersome. The dimension a particular entity dwells in depends on a person’s attainments and spiritual levels in their physical avatar. Many spirits get stuck in this dimension itself and either try and help humans or haunt them.
Aura
The aura is the electromagnetic field that encompasses all life forms. As mentioned earlier, thicker the aura, more spiritually powerful the person. Most viral diseases that we contract first infect the aura before they infect the body. The aura acts like a protection layer to the body. It also protects people from attack by negative spirits who normally cannot penetrate the aura of averagely powerful beings.
On one of my journeys out of the body, I saw my wife sleeping on the floor. My out-of-the-box sense of humour compelled me to pull her leg. I thought I would bounce on her and scare her. It was around 4 am. What happened next was a great learning. Every time I tried to jump on her, I would bounce off. I could not touch her. She seemed to be enveloped by a blue light, of conical shape, since she was lying down. It extended to at least a foot off her body. She did not move an inch in spite of my efforts to wake her up. I realised then that the human aura is a very powerful protective shield.
It is a sorry state of affairs that out of six billion people alive on this planet, not even ten per cent know much about the aura. And only one per cent of that ten know enough. The rest are only familiar with the word. It is important to know how to protect one’s aura and learn how to expand it.
There are three kinds of wealth that people can attain:
The last point includes depth of aura, the positive karmic balance yet to fructify, special attainments and siddhis that the spirit might have qualified for, during its various incarnations, etc.
Most saints and deities are depicted with halos around their heads, to signify their powerful auras.
Let us examine the factors that lead to enhancement of the aura. Let us work towards attaining greater wealth, a wealth that will last thousands of years, as against material wealth that becomes immaterial after our death.
The word gati in Hindi means speed. The speed this word refers to is the speed that the spirit body can acquire for its movement. For bodies that travel in astral space, speed is an important aspect for movement. This gati is required for the spirit to cross certain barriers and travel to other dimensions. For attaining this speed, aura is the energy required.
Energy Ball
The basic ingredient of aura is shakti or energy. I have actually seen shakti in the form of a ball of energy and I’m happy to share the experience with you.
Energy imploding in a dynamic way - If it is absorbed into a person,
it adds to his AURA.
A visitor to the sthan for several years, Nandlal, who did a lot of seva, had a problem. His shops could not get rented out. Something would always go wrong before an agreement was finalized. He wanted us to clear this. He felt there was a spiritual problem acting as a hindrance. I was new at spiritual healing, so in an experimental mood, I sat down in meditation and asked Gurudev to give this gentleman the power to solve this problem.
In the meditation, I saw three characters appear - Nandlal, Gurudev and myself. Gurudev threw a ball of energy at me. It was dynamic, translucent white in colour, about a foot in diameter and almost alive. It kept expanding and contracting, like a small cloud that moves inwards. I knew it was a ball of energy. I threw it at Nandlal who accepted it and the ball got absorbed within him. A few days later, Nandlal told me that he met someone in the train and the person was suffering from pain. He touched him and the pain vanished. Nandlal became a healer. He was responsible for treating many patients in the years to come. This power helped him clear his shop of the negative energies that were stopping its progress. Nandlal became fairly spiritually powerful. He died a few years ago.
A very interesting incident in Nandlal’s spiritual journey was that once he was throwing energised water into a lady patient’s eyes to heal her (one of the processes taught by Gurudev). But he made the mistake of doing this egotistically. The lady herself was a spiritually advanced person, who had practiced many mighty mantras for years. Because of his ego and not doing this on behalf of the power of the sthan, Nandlal’s hand got drained of energy. The water, which is a carrier of energy, was being thrown into the eyes of a powerful person. The eyes are also magnets that can both take in and give out energy. So the energy that was thrown into the eyes, through the holy water, got enhanced as the receiver of the energy was probably more powerful than the hand of the transmitter. He confessed his mistake. For six months he had dullness in his right hand. He had lost a part of his aura energy there. It was a learning for us all.
Why People Have Poor Auras
Let us examine why most people who are rich materially, or even those who are clever at their jobs, don’t have thick auras? Listed below are some of the ways in which auras get depleted.
(1) Forward bending exercises and also weight training. Very often when you bend forward or backward and drop the weights, there is loss of aura.
(2) Massages where the masseur pulls your fingers outward in a jerky movement, lead to loss of energy.
