On examining self-worship Chapter IV
I’m quite convinced that even though you may have had many hesitations, agreements, disagreements in the first three chapters, by and large, you would have seen the logic of being able to love yourself; for you are what you are, despite circumstances, destiny, conditioning, negative thoughts and beliefs, lack of self-worth and all that.
However when it comes to the subject of worshipping oneself, oh boy! That’s like taking on more than what you can chew. WHEW!
It does not matter what you think of yourself, what your family and friends think of you, what the world in general thinks of you. You have to imagine you are bungee-jumping off a cliff and just take the leap.
The day you joined first standard in school you were already a high school graduate in the future. You were sure you would clear high school. That’s because everybody else did and you could see that. It was common knowledge.
Worshipping yourself? That’s not common knowledge.
Most people would think you need to have your head examined. Who do you think you are? A self-styled God?!
So, here is something you need to infer. A glass of water is a limited version of the ocean, a human being at its core. the jivatma, is a part of the Paramatma or the Supreme. We have studied and listened to this all our lives. The Gita says it, the Bible says it and every person who preached spiritualism has said this in one way or another. ‘In his image he made man’ is the common strain of thought.
Why don’t you learn to play spiritual golf? As you practice, you become perfect. It takes time but you get there. The biggest challenge is that you are trying to perceive a reality which goes beyond the mind and intellect. And those are the only tools of perception available to you. This is not a subject for the five senses to be able to perceive. And that’s all the mind is capable of. The intellect will try to figure out what could lie beyond the five senses, but still it does not have the power to gauge a reality which is not within its means.
In the words of Adi Shankaracharya, one of the greatest Hindu Saints,
“I am not mind, nor intellect, nor ego, nor the reflections of inner self (citta). I am not the five senses. I am beyond that.”
That is why it is important for you to watch yourself do things that you respect. The observer in you has to be impressed by what he observes. It will convince you that you are larger than an average mortal. When you see yourself do a lot more of what you perceive to be good and elevating, you will see yourself as a much greater mortal. (The seer here is your entire being – the body, the spirit, the kaarna sharira or causal body and the jivatma).
The role-play of sharing, bending backwards to help others without a personal agenda, convinces you that you are no ordinary mortal. You will still make many mistakes and those will shake your belief pattern.
But you have learned how to forgive yourself, how to empathise with yourself, and how to accept yourself on an ‘as is where is’ basis. This philosophy will help you press the delete button on any negative feelings that you might have about yourself.
You may stagger a little, but with resolve you can get back to being sturdy on your feet again.
Multiple Levels of Mental Existence
I would like to share with you an amazing secret that has worked for me for several years.
I realised that I could not hold one particular level of introspective thinking or I could not remain in one particular class all the time. I saw that often due to the circumstances of social life and day-to-day operations, I had to dwell in the seventh standard of philosophical existence; at certain times I had to behave like the high school pass out or at times I would react like a fifth standard student. Naturally, I would not find my own reaction quite mature. At other times, my reaction would be like that of a 12th standard student who is slightly more sensible and still at other times, I would be talking, thinking and behaving like a graduate, who has completed his education and is learning to practice it. And it was in between these times that I could play the role of a postgraduate. Of course, there were moments when the doctor in me got an opportunity to live with his PhD and use it. But it was always living at different mental levels, at different times.
In short, my maturity and evolution were fractured and I could only enjoy them part-time. It was almost as if I had bought into the time-share of different levels of evolution and different levels of consciousness.
Does that sound bizarre?
No it does not.
Think about it!
It’s amazing if you can accept yourself to play different roles at different levels of mind, intellect and awareness. The particle of divinity within you does not need to be worshipped 24/7. You need to be able to oscillate to that level when you want to, when you do not wish to be living in a world of delusion or maya (knowing that your so called normal life is one of delusion, is a great realisation. Living a life of maya with this realisation keeps you flexible enough to oscillate in and out of the circle of maya – refer to the explanation on maya in the chapter on Second Thoughts.)