(3) Attraction towards the opposite sex involves transference of an X amount of energy. That is why, in the past, women practiced shringar (the art of adornment) to attract energy from the opposite gender.
(4) Sexual interaction involves the exchange of energy and one partner gets more than the other.
(5) Shaking hands with more powerful people leads to loss of energy from the less powerful to the more. Namaste is an insurance against that.
(6) Blessings and aashirwad given by the right hand to the head of a devotee can lead to transference, if the blessings are heartfelt.
(7) Conversely, curses do drain a lot of energy if they manifest.
(8) Desires and emotional attachments are transference of energy from one to the other. The bonding (moh) that a mother has for her child is a source of earning for the child.
(9) Anger can be loss of aura as the fire within rises to the head and consumes more energy. Hatred is even worse as it is a continuous drain for a long period of time.
(10) Sustenance of life is both an investment and also a gain of energy and therefore the ebb and flow of energy have to be positive.
(11) Speaking too much is also a waste of energy, thus it is nice to remember that there is a cost to each word. So why not economize. Remember the old phrase ‘Brevity thy name is wit’.
How to Protect and Enhance the Aura
1. Mantra Vidya: Chanting silently in the mind in a meditative pose helps increase the aura. It helps if you cross your hands and feet so that the vibration remains within. Many sadhus keep their malas or rosaries in a cloth bag in which they do their counting. The idea is to keep their rosaries hidden and save the leakage of any vibration or energy. A glass of water kept in front while you are doing mantras in a cross-legged pose helps to capture the energy in the water as well.
2. Purification of the mind: A change of the guna mix in an indirect way increases the capacity of a person to hold more aura. People with a sattvic nature have a potential for a larger aura.
3. Seva: Serving people, animals and other life forms helps enhance the aura.
4. Spiritual Healing: Magnetising away the pain from a patient helps to add some aura which could have been negative to that person. The patient suffering from pain, could be healed by a healer taking away some of the negative energy from the patient’s aura and laundering it into positive energy. This may result in the healer absorbing some of the negative energy in the transitive period. Sometimes, of course the healer has to bear the negative energy in a small measure before it gets converted to positive. To cite a personal example, a patient in Mumbai had blisters in his mouth and throat. I was influenced by his entire family to help him with quick relief. I did not think that was what I should do, but we are all prone to influence and so was I. My son got blisters in his mouth and so did I! They lasted a few days. The lesson I learnt was an important one. I realised the value of surrender to a higher power (here, surrendering the patient’s pain to the higher power of the sthan). We call that arpan.
5. Greening Places: Watering plants and greening places helps add to the aura balance. Gardeners are normally richer in aura than their employers.
6. Accidental Aura Attainment: Very often we are not in a position to understand the magnetic level in a particular location. However each location has its own magnetic value. Places like temples and other religious places, cowsheds, crossings, caves, have higher magnetic energies than other areas. Homes of people where worship is carried out become magnetically more powerful than normal homes.
When people meditate in such places, they naturally interact with a higher level of spiritual energy. If they are more magnetic or more powerful, they will attain or absorb some of that energy as a part of the interaction. This, of course, is something that should not be practiced commonly unless the practitioner knows what he or she is doing. If one were to try and magnetise energy from a place where worship is practiced it may not be taken kindly by the priest of that institution or by the energy itself.
I remember a couple of incidents where I thought I could take some power from a particular location. It was at a private temple of one of Gurudev’s disciples in Renuka. While I was praying at the altar I had a desire to attain some of that energy. Suddenly, I felt as if some power had attacked me. I got a feeling of uneasiness which I could not get rid of. Sitting in the car was a horrifying experience; I felt something was destabilising my mind and body. I felt a kind of heaviness around my head and I knew from past experiences that some force was attacking me. Unfortunately, it did not seem to be a minor force.
I couldn’t sit in the car, so I got out and walked towards the Renuka Lake. The uneasiness persisted, though it was slightly less as I was walking on the ground and being earthed (as my feet were planted firmly on the ground possibly the attack of the negative energy may have been partially transmitted to the ground and absorbed by the earth). I could not think of any other option so I prayed to Devi Renuka (the mother of Sage Parshuram), and asked her to protect me from this attack. What happened next is something I still can’t believe, though of course I did see it happen. It was like watching a television screen on my forehead. I saw a beautiful woman, dressed in white, wearing many ornaments and a crown on her head. She looked like a glorious being; I assumed it was the Devi Renuka.
I saw myself requesting her for help and she touched my head. The moment she touched my head the heaviness disappeared. The attack was warded off. I felt absolutely normal again. I shall never forget that show of grace. I have always kept the holy water of the Renuka lake in my place of worship as a kind of connection with that charming glorified Devi. I had learned my lesson; energy was better earned, than stolen.
Some of the places where magnetic values are higher than at other places:
Often, the exchange of aura can lead to contamination. Swimming in a pool which is frequented by people with different types of auras, where many of them may be of the tamasic and rajasic quality, we might acquire some of those qualities and magnetise them. Further, wearing people’s clothes which have been recently worn by them, sitting on seats in a bus or a taxi where people with a lower quality of guna mix have recently sat, sleeping on beds in hotels which have been slept on by people who are not of your guna type, are some of the ways in which your aura could get a little polluted.
I was a fairly good swimmer especially in the backstroke, but for years I have avoided getting into a pool.
I am not saying that you follow these suggestions to the last word. I wanted to exaggerate this point just so that you could understand it better.
Another thing that I have realised over the years is that drinking other people’s drunk water or liquid (jhootha) or eating out of someone else’s plate, where there is the chance of someone else’s saliva getting mixed with yours, is dangerous business in aura exchange. Of course this covers kissing. Another person’s saliva brings to you in a very direct way, their qualities, good or bad. People, therefore, want to drink the liquid sipped by a saintly person in order to acquire some of his or her qualities. The next time you have to kiss someone, do an x-ray of their qualities and then decide.
Besides, the aura transmitted through the eyes of an individual can affect the food that they are cooking or staring at. If their qualities at that moment are more negative then that would infect the people eating the food. That is why prasad or food distributed at spiritual places of worship has to be cooked by evolved people, known for higher level of thinking and greater qualities. Even what they are thinking whilst cooking matters. The food catches the energy that is generated in the mind of the cook.
Different materials react differently to the human aura or human energy. Good conductors of electricity attract (but also discharge) aura much quicker than bad conductors of electricity. If you look at some of the religions, especially Sikhism, you find that the Sikhs always wear a kada (bracelet) or steel bangle on their right hand. Gurudev made people wear copper kadas with silver joints. These kadas if blessed by someone with a powerful aura, manage to retain the aura which revolves around the bracelet in a dynamic way. I have heard accounts of hundreds of people who claim that wearing the kada protected them as it seemed to have established some kind of a connection with a much larger or greater energy. One such person is me.
I am too embarrassed to tell you how this kada helped me during my visit to Nairobi over 30 years ago. For twenty days I tried to do something which my conscience considered wrong. But every time I tried to make a moral mistake something would go wrong with my adventurous attempts. I failed constantly and consistently. Logically, it is not possible to fail so many times. I knew there was something odd, something was forcing me to follow the right path. I was wearing
The strength and width of the aura determines the power of a human being.
a kada that had been given to me by Gurudev, and it kept flashing in my mind every time I failed. By the end of my month-long trip, I knew that this bracelet had something to do with my decision-making. I would go as far as saying, it actually manipulated my mind!
Significance of Aura
The Ramayana talks very significantly of the Lakshman Rekha, a line drawn by Lakshman around Sita’s hut in the forest during Lord Rama’s exile. Her young brother-in-law was going to leave her alone to find his brother who had gone to chase a golden deer that had captured her fancy. In order to protect her, he drew a line around the hut and energised it with the power of mantras, thereby creating an impenetrable energy field.
It is possible for anyone who has a strong aura and spiritual energy to be able to create such a circle of power. Someone who creates this circle needs to be spiritually powerful because you need to sustain that energy with your own. It lasts as long as you will it to last. Very often, when there are spirits in any house or in any particular room, we can capture them with this energy circle. Being trapped within that circle of energy they are not in a position to escape till such time that we allow them to, or till the energy circle remains. In Hindi it is called keelna.
Black Magic on Aura
Something that one needs to be aware of, but not necessarily fear, is that people can take items which have traces of your aura and perform black magic on you. I remember a young child whose swimming trunks were stolen from the CCI club in Mumbai and black magic was performed. The child lost all energy from waist downwards. This was a case of tantric negative energy being used.
I was a victim of black magic performed on me by my watchman in Gurgaon. I had left my shirt behind by mistake and my watchman, who was normally a very nice man, felt the urge