Besides having to live as if you are studying in different classes at one point of time in your life, it lets you examine yourself as a personality at different phases of life.
Judge Yourself from Phase A to Z
Here’s Rajeev. He lives through strange circumstances and all of a sudden his world of style, wealth and luxury comes to an end, due to the bad luck that strikes his family. The world has turned turtle and so has most of his father’s legacy. He now has to work and live off the dividend that his mother’s shares earn. So what does Rajeev do?
Rajeev becomes an alcoholic and a drug addict. Fortunately for him, he is already married and has a nice wife (one book is sold!). Rajeev spends years staying drunk - his escape route to the harshness of life. His wife joins in. So now the sizzling couple become the sozzled one!
There is pathos!
Rajeev, through someone, is introduced to the sthan and is inspired to take steps to give up alcoholism. In the meantime, his father-in-law comes to meet me and wants to know if we can do something to help his unfortunate son-in-law.
I do my own googly bowling. What I say to him next, is enough to ruin the effort he made to come and see me (Thank God he doesn’t claim the taxi fare!). “Your son-in-law is a saint,” I say, “trust me you will be more than proud of him and he will do a lot of good in this world. Your son-in-law will one day be respected and worshipped by hundreds and thousands of people.” (He wonders if I have joined the Rajeev Club and lost it completely).
Poor father-in-law! If only he could go back a few hours in time, he would not be here and he would not be subjected to such indigestible words. The expression he gave me was the one you give someone when you think he is talking through his hat! Our meeting ended shortly, but not without a snide remark from me. “You may laugh today Paliji,” I said, “but he who laughs last, laughs the wisest.”
Years later, Paliji came to see me again, this time without the same disenchanted expression. He wanted to thank me as his son-in-law had turned around completely, given up alcohol, acquired a sense of maturity, and was involved in a lot of social work and spiritual healing (by that time, he may have healed several hundred). My words were ringing in Paliji’s ears.
Paliji was amused and said, “You were so right but at that time how could I believe it? Thank you so much for initiating so many changes in Rajeev.” The funny part of the story is that Rajeev had always been a saint with a few years of absenteeism where he practiced alcoholism. I had done nothing to make him go through a process of metamorphosis, that was his destiny and I was destined to be his trigger. So now let us examine which one is Rajeev?
The child that wets his bed, the naughty little kid in school (he studied in Doon school no less), the adventurer in college and in MBA school in the US, the drunk one at his desk in office, the quick learning disciple at the , a well-respected and revered spiritual healer?
Which one is Rajeev?
Which one are you?
The great sage Valmiki, who wrote the Indian epic Ramayana, was, at one time of his life, a murderer. And yet he is called a Maharishi in history.
The scholar Vishvamitra, was once an arrogant king who felt slighted by Guru Vashisht. In order to take revenge, he did penance so that he could achieve the same attainments that were held by Guru Vashisht. He failed several times but finally he made it to what is called a Brahmarishi (the most advanced in spiritual practices). So which one was he? The arrogant king or the accomplished guru? (There are some additions to this thought in the ‘You may not be you’ section at the end of the book)
So why judge yourself at the cross-section of today. If you have embarked on the voyage of self-discovery, do give yourself a fair chance. You can accept yourself. You can love yourself. In time, you can worship yourself too.
The seed is in the soil and so has it sprouted. Help it to grow and there will be flowers in the spring. Do accept your potential potencies. To make it easier, let us examine a few case-studies of extraordinary feats by animals whose level of consciousness was temporarily raised.
If animals can do what features ahead, examine your potential. Be ready for a few surprises.
Let me give you examples of some bizarre feats by domestic animals that we see every day.
Example 1. When my son was born premature, he had to be kept in an incubator for several days. My wife had to stay in the hospital where that incubator was situated. She had to go and breastfeed him every morning at 6:15. As she was not a morning person, she would often get late and the nurses felt that was not good for the baby. A strange morning alarm came into play. An ordinary crow would arrive at 5:45 every morning and knock on the windowpane with its beak. It would keep knocking till my wife woke up. As my late mother-in-law, a light sleeper, accompanied her in the room, waking up was easier. When the ladies had woken up, the crow would stop knocking and fly away. But it was always on the dot and it never missed a single day of being the morning alarm. How does one explain that? How does a crow know when it is time to knock? For that matter how does the crow know that it needs to knock? And how does it know that it is 5.45 am? As this was a miraculous birth, where most of the nurses and the doctor had said to us that we should not have much hope, I do realise, that there were a few spiritual forces at play. The crow was probably one of them. It was more than just a crow. It was possibly a spiritual energy that had been allotted to help this child succeed to live. A power at play could have heightened the level of consciousness of the crow.
Example 2. We had gone for a family trip to Himachal Pradesh with my brothers-in-law, their kids, and our kids. We stayed at a unique hotel in a hamlet called Ghosheini. It was two hours away from Kulu. There was a hotel across the river and we had to pull ourselves across the river in an apple cart. An amazing place. An amazing holiday. But, I felt there was a kind of heaviness around my head, as if there was some external energy present in the room where I was living. This started off on the third or fourth day. I could not figure out why and what was happening. I suspected that an energy was hovering around me. I was not comfortable.
There was a lazy dog that lay down all day and all night except for when it had a commercial break for food. It was almost like a soft toy that sometimes moved. One evening, when everyone decided to go for a jeep ride, I decided to stay back and investigate the heaviness around my head. When all of them had left, I was standing in the garden, doing almost nothing, when suddenly the dog burst into life. It was as if some hyper energy had possessed him. Energetically, he came and stood right in front of me and turned around as if to ask me to follow. I was wondering whether my mind was playing games or was I sensing a communication with the animal. There was only one way to find out and so I followed him.
He led me up the regular walking path we took every evening. At one point, there was a fork in the road and one path went to the left around the hill, and the other went up the hill towards a village. I kept trying to take the left path, but the dog would not follow. It sat on the right side of the fork and stared at me. So I gave up and followed him.
When we had reached near the top and the village was visible, the dog suddenly jumped, and disappeared. I asked a couple of young village girls if there was a temple nearby. They said yes, in 20 steps to the left was a temple in a tree. I took their directions and what do you know? There was a huge tree with a temple built around it and the dog was sitting right in front waiting for me to arrive. And when I did, it just disappeared and left me alone with the temple.
I sensed that this temple was trying to say something to me and so I listened with my mind and not my ears. The temple said that I should come here and do service for the people around in collaboration with it, and it would help as well. At that moment, I found it diplomatically correct to say that I was willing to do that, if the temple were to make it happen for me. A few minutes later, I left. The dog was waiting further down the road to escort me back to the hotel in all its laziness, without the hyper energy. The heaviness around me had vanished too.
We were checking out of the resort the next day and the owner refused to charge us. We had to fight our way to pay the bill. Even then he accepted less than half. No explanation why. Liked our face?
We went back to our homes and forgot about this incident, but the tree did not forget us. Two years later in my office, my partner turned around and asked me, ‘Would you like to buy some land in Ghosheini?” What was that? And then he went on to explain, that there was an army colonel who wanted to sell his land in that little town and that if I wanted I could buy it as first choice.
The tree certainly knew how to spread itself and reach me in my office in my city. Wow!
So can a lazy dog suddenly become a messenger between one spiritual energy and another? It must have had to reach a level of consciousness far beyond the level of consciousness of a lazy dog. What is there to stop us?
Can a crow learn to look at a clock and wake someone up to go feed their baby? Again the level of consciousness of that crow was probably beyond what we see in most crows. If a crow can do that, so can we. I am just giving you proof of the fact, that what I’m saying is possible and not impossible. I am saying that you can worship yourself, provided you see yourself not as an identity with a label, a name, a designation, a domicile, a family, religion, but as someone who is on his or her way to eliminate the conditioning, the samskaras, the attachments, and the delusion of this world.
Metamorphosis...Yours!
Watch yourself change from X to X plus. As you put the strategies of the first three chapters into motion, you will notice changes in your attitude and your behaviour. But you have to put the strategies of the first three chapters into play. You have to!
• You will be able to empathise with people and yourself.
• Attachments will wane, detachment will take place.
• You, the actor, would have emerged.
• You will learn to play your roles, rather than get emotionally trapped by them.
• You will continue to receive negative thoughts, but because of your ability to accept things as they are, you will not find yourself indulging in self-blame and self-degradation.
Imagine that! Making a mistake and not feeling low about it, but feeling high about it. So it happened! So what? Empathising with the fact that you had to go through this experience in order to learn to create an intent, to avoid it in the future, is a victory.
You have learned to love yourself by now, as much as you have learned to love those comfortable old T-shirts, those worn shoes, your second-hand car. True love for anyone, including yourself, is not about expectations, but about acceptance. Self-acceptance has already kicked into play.
Enjoy it!
Mirror, Mirror on the wall who is the nicest of them all?
Answer it.
You have understood the secret that you cannot always be at one level of consciousness or one level of understanding. You, therefore, are now willing to accept yourself studying in different classes at the same time. Your first period was in the fifth standard, the third in college, and you ended your day working further on your PhD.
Aren’t you something else? Look at the change in you. It’s called metamorphosis. And it didn’t even take much. Only purusharth !
A word of advice. Remember that however badly you fare in the tests to come, you can’t get zero. Not possible. So you can’t get 100 either. You have to learn to accept varying percentages in different subjects. Too many tests going on at the same time! So be happy to do well in some and not so well in others.
Like in the share market, you need to invest in your own share – the share value will go up.
Empathy towards self, detachment, acceptance, role play, self-counselling, will all work towards your share, beating the index. A blue chip you will be. So invest and watch your share in colour green constantly. Do not wait for all the processes to be evolved one at a time. Once you have joined college, you have already attended the graduation. It’s a matter of time.
Dreams, Visions, and Spiritual Experiences
Spiritual experiences and visions help fortify your beliefs in the subject.
Is that necessary? No, not at all.
But the human mind which lives in a state of constant delusion, needs more measurable delusions to have faith. Miracles, visions of saints, Gods and goddesses, premonitions, spiritual healing, sighting of ghosts or spiritual beings, psychic predictions are all part of the bag that helps create faith and psychological acceptance.
Dreams can be of many types. The vitarkas and other stored sundry samskaras in our hard disk can just fructify, or we could be suffering from indigestion, not having urinated before going to bed, having thought continuously about some subject or the other, having contemplated on a subject several days or even months ago - all possible reasons for dreams that do not make sense. They can also be pretty bizarre with no head nor tail, and no logic. On the other hand, there are many dreams that take place in a half-awake, half-asleep state which can seem meaningful and act as learning experiences. Many premonitory dreams, guidance by spiritual teachers or ancestors, interaction with spiritual energies, out-of-body experiences lead to a person acquiring faith in both the subject, and themselves.
Udhav’s Spiritual Geometry (Jain Sahib’s too)
Take the example of my friend Udhav Kirtikar, who lives in New Zealand. He used to be involved in spiritual seva when he lived in India. He would often trouble Gurudev, about giving him spiritual experiences. One day, while he was lying in his bed at night, half-awake, half-asleep, at approximately four in the morning, he saw a couple of blackish looking triangles fly through his window and stop in front of him. That woke him up! Naturally, he was perplexed and did not know what to do. Being an expert in martial arts he had a Nanchaku hanging behind his head, so he tried to rush towards it. The triangles were witness to his immaturity and our friend could not even move. He was absolutely frozen. His martial arts practice had gone for a six!
So all he did was watch those triangles enter into his personal home temple and come back opposite to where he was sleeping. After a few minutes, they went out of the window. I could have considered this a part of hallucination but I didn’t. One of Gurudev’s oldest disciples, called Bade Jain sahib, had also told me about a similar experience. He too had seen a couple of triangles enter his house and stare at him. The description of the triangles was almost identical and I knew for a fact that these gentlemen had not concurred with each other. I am quite sure that both these gentlemen must have awakened the next day feeling wealthier in terms of spiritual visions.
Shiv Darshan
Rajiv Sharma, a false name given because the disciple does not want to be quoted by name, a favourite disciple of Gurudev, had an experience that anyone would give their left arm for. He saw Gurudev appear in his dream and take him out of his body to travel to a cave somewhere in a mountain, but not on earth. When they entered the cave, he saw three huge statues of men in deep meditation. I use the word statue because they were not awake in our sense of the word awake. He instinctively knew that these were the meditating bodies of Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma. The body of Shiva came to consciousness and stared at him with a deadpan expression. In a deep resonating voice, the body asked Mr. Sharma as to what he desired? “Nothing your Lord,” said Mr Sharma, “I need your grace.” The body of Shiva materialised white holy water with a milky texture, and poured it into the hands of Mr. Sharma three times, every time saying ‘mrityu, mrityu, mrityu.’ (death, death, death, to my interpretation it means the end of existence).
Mr. Sharma was naturally speechless and after some time they left that abode, and Mr Sharma returned to his bed and body. Pretty cool huh? Of course, people will say this is delusion of the mind, wishful thinking, creative visualisation (buddhi brahm) and what have you.
Sure, I agree!
We live in a world of maya and everything around us is delusion. The senses are the creators of the delusion and so we are susceptible to imagine a world of reality that is nothing more than an appearance of this world and the reality created by the imagination of our minds collectively. That is maya. Let’s talk about it later in further detail. Delusion within a delusion is as true or as reflective as your perceived reality. The dream state is another state of reality within the circle of maya. Some of it as real as life itself, except that like physical life, it does not have continuity. It’s a book of short stories.
An Experience at Badrinath: Hello Brother!
Thank God Gurudev was not a cricketer and especially not a bowler. Otherwise, he would probably never have bowled a straight ball, only googlies!
He was camping at a place called Srinagar in Uttarakhand, and asked me to come and spend a few days with him at his camp. There were others too who came there, and so he decided to take us all to a famous temple called Badrinath.
When we reached there, he refused to go into the temple and asked me to go and hug the deity and say, “My dear elder brother, I want to give you a hug.” I went into the temple and did not know who to hug. I was quite sure that he did not want me to hug the deity of the temple, namely Badrinath. So in the compound of the temple I found the statue of the man who had established this temple called Adishankaracharya. Him I found easy to hug. He was tangible, measurable and huggable! I quite enjoyed hugging his marble statue (even though he never hugged me back).
When I came out of the temple he took an account from me of what I had done and sent me right back. I was supposed to go and mentally hug the Lord Badrinath himself. Whew! What was that? Who was this idiotic me to go and hug the deity of one of the most powerful temples in this country. It did not sound like a joke. Neither did it make sense. It took years for me to figure it out. It was one of the reasons that could have led to this book.
What Gurudev said to me, without putting it in words, was that I should consider myself to be a younger brother to that very powerful force. He expected me to believe in the equality of one aatma with another. He knew that this was going to be a huge concept for me to swallow, yet he wanted me to do so.
So, I did exactly what he had asked me to do, and tried my best to mean it. Naturally the conviction could be ‘made of sterner stuff’. But finally in years to come it did become sterner stuff.
What happened next, and I mean in a few years from this episode, was that I got a vision in the early hours of the morning. I’d reached a kind of a gathering place, where there were people waiting to pay respects and to have an audience with the trio of Ramji, Sitaji, and Laxmanji. There were almost 100 people waiting, and it took some time, as each person had something to discuss. I recognised one of my Gurubhais (my spiritual associates), Ahuja sahib, an income tax officer who was highly devoted to Gurudev, in queue before me. When it was finally my turn, I surprised myself. When Ramji asked me what I wanted, I said I wanted nothing but had come here to give them my good wishes. Sitaji thanked me with a broad smile. Ramji and Laxmanji acknowledged me too, but with wry grins. When I woke up in the morning I was a little more than shocked. What was this Mr. Ordinary doing offering his good wishes to a man who is considered a God by millions of people? Are you kidding me? How can this be true? But whether it was true or not I started looking at myself as a part of the divine spark that was within me. I started identifying more with that part of me, than with the part of me I’d seen making an idiot of himself (quite an idiot, I warn you!). And of course, I wondered if I had a better sense of humour than Ramji (hope he doesn’t have an arrow in his bow right now!).
So you see it all depends on which part of you you’re willing to connect with, and identify with. You have a choice to identify with the divine in you, so why identify yourself with the waste- of- time character that you have to deal with anyway?
Think. Think again, and act on it!
I can almost visualize my friend Dr. Shashidharan reading this with absolute cynicism and saying, come on! This is buddhi brahm (delusionary thinking). Sure doc, it might just be. Sure we cannot deny all this as a play of maya, but then what is not maya in our lives?
Or yours for that matter?
Dreams: A Group Discussion
At a group discussion with my spiritual colleagues on dreams and visions, there were a few points that we all found interesting.
(1) That dreams were not necessarily happenings or events, but often they were the projection by our minds and of reality as we perceived it. For example, if I were to dream about a saint blessing me or interacting with me, it meant I believed that it made sense. That I did believe, I was competent and qualified to be in the acquaintanceship of saints who were somewhere near my equal, or I was in the process of wanting to get there. On the other hand, if my dream of Ram was a figment of my imagination, the fact that it was so vivid and so real, lasted for so long, and I could literally feel everything, touch everything and react to the atmosphere and its movement, meant that I considered myself qualified and justified in meeting this great soul.
(2) The fact that I got so many insignificant, unrelated, and nonsensical dreams meant that I was letting out some stored thoughts and engrams in the dream space. It was not meant to have any meaning, it was purely meant to let out steam. The steam being the stored impressions and engrams/samskaras.
(3) Out-of-body experiences that I had, cannot be compared to the above categories, as in this state, my spirit body had come out of my material body and my attention and consciousness had moved from my physical body to my spirit body. My physical body lay there in cold storage, kept alive by a part of the energy at the cortex of the head where the shivling of the human being is situated. If you shave a coconut at the point where it has impressions on the top of its head, you will find a clove-like structure which resembles exactly its counterpart in the human head, on the inside of the head. (This portion is called the sahasra and is the place where great saints aspire to exit from at the time of death). If you press your head at the back, you will find similar impressions as you would in the coconut, and that is why in Hindu philosophy, a coconut represents the human head and it is offered as a sacrifice to a greater power.
(4) Another category of dreams that I have experienced, is one in which certain powers or energies come and give you important information that would be of use in the future. When one of my children was about to be born, I got a message in my dream that I must leave my city and go out of station for the delivery to happen smoothly. I decided this was only a dream so I should not make too much of it. However the second night again one of Gurudev’s disciples appeared in my dream and said he wanted me to go. Though it did not make sense and I was quite sure that my wife would think it was one of the worst ideas I ever had, I still did this as a matter of faith.
My son was to be born premature and the doctor had indicated that they would perform a caesarean delivery. It was New Year’s Eve and around 11 pm, the doctor and his wife, both gynaecologists, and both commercially inclined, went up to thei